Category Archives: Campground

Published

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in Campground, Marketing and promotion, RV, Self-publishing, Vanlife

≈ 9 Comments

http://books2read.com/cici

I’m at Trimble Park, one of my favorite campgrounds, and I spent all day yesterday on the computer, fighting to post Cici in the various places that I publish books. All the usual suspects, in other words, including Google Play, which honestly has such a ridiculously bad interface that I’m not sure it’s worth the bother. I kept telling myself that I should just wait until I went back to my dad’s house because internet is a lot faster when it’s not a cell connection, but I guess I felt persistent. 

By evening, it was up in most spots — not Apple, of course, because Apple takes forever and a day — so I went ahead and sent an email to my mailing list. This morning I posted to Facebook, my three different pages, and paid $5 for an ad, so that people might actually see the post, and now I’m posting to my blog, and then I will be done with publishing Cici. This is why I’m really not a very good self-publisher — one is supposed to do all kinds of marketing, release day promotions, newsletters, giveaways, ad campaigns, blah-blah-blah. Does knowing what one is supposed to do and not doing it mean that one is: a) bad at business, b) rebellious in all the wrong ways, c) lazy? All three, obviously. But Cici is available for purchase, so at least I’m getting the “Step One: Write a Book, Step Two: Publish It” part of self-publishing right. 

Meanwhile, it is raining. Not heavily, but persistently. The main reason why I am sitting in this lovely campground is to dump the tanks and I cannot express how unenthusiastic I am about doing that in the rain. Also, I left stuff outside which is now going to have to come into the van and be wet and drippy inside. Sigh. But! The good news is that it’s a lovely tropical summer-feeling rain, so I should be counting my blessings. And I need a shower, anyway, so probably I should just enjoy it. But sewage in the rain always seems to smell more: psychological, I think, not real, but still.

And the clock is ticking, so I guess I can give up on the rain stopping before I pack up. It’ll be good for me, right? Right. 

Crooked River State Park

29 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Campground, Personal, Reviews, Travel, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

The sky at Crooked River State Park, Georgia

The sky at Crooked River State Park, Georgia

In winter, days last longer in the south. In my head, I’ve known that for a long time. Alaska & Scandinavia = dark all day in the winter = duh. But in the past few days, I’ve really noticed the difference.

But let’s start at the beginning: I was staying in PA to watch my niece play Piglet in her school production of Winnie-the-Pooh, but I had one eye on the weather report and I was getting increasingly nervous. It sounded like it might be bad, and definitely not driving weather. I didn’t want to miss the play, though, so I took my chances and stayed.

It was the right call. The play was fantastic, and kinda crazy. The story is that Kanga is coming to the forest and all the other animals are scared of her because she insists on baths and medicine. I can see that in some version of this story, it’s about not being afraid of the unknown and maybe even understanding that baths and medicine are good for you. But in this version of the play (dialogue unchanged, merely a matter of delivery), it’s about child abuse and kidnapping and revenge. At one point, Rabbit is offering Roo candy in order to kidnap him so they can blackmail Kanga into giving up Piglet who has already been kidnapped and is being tortured… who knew Winnie-the-Pooh was such a psychopathic story?! But it really was all about the delivery. M played Piglet, which I had assumed would be a minor part, but it was not, and she was terrific. Her expressions in the scene where Kanga is forcibly giving her a bath were hysterical. I laughed so hard I worried I was being disruptive. I’m so glad I stuck around to see it.

The next day I braved the rain and started to drive. My tentative plan was to make it to a campground around the Virginia/North Carolina border and stay there for a few days. The weather did not cooperate. Neither did the traffic. As is the way of traffic in the rain, a major accident closed the entire highway for a while and probably added a solid two hours to my journey. I managed to view it as an adventure, getting off the highway and roaming around side streets at 25MPH, and obviously, my day was a hell of a lot better than that of the people involved in the accident, but still…

After I made it through the traffic jam, I stopped at CostCo for gas and snacks and bought myself, among other things, an LL Bean winter coat for $40. It rolls up and fits into a small sack like a tiny sleeping bag. I suspect it makes me look like a plump eggplant, but that’s okay, I was a warm plump eggplant! And I’m going to need it again within a few months, I think.

Eventually I wound up at a noisy Walmart in Virginia, not sleeping, but at least not driving. The next morning, I considered simply driving to the campground I’d intended to reach on the first day, but it was cold and gray and it seemed pointless. Why would I want to camp in cold, gray misery? Instead, I resolved that I would keep driving until I reached 70 degree weather and sunshine.

It didn’t happen. Instead, I spent another night at a Walmart parking lot. It was a longer day, because I stopped when it got dark, but it got dark later, followed by another sleepless night. I’m not anxious about parking lots the way I used to be. I don’t lie awake worrying about every strange sound. But at the very best of times, I’m not a great sleeper, and strange noises wake me up. Parking lots are filled with strange noises.

By Sunday morning, I was feeling exhausted and unwell. I walked Z around the parking lot, made myself some coffee and breakfast, and considered the miles. Another six hours of driving would get me to a driveway in Florida, at which point what I would really want to do would be to crawl into bed and take a nap for a day or two. Or I could take a break, stop at a campground, have a day or two to rest, clean out the tanks, do some organizing, get the van ready for another couple weeks of driveway days. The campground won.

So this morning I am at Crooked River State Park, in Georgia. It’s a nice campground, huge sites, with plenty of space between them. The landscape reminds me very much of Florida, with lots of scrubs pines and palmettos. I’ve seen the river, but only from a distance, but Z and I had a nice stroll this morning around the campground, the mini-golf course and playground. My one real negative about this campground is that Georgia State Parks are comparatively expensive: I’m paying almost $40/night for a water-electric site and if I’d been willing to drive another hour (and possibly had made a reservation ahead of time), I could get an equivalently nice site, possibly even nicer, for $24 night. Florida State Parks are a much better deal. And since this park is so much like a Florida park… shrug. But it’s a convenient stop for me and just for a couple of nights, so it felt worth it.

Yesterday I dumped the tanks and rinsed them out, and one of today’s goals is to fill them again, so that they can have an almost clean flush when I leave tomorrow. Also on my agenda: washing lots of dishes, defrosting the freezer, showering, sweeping, and appreciating the sunshine. Lots of appreciating the sunshine and warmth, I hope. It’s supposed to go up to 80 today, which would have annoyed me a couple of months ago, but which is going to feel very pleasant today.

Also on the agenda, doing some real writing. I’m thinking about doing a NaNoWriMo project this year. I’ve never succeeded at NaNo — the pressure freezes me up immediately — but I feel like it might be really fun to spend a month writing something with no goals, no agenda, but just trying to let the words pour out. I haven’t decided yet, because obviously, I’m currently working on projects that are “real,” ie, intended for eventual publication, and from a life perspective, I need to start doing things that will earn me money eventually. On the other hand, from a life perspective, maybe I should be working on maximizing the fun I have from writing for a while?

At any rate, NaNo starts on Thursday and one of my ideas for how I might make it work for me is to have a list of questions that I can use every time I get stuck on my story. Like story prompts, but for within a story. Maybe even a numbered list to go with rolling dice. Get stuck, roll the dice, use the idea. So examples of ideas — #2: what can the POV character smell right now and what does it mean to her? No #1, because obviously, with two six-sided dice, you never roll 1. But maybe I should get a RPG die instead, because also with two six-sided dice, your odds of some numbers come up more than others. Two and twelve are a lot less likely than six and seven. And talk about getting lost in the weeds! I need to make my list first, and then I can worry about how I will use it.

But for my fellow writers who might be reading this, if you have ideas about questions, please share them!

Mine so far:
1) What does the POV character smell and what does it mean to her?
2) What is an unexpected sound that would change the scene?
3) How can the character say “yes, and…”?
4) How can the challenge facing the character be immediately made more difficult?
5) What would an Aha! moment look like for the character right now?
6) How is some detail of the character’s past important in how they’re perceiving the current situation?
7) How does the POV character read/understand what a non-POV sees, believes, or feels in the situation?

I don’t know whether this will work. Like I said, I’m lousy at NaNo. But it feels like it might be fun to try. I also have absolutely no idea where or what my story is. I feel like if I start a new Tassamara story or work on Fen, I’m already constraining myself to worlds and characters and rules already created. But maybe that story snippet I posted the other day would be a fun project to keep going with. At any rate, I should stop writing this blog post, and start some of the other things on my list. I can think more about it while I wash dishes!

Blueberry Pond, Pownal, Maine

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Campground, Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

tree at sunrise

Not Blueberry Pond

Blueberry Pond Campground in Pownal is a nice little family-run independent campground, just about five miles away from Freeport, Maine, and the outdoor shopping available there: ie, LL Bean, North Face, Patagonia, and so. The above picture, however, is not of Blueberry Pond, but of a sunrise at Glooscap in Nova Scotia, because I left Blueberry Pond yesterday and only this morning realized that I took no pictures while I was there. None, nada, zip, zilch. It was actually a reasonable campground: my window faced onto forest, so my site was nicely private, and it was green and pretty and reasonably spacious. I would happily stay there again.

But it was no Glooscap. I sort of suspect that’s what I’m going to be saying about a lot of campgrounds in the future: nice, but no Glooscap. This is made somewhat more amusing to me by the discovery that Glooscap is a legendary native figure who is “kind, benevolent, a warrior against evil and the possessor of magical powers.”

But I’ve moved on, both from Nova Scotia and from Maine. I’ll be spending the next week or so visiting friends and family in Massachusetts, and by this time next week, I expect I’ll be back in Pennsylvania, staying at my brother’s house for a while. A more organized person would be making a list of all the self-publishing related things I should be doing while I have good internet — updating keywords, revising print files, exploring AMS ads — and probably even getting started on that list, but I’m going to treat the next week as mostly vacation time. Yesterday, I broke my writing streak of 661 days of writing 1000 words every day, and I actually felt fine about it. It felt like a very conscious decision to let go of the requirements I impose upon myself.

New River Beach, New Brunswick

24 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Campground, Reviews, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 5 Comments

When I left Parrsboro, I headed south. My first stop was in Saint John, New Brunswick, for an exciting visit to a Canadian Costco. Yes, I’m such a good tourist. No museums, no art galleries, no historic sites, but Costco, definitely!

But when R and I were grocery shopping, we discovered some delicious pretend trail mix at Canadian Costco and I wanted to get more of it before returning to the US. What makes it “pretend” trail mix, you ask? Well, it’s a combo of dried fruit, nuts, and chocolate, which sounds like trail mix to me, but the chocolate in it is so good that it feels like trail mix that belongs in fancy bowls at cocktail parties instead of out in the woods. Funnily enough, the American version, as shown on Amazon, calls it “Deluxe Chocolate Trail Mix” but the Canadian version is just “Deluxe Chocolate Mix.” Maybe the Canadians don’t feel the need to pretend that mixed nuts and chocolates are health food?

Anyway, post-Costco, I’d intended to keep driving, but I was already tired and just not in the mood to be on the road. So I looked for a nearby campground and found New River Beach Provincial Park. Or Parc Provincial Plage New River, depending on where you start reading the name. (The actual paperwork reads “Parc Provincial Plage New River Beach Provincial Park” which would be the fully bilingual name.)

Campsite at New River Provincial Park

It was a one-night stay, arriving mid-afternoon, departing first thing in the morning, and so it could have been a totally forgettable campground for me. But, the campground was really, really nice. It made me feel so much better about being back on the road. The sites were shaded and private, the walk around the campground was lovely, there was a beautiful beach nearby, and best of all, the showers were clean, hot, and free!

And modern. One of the things that most annoys me about campground showers is that there’s rarely any place to put your shampoo and soap inside the shower except on the ground. These showers had two built-in ledges on the fiberglass walls. Just remembering it makes me sigh with pleasure. Yes, the small joys of being a full-time camper, ha.

The next day I headed to Acadia, which is where I am now. I think I’m probably not going to write a separate post about Acadia. I’m in the Schoodic Woods campground and it’s lovely — nice, modern, big sites, reasonable privacy, lots of nature around. But Zelda is resisting going for long walks and I’m not sure we’re going to see much of the park.

And it feels like my head has already moved on. I’m visiting lots of people in the next ten days, scheduling a night here and a night there, and looking forward to all my visits. But also feeling like I’m not being where I am very well right now — I’m busy thinking about all the places I’m going to be and all the things I’m going to do instead of appreciating this day that I’m in. I think I’d like to get back to appreciating the day I’m in, instead of trying to think about it to write about it. But it’s 48 degrees outside, sunny and beautiful, and I’m glad to be here, even if I do just sit in my chair and breathe for a while.

Sous Vide

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Campground, Food, Sous Vide

≈ 7 Comments

My sous vide cooker broke yesterday.

In the process of figuring out what happened to it, I realized that I should have been dismantling it and cleaning it on a regular basis. It sits in clean water, so it didn’t even occur to me to take it apart, but over the course of the time that I’d owned it, enough hair and dog fur had gotten caught in the fan blades that they jammed and then, I think, effectively burned out the motor. I was very sad, but thought positively, “Oh, well, this will give me a chance to break out of my cooking rut and make some different meals.”

That lasted exactly eighteen hours. While I was walking the dog this morning, on an absolutely beautiful gray gloomy beach, I was considering my food options and choices, and when I came back to the van, I went straight to Amazon, and bought myself a new sous vide device, specifically this one: Malaha Sous Vide. It was reasonably cheap at $77, with Prime shipping and a number of nice reviews with verified purchase tags that read like they were written by real people. I haven’t tried it yet, obviously, so I can’t say that it’s as good as the Anova, but I liked the price and the reviews.

Here’s the thing about sous vide cooking: it’s easy, it’s extremely low-mess, you can prep food for several meals in one batch of cooking, it’s cost-efficient, and it’s delicious. I can’t imagine cooking chicken breast or steak any other way now, and it lets me do things like buy a bundle of asparagus and actually stretch out the eating of the asparagus over ten days to two weeks, instead of needing to eat it all within a couple days. I divide the asparagus — or whatever vegetable — into smaller quantities, vacuum pack them, and then take my time about eating them. It’s possible to wait too long — specifically, I’ve ruined asparagus by cooking it and then not opening it for a week. That was a bad ida. But generally, I’m throwing away less produce that I didn’t manage to eat before it wilted. Also, my chicken is always delicious with so little effort from me. It’s the laziest method of cooking ever. And because when I’m cooking for myself I don’t worry about browning my meat, the clean-up is basically pouring some clean water down the drain. Usually, I use the warm water to wash my bowl and plate and silverware and cutting board first, but there’s no messy frying pans involved.

So, yeah, I thought, “Oh, I will break the quinoa bowl/sous vide habit,” and then I actually considered that more seriously, and thought, “Nope, absolutely not.” I’m going to have to live without my sous vide cooker until I get back to my brother’s house, but frankly, this is going to make me hurry to my brother’s house, because it’s not a thing I want to live without. I don’t use it daily or anywhere close, but I use it weekly and eat the food that I’ve cooked with it pretty much every day.

So my two pieces of advice to you this morning are: 1) if you own a sous vide device, make sure you’re cleaning it! And 2) if you don’t own a sous vide device, but you cook meals, seriously consider getting one. It’s not the kind of cooking tool where you come home from a long day of work and think, “Oh, I’m going to pull out the sous vide tonight,” but it is very much the kind of cooking tool where you can take a Sunday afternoon and prep food for healthy interesting lunches all week long.

Moving on… tomorrow I will literally move on from what I think is my favorite campsite ever. If I didn’t have reservations in Acadia this weekend and plans with friends and a need for a sous vide cooker, I’d probably stay until the weather drove me away or the campground closed for the winter.

Serenity with an ocean view as a backdrop

Can’t beat the view

I’m trying to remind myself that the campground in Prince Edward Island was my previous favorite ever and the only way to find my next favorite ever is to keep moving. But this place is seriously lovely and it will be hard to say good-bye.

Glooscap Campground, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia

17 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Campground, Food, Photography, Reviews, Travel

≈ 11 Comments

I have a zillion pictures of this campground. And I would google zillion right now, to see just how hyperbolic I’m being (pretty darn hyperbolic, I have to admit) but my internet is down to super-slow speeds so I’m not going to. I think Verizon might be hinting that it’s time to stop using the Canadian cell towers, sigh. My super-slow internet also means that I’m not going to post my zillion pictures. Instead, I’m going to have to decide on one or maybe two that I will watch upload in painfully slow motion. It’s not an easy decision, made more difficult by the fact that none of them are good enough.

None of them capture the sound of the water. It changes, and I’m not sure I’ve ever actually spent enough time sitting by a beach to realize how much the sound of the waves varies over the course of the day. Or maybe it’s just this beach. The tide goes way, way out — in the middle of the day, there’s half a desert between me and the water, but in the morning, it’s more of a wide rocky strip. Sometimes the water is very quiet, gently brushing against the shore, so still that even listening hard I can barely hear it, and then sometimes it’s lapping at the shore so loudly that I’m reminded that yes, I am sitting next to the ocean. (Sort of the ocean, anyway. I’m on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.)

And no photo can capture the feel of the air. The weather has been lovely — sometimes sunny enough that it actually does feel hot, although I doubt the temperature has broken 75, and sometimes foggy enough that it definitely feels chilly, but mostly hovering in the mid-60s. But it’s just not the temperature — it’s the perfect level of humidity. It feels like there’s always just a light breeze, carrying a little bit of moisture.

And for some reason, none of my photos are getting the colors right. There’s an incredible number of wildflowers blooming right now. I’m looking outside the van window as I write at an expanse of yellow-gold and green, but the pictures capture the blue of the ocean behind the gold and turn the gold into a dull yellow that doesn’t come anywhere close to looking right.

ocean view with wildflowers

Not the right gold at all, but this is the view from Serenity’s door. The flowers are so much brighter than they look here.

And, of course, it’s impossible to take a photo of the moon and the stars, but I’ve watching them every night from my window as I go to sleep. Here’s a thing that made me feel stupid: over two years of living in the van, and I never realized that the tinted windows were distorting the brightness level of the stars. I’ve been sleeping with the window open and they’re so much more beautiful that way.

It would be nice to see the stars without the screens, too, but that’s never going to happen because the one thing about Nova Scotia that is really not working for me are the voracious mosquitoes. They’re not as bad as they were at the farm on Prince Edward Island, but I keep needing to tell myself that to tolerate them. Almost every walk on the beach ends when the mosquitoes find me and I wind up needing to escape from the ones that are dive-bombing my face. Still, they’re not constant — they’re worst at dusk and dawn, and in the middle of the day, I’ve been sitting outside perfectly happily. So excuse the whining!

I do really love this campground, love that is definitely helped by the fact that I have a perfect site. I started out last week at a pull-through spot, sort of in the middle of the campground, and it was still nice. I had a good view of the ocean, although a better view of my neighbors’ campers, and the beach was still a very easy walk away. The campground’s not too big, with both seasonal and tent spots, and it’s not too busy either, this time of year. They have a “stay three, get one free” deal, so I was going to stay four nights.

But after two nights, a spot opened up right next to the cliff that overlooks that water and I thought, “hmm…” so I wandered back up to the office and asked if I could have it. Yep. I paid for another three (four) nights after that, so when I leave here on Wednesday, I will have been here for eight nights! Eight! It’s close to my longest stay at any campground, and if I didn’t have reservations and plans for later in the month, I think I’d probably be aiming to stay even longer.

Sunset

Another view from the door.

Yesterday, I ate blueberry pancakes with tiny wild Canadian blueberries and Vermont maple syrup, plus Berkshire bacon from the organic farm, while sitting at a picnic table watching horseback riders on the beach. I wondered whose life was more perfect at that moment, the horseback riders splashing through the water or me, and concluded that I won because my pancakes were crazily delicious (gluten-free) and they were probably surrounded by mosquitoes. But it did feel unreal in a most lovely sort of way.

Hideaway Campground & Oyster Market, Dingwall, NS

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Anxiety, Campground, Reviews, Travel

≈ 4 Comments

When I last wrote, I was in a state of indecision: whether to stay or whether to go? I suspect that the people who know me well never shared my doubt. My answer always seems to be Go. It’s true that sometimes what’s around the bend is not as nice as what you’re leaving behind, but curiosity is either my besetting sin or my defining virtue. Maybe both!

So I left.

My state of indecision continued and continued and continued, though. I was going to stop in New Glasgow, because of the name, but I drove straight through, almost without realizing. I’d never changed the time on the van dashboard, so I was there sooner than I expected to be. Since I’d already passed it, I decided to keep going and stop at a campground called Whycocomagh, because that name was even better. I did stop there, but the self-registration process was completely frustrating and I finally gave up. It was still early enough in the day that I could go farther. I decided on another place, then changed my mind, then another and did the same, then finally, exasperated, called the place that I was really aiming for but didn’t think I could get to in a single day, and asked if I could arrive late. I could, so I did.

It was a long day.

But the drive was pretty spectacular. Cape Breton National Park reminded me enormously of a prettier, greener Northern California. No offense to Northern California, which is a remarkably beautiful place, and I’m sure has better weather, but Cape Breton is stunning. The road curves and winds, one side dropping off cliffs into the ocean, the other side hills, covered with trees, mostly a mix of pine and birch. I bet in another month, when the birch leaves are changing color, it’s even more beautiful.

And the Hideaway Campground is lovely. Small and hilly, with a mix of sites, some set into the trees, some lined up facing the ocean. At the front, there’s a little restaurant where you can get a lobster dinner or oysters. As far as I can tell, that’s the complete menu, but who would want anything more? The paid showers look reasonably nice, there’s a beach about a kilometer and a half away, and a dirt trail that leads into the woods. And a fantastic view of the ocean, the kind of view that is so big that it’s impossible to do it justice with a cell phone camera.

scenic vista of ocean and hills

This doesn’t even come close to capturing the view. The colors are more intense, the expanse much deeper and richer… but it’s the best I’ve got!

Unfortunately, the Hideaway has two problems for me. The first is that it’s still quite busy. I had one night in my site and then had to move to a different site. Today I’ll have to move again. There’s an open site that I could take, but a big German Shepard right behind that spot lunged and barked at us when we were out walking. For obvious reasons, I don’t feel like I would be comfortable there. I’m trying to avoid developing a total dog phobia, but I don’t want to exist in a level of constant tension, waiting for an aggressive dog to appear.

The other problem is that I am so incredibly allergic that it’s ridiculous. Obviously, that’s not the Hideaway’s fault. I think my allergies got kickstarted with the Queen Anne’s lace at the farm a few days ago, but I woke up yesterday in a state of misery and can’t kick it. If this was a house, I would be sealing the windows, vacuuming everything, changing the air filters, and staying absolutely inside, but that’s pretty hard to do in a van. I’m hoping that if I get out of the forest, I can escape from whatever it is that I’m reacting to. I haven’t even owned an inhaler since I left California, but I was wishing for one last night. Alas.

So today I’m heading on. Unfortunately, there’s a severe weather alert on for Nova Scotia today — rain from Gordon hitting the area — so I have no idea how far I’ll get, but I’ll be moving inland, out of the storm’s way, I hope. But definitely not headed south, because I’d like to stay out of Florence’s way, too. Speaking of which, I hope those of you in Florence’s way have your emergency kits ready. More bottled water never hurts!

Cabot Beach Provincial Park

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Boring, Campground, Food, Randomness

≈ 9 Comments

a beach path at sunrise

The walk to the beach at Cabot Beach Provincial Park, PEI.

I’ve had three days of enormous efficiency and I’m exhausted. Although I think the exhaustion is because for the very first time, I’ve got awful neighbors. Oh, wait, I just remembered some bad neighbors in New York a couple of years ago. But those neighbors were bad because I had to eavesdrop on their complaining; these neighbors are bad because I had to eavesdrop on their late-night fun.

And by late night, I mean that sometime close to 3AM, security showed up and yelled at them, saying that he could hear them all the way down by the security gate, half a mile away. Given that my van is parked about three feet away from their RV… yeah, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

I did entertain myself thinking of polite revenge fantasies. My favorite was to set off my smoke alarm at 7AM. I could even do it legitimately — it goes off pretty much every time I use the stove, so I wouldn’t have to burn anything. And I could be very slow to make it stop. And then maybe I could cook something else half an hour later and do it again. I did wind up washing all the dishes at 1:30 AM, because hey, I was awake, why not be productive? so it would have been easy to cook something first thing in the morning. Didn’t do it, however, because I am not really a revenge person. However, if they keep me up all night again — and their music is already playing — all bets are off.

So yesterday’s efficiency was all van related: oil changed, tires rotated, brake fluid topped up. I was finished at the service place around 3, so I looked around for a nearby campground and decided Cabot Beach Provincial Park sounded worth a try. Its selling point was that there was a seafood market/restaurant within easy walking distance.

It’s an interesting place — big green empty fields, sprinkled with pine trees. Apparently there are 163 sites. I’m guessing in summer, it’s bouncing with people. At the moment, there are a half dozen of us in one row near some cliffs overlooking the water and probably another twenty or thirty campers in the section that has full hook-ups. But we’re lined up like parking lots, no separation between sites at all, and that is very much not my favorite type of campground. And the mosquitoes are fierce enough that I’m avoiding the outside and that’s also not my favorite. Not the campground’s fault, of course, but not conducive to feelings of delighted enchantment.

Zelda and I have had several nice walks, though. It’s a reasonably short hike to a nice beach, and there’s also a great walk through fields of wildflowers along the cliffs by the ocean. The walk to the fish market is less appealing — it’s along a road and through a parking lot. And sadly, the market’s on winter hours (4PM – 9PM), so it was closed when we went there at lunch time.

dog in field, ocean in distance

Walking the dog through a field with an ocean view.

I thought about going back when it opened in the afternoon, but after a long beach walk in the morning, Z seemed to be limping before we reached the market. Not a ton, just sometimes skipping a step or two. I don’t want to make her do a third long walk in one day, so I’d have to pack up the van and drive to go to the market. And before I do that, I’d have to clean up from today’s cooking projects.

And today was a day of many cooking projects. This morning I made oatmeal for breakfast, and ate it topped it with yogurt and honey. And then I baked some granola. And then I made some quinoa. And then I decided that there was no possible way I’d be able to eat all the potatoes I had before they went bad, so I should probably vacuum seal and sous vide cook them. Seven packages of potatoes later, I realized I should do the same thing with the corn and the beans. So basically I’ve been cooking vegetables all day long. I’ve realized that I can’t make the squash soup I wanted to make — there’s absolutely no room in my fridge to store home-made soup. But I definitely have enough vegetables prepped for a whole lot of meals.

Tonight’s quinoa bowl was not as interesting as whatever fresh seafood I might have gotten, but it was tomatoes, fresh corn, spicy garlic wax beans, avocado, cilantro, turkey, a Greek yogurt-lime-garlic dressing, plus mixed greens and quinoa, and it was quite delicious. I ate it outside until I’d decided I’d donated enough blood to the mosquitoes and then I came inside, looked at all the clean-up I should do, and decided writing a blog post would feel productive without requiring me to keep standing over the kitchen sink.

Tomorrow, I’m moving on. I generally like to stay a minimum of three nights at campgrounds, but when I got here and saw the rows of campers, I decided two nights sounded fine. And that does feel like it was the right decision. Good walks do not make up for bad neighbors. But I’m not sure where I’m headed tomorrow, whether it’s back to Campbell’s Cove, which I liked so much, or whether I’m leaving the island. Decisions, decisions. One way or another, though, I’ll need to have the van cleaned up. I guess I should have done that instead of writing this post!

A sunrise in three parts at Campbell’s Cove Campground, Prince Edward Island

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Birds, Campground, Photography, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

sunrise

So early that Zelda was still sleeping.

sunrise, part 2

So gorgeous that I ran out of the van in bare feet and pajamas to take a better picture.

sunrise, part 3

Still gorgeous when walking Zelda on the beach, at least an hour or maybe two later.

I have so many beautiful pictures from this campground. I was only planning to be here for three days, but on Sunday, I decided to stay a few more. Today is Wednesday. I did laundry, filled my fresh-water tank, started stowing stuff to get ready to leave tomorrow morning. And I am going to leave tomorrow morning, because I need groceries, including dog food. But every day has gotten nicer, and it’s going to be hard to say good-bye.

Eh, words don’t do it justice. Have a few more pictures instead.

birds on the beach

Birds on the beach

farm with wildflowers

The farm at the top of the hill

wildflowers at sunset

Wildflowers at sunset

beach and blue sky

The other end of the beach

Camping Juneau

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Campground, Reviews, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

When I imagined my life in a van, one thing that I didn’t picture accurately — at all — was how much time I would spend looking at campground websites, campground reviews, and campground apps, trying to find places to stay that I would like. It seemed straightforward when I started — look for places that other people liked, right?

But we all have different tastes. People who are driving 40-foot long buses have very different needs than people in 20-foot camper vans. People on vacation with kids want very different things than a writer with a dog. Serious athletes appreciate different qualities than casual walkers. People who are planning to spend months in one place have different goals then people who are wandering through, hoping for some time in nature.

Those last parks have the word “seasonals” in their descriptions. Over the course of the last two-plus years, I’ve started avoiding them. In Florida, especially, they’re the campgrounds that are basically trailer parks — long rows of trailers stacked up one next to the other, with a view of your neighbor’s sewer hose. Parking spaces with lawn chairs. They curdle my soul.

On Monday, I had sort of an in-between day. I woke up in a Walmart parking lot, did my shopping when the Walmart opened, and wasn’t quite sure what to do with the rest of the day. I knew where I wanted to be on Tuesday, but I didn’t have a plan for Monday night. But it was going to be a hot day so unless I wanted to drive all day or run the (obnoxiously loud) generator all day, I was going to want electricity. (I can survive a 90-degree van, Zelda cannot. Traveling with a dog means running the air-conditioning when the temperature gets above 80.)

I spent a while considering my options, my energy level, and my goals, and finally decided to try out an inexpensive seasonal campground in Quebec City. It was just for a night and it had laundry facilities. Good enough. I drove by it, saw that it was a parking lot with lawn chairs, and decided to try my next option: a more expensive, but also seasonal campground in Quebec City.

Option #2, Camping Juneau, was adorable. Completely charming and beautiful in a campground sort of way. It wasn’t stylish. The buildings were a little run-down, the signs were hand-made (some of them, at least), the roads were narrow gravel and dirt, the washing machine had dead bugs on it, my fire pit was made of crumbling concrete. But a shack of a restaurant had a patio, maybe four tables with plastic tablecloths, overlooking the lake. There were trees between all the spaces, plants everywhere. It reminded me somehow of Maine and Greece mixed together, with a whole bunch of the resort in the Catskills from Dirty Dancing thrown in. There was sunshine and shade and pure essence of summer.

patio overlooking lake

The restaurant was closed, but the patio looked like a fine place to play pinochle on a summer evening.

I didn’t wind up doing my laundry, but I did open the awning and get out my own lawn chair and read books sitting outside in the shade. It was a lovely afternoon.

picnic table view

The view from the van window. Not a sewer hose in sight. My site was much smaller than my site at Camping des Voltigeurs, but I liked it much more.

I think the thing that I will look for in future campground descriptions, though, is “tents”. Juneau had tent spots and tent campers, and a place that appeals to tent campers probably can’t be a parking lot with lawn chairs. It certainly wasn’t. It was lovely! As is Quebec City, but somehow it’s almost 9AM and I’ve got to get moving. Today’s going to be a busy day. It might just include poutine!