Small House,
Big Yard
Our 10 year roadtrip to see America.
John O’Neal
Small House, Big Yard
by John O'Neal
Copyright 2014 John O'Neal
All rights reserved
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2287-9
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Introduction
This is a book about North American places, large and small, urban and rural, well known and off the beaten track. It’s also a book about all the wonderful strangers we knew for an hour or two. And to some degree, a book about living the life of a tumbleweed.
My wife and I have always liked to travel. We talked for years about seeing the USA after I retired. The thought was that we would have plenty of time to really see the country and linger along the way. So that’s what we did.
When I retired we bought a really big recreational vehicle (RV), sold the house, got rid of our “stuff,” and set out on a ten year roadtrip to see what there was to see.
We did one lap around the country each year. Each lap started about April 1st when spring was springing. Normally we had about two places we specifically wanted to go and knew where we wanted to end the year. Within that structure, we filled in the blanks as we went. We typically moved about once a week and went about 150 miles. When it started getting cold we headed for warmer climes. We “wintered over” every year in Florida, Texas, Arizona, or southern California.
What we learned about America is what we already knew. It is filled with wonderful places and wonderful people who are amazingly friendly and will stop everything they are doing to answer questions, or help out, a tourist in their community. I can’t begin to tell you how many really nice people we met in those ten years.
And there was an unexpected consequence to our travels that we hardly considered ahead of time. We reconnected with all our aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as, many school friends, and work friends that we had not seen in 10 to 40 years. We would stay in an RV Park in their town and “visit” them while staying in our own home. In every case it was like we just saw them yesterday, except they got a wee bit older. That was always a great experience and we came to look forward to seeing people as well as places.
The day we started our trip I began a journal of our adventure just for the fun of it. Once a month I emailed a newsletter to family and friends who had an interest in what we were up to. The first month there were 15 people on my email list. By the end of our trip word of mouth had ballooned the list up to 97 people, some of whom I’ve never met. This book is a compilation of all those 105 emails.
I took a lot of pictures with my handy little point-and-shoot camera and attached about a dozen of them to each newsletter. There are way too many pictures to put in this eBook so I labeled them and uploaded them to a photo repository on the internet called FLICKR. I put them in an account under the name John O’Neal Tumbleweed so they would be easier to find.
You may see the pictures by going to the web page… FLICKR
Search for my photo name… John O’Neal Tumbleweed
You might also find my pictures by the name… smallhousebigyard
Eventually you will get to my Photostream.
When you get to that page click on… Albums
You will find 10 albums, one for each lap/year.
The pictures are number-labeled to correspond with the lap/year in which they were taken. And they are in the sequence that they were taken so they match up with the text. For example, picture 3-54 is associated with chapter 3, which is also lap/year #3. It was the 54th picture taken that year.
If you have a smart phone, you may find it more convenient to view the pictures on your phone while you read the text on your tablet. Or maybe view them on your tablet by toggling between the text and the pictures as you go. If you don’t want to be on-line while reading, then I suggest you just download all the pictures to your hard drive and be done with it. No fuss, no muss. No matter how you do it, don’t miss out on seeing the pictures as you read each chapter.
You will find that I occasionally link to web pages in the text. I tried to minimize that because I didn’t want to overdo it. So if you are reading along and want to find out more about a person, place, or thing that I wrote about, and there is no link, I encourage you to stop and “Google” it.
I also did research on certain people, places, or things to make my emails more interesting, or to verify that what I had been told by tour guides was correct. It never occurred to me that I might publish the emails someday so I didn’t keep track of when or where I did the research, or what the source was. As a result, I’m sorry to report that I’m unable to give credit where credit is due in my eBook. I also took pictures off of web pages without giving credit. If you come across anything that is copyrighted, let me know and I will take it out immediately.
Pull up a seat and ride along with us.
…John O’Neal
P. S. If you have any questions about RVing, or places we went, drop me an email.
"All who wander are not lost."- J.R.R. Tolkien
Chapter One
San Diego, California to San Diego, California
Family and friends...
Well, after many years of planning, dreaming, and anticipating, we finally did the deed. It was with great pleasure that we sold the house, gave our kids any stuff they wanted, gave the rest to charity, and moved into the RV.
Hallelujah! We are now officially on the road.
Our RV home on wheels has everything we need in it. It is the same size as a small one bedroom house, complete with living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. We even have a patio.
We are always in touch because we have satellite radio, satellite TV (DirecTV), satellite internet, and a cell phone. We expect that having satellite internet access in the RV will be a big help to having a normal life as we move around. It was a little pricy but well worth it. We thought about only using Wi-Fi but that’s way too unreliable, and hard to find.
Other than clothes, we took almost nothing out of the house. I scanned all our pictures and transferred our music CDs to the computer. A few boxes of mementos and Family heirlooms were given to my son for storage in his attic and the rest was either sold or given away. All our worldly possessions, which we so carefully accumulated over the years, turned out to have almost no resale value. Who cares! We don't miss a thing.
Cindi and I continually marvel at how busy we have been since we retired. Every day is go, go, go. We did the complete round of doctors and dentists in preparation for being on the road. I had the lenses replaced in both of my eyes to solve a growing cataract problem. Cindi converted all our time-sensitive economic stuff to on-line payments and we got our new mailing address established.
We took