Tag Archives: Roadtrek

Finding more blues outside the Mississippi Delta

If ever there was a pretty Southern town, it has to be Natchez, Mississippi. So, we parked ourselves there for three days, worked in the library, walked the streets and stopped in for coffee often at the excellent Steampunk Coffee Roasters. Next door is the historic blues club the historic blues club named Smoot’s Grocery. Smoot’s has received a top-to-bottom renovation and is a beautiful space for parties, get-togethers or live music. Well worth checking out if you find yourself in Natchez.

Our schedule included a “break week” when we were taking some down time on the Mississippi Gulf Cost, catching up on blues-related reading, working on the book structure and starting some chapter work. All accomplished while we stayed at Gulf Islands National Seashore near the pretty town of Ocean Springs. While there we crossed paths with a get together of about two-dozen Roadtreks and we were quickly welcomed into the fold. Thanks y’all! Looking forward to the next time.

Back to work and starting the drive northward. Our first stop was in historic Meridian (the home of The Father of Country Music, Jimmy Rogers) where we had a fascinating hour interviewing Hartley Peavey, the founder of Peavey Electronics. As a teenager he started building amps at his parents place and he is now head of a worldwide corporation producing quality musical sound systems and instruments.

On to the small town of West Point, considered the home of Howlin’ Wolf. There’s a blues marker, a small but very good museum and a very cool downtown mural.

Just a bit further into the northeast corner of Mississippi – we stopped at Tupelo. Tupelo is the hometown of Elvis Presley. He was born there and lived in East Tupelo with his parents until he was 13 years old and they moved to Memphis. They’ve done a beautiful job at the Elvis Birthplace Museum, the self-guided driving tour, at Johnnie’s Drive-In (where they have preserved an Elvis booth where he’d hang out with friends and order an RC cola and burger) and at the Tupelo Hardware, the spot his mother bought him his first guitar. Probably the best $7.75 she ever spent!

Checklists & The Big Pack

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In a few days we will be on the road.

The Big Pack has begun and we have several checklists to follow: Pack the van, pack the dog, pack the people, pack the food, outfit the small kitchen and – no small task – pack the research materials, interview spreadsheets, maps and our portable office. It’s amazing that we get it all into the Roadtrek!

Our plan is to post snippets plus photos and video clips from the road so you can follow how we are researching and putting together our book project. We are on the final research push for a travel book on the roots of blues music.

We thought it might be fun to post bits and pieces here – kind of a behind-the-scenes look at how the research for a music-themed book comes together.

Heading back to the Mississippi Delta (and escaping the Canadian snow!)

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Big news at our end. The past year was a bit of a roller coaster for most people – for us it included buying a new(er) Roadtrek that we are in love with as well as working on book ideas.

Our first big road trip was the one that delved deep into the roots of American music. Our goal is to write a travel guidebook about exploring the roots of a unique style of American-born music, the blues (publication date: 2018).

So, we are back on the road for a month this winter, tidying up the bits and pieces of research for the book. Our travels will take us through Memphis, zig-zagging all across Mississippi, into Louisiana and ending at Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

While we’re gone, we’ll be blogging from the road – just for the fun of it – because there are some very cool stops we’ll be making, including . . .

The birthplace of Robert Johnson and the church where he sang in the choir.

Interviews with David Hood (one of the original Swampers in Muscle Shoals), Clarksdale author and blues enthusiast Roger Stolle, blues players including Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and King Edward, Rick Hall (founder of Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals) and Jerry Phillips (son of the late Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis).

If there’s a blues museum in Mississippi, we’re stopping in.

Touring the recently-opened 3614 Jackson Highway in Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. The last time we were there it was still boarded up and the revived studio space was just an idea.

So, we’re packing up the van, washing the dog, unfolding our maps (and plugging in the GPS) and soon we’ll be off. If you have any ideas for what sorts of things you’d like to learn about the blues please let us know!

Talk about a drop off the cliff!

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The U.S. National Park Service is made up of many different types of sites. Two of the most common are National Parks and National Monuments, which are often confused. The parks have been protected for eternity by an act of Congress; monuments have been created by presidential proclamation. It doesn’t mean that there is an obelisk or statue at the latter. It’s a common misconception – the park ranger at Colorado National Monument near Grand Junction, CO told us the oddest question he gets is, “Where is the monument?”

Well, the whole park at Colorado National Monument is the monument. There was little in the valley communities below to prepare us for the jaw-dropping scenery along the 23-mile, Rim Rock Drive following the park’s exposed ridge. Craig – ever the boundary pusher – bellied up to the cliff edge to get photos. I did a mental update on our life insurance policies.

A highlight for us was actually inside, at the Visitor Center where the excellent short film was full of ah-ha moments about the geology of the entire Colorado Plateau. It’s available on YouTube and shouldn’t be missed if you are heading west (and especially if you are a bit of a Geology Geek).

In a nutshell, 80 million years ago, this area was flat. Between 70 and 40 million years ago, moderately-strong earthquakes along the visible Redlands Fault created the tilt and shift in huge layers of rock, forming basins and uplifts. The faultline runs right through the park and we crisscrossed it several times – the erosion of the last 10 million years has exposed the actual fault. Subsequent erosion slowly removed loose and weaker rocks that crumble, creating dramatic canyons and spires of the rocks more resistant to wind and water.

We hiked a few trails (gotta get out of the van!) along cliff edges dotted with a sparse growth pinyon-juniper woodland. Many of the scrubby junipers – scaly leaves and waxy, blue berries – are 800-years-old. In the distance we could see a group of rock climbers who’d made it to the summit of vertiginously-high Independence Rock.

Back at valley level we overnighted and dined out in Grand Junction, a college town much the same size as our hometown. The pedestrian-friendly, downtown main street looks as though it has triumphed over the hit by the big box stores on city’s edge. There are independent, interesting eateries and shops, lots of places to sit and relax, and art sculptures that range from conventional to whimsical.

Colorado is known for craft breweries, so we ate dinner at Rockslide Restaurant and Brewery, the city’s first brew pub located in a historic, circa 1900s brick building. The menu ranged well beyond standard pub fare and there was a half-dozen of the brewery’s handcrafted beers on tap. The most popular is the Widowmaker Wheat, a mildly hopped blend of pale and wheat malts. Craig (who loves Guinness) went for the Big Bear Oatmeal Stout – declared as superb!

The next day we had a late afternoon lunch at Café Sol (also on Main Street) – a fantastic dining experience. Clean, funky, colourful with an interesting menu of soups, salads, paninis and desserts created with mainly organic ingredients. Incredibly fresh foods and enormous portions (they have self-serve To-Go boxes). We were splitting a side salad that could have easily satisfied four to five.

While we do have a strong preference for the more rustic state and national park campgrounds, our spot at Junction West RV Park hit several markers: it was super clean, centrally located for all the local stops we wanted to make, super clean, had a fast Wi-Fi signal so we could write and file stories, was quiet and spacious . . . and did we mention super clean?

www.colorado.com

www.visittheusa.ca

Yellowstone: An Acts of God theme park!

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Think of Yellowstone as an “Acts of God Theme Park.” It’s the most apt description we could conjure. There is so much to see and do in this mammoth national park that we’ve decided to write several posts – one on the geothermal activity in the park and another on the incredible wildlife. In addition, we’re going to create a few “photos-only posts.”

A bit of background: Yellowstone is the first U.S. National Park, established in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. Pull out your map – you’ll find it in the northwest corner of Wyoming (although margins of the park cross over into Montana and Idaho).

Of course, as soon as we arrived at our campground, the temperature plummeted and it snowed. We felt so sorry for the campers in tents but we stayed dry and warm. We stayed at both Grant and Madison campgrounds operated by Xanterra – if you visit, make reservations early as the campgrounds fill up (even in snowy and cold weather!). The sites were well wooded and – this was a first for us – on registration we had to sign an acknowledgement about bear activity, both black and grizzly. There are large metal food storage boxes for tenters to use and all sorts of signs about bear activity.

So, let’s start with the geothermal sights. Everyone knows about Old Faithful – it’s one of 10,000 geothermal volcanic vents in the park – it was great but not the most interesting by far. A park staff member told us it gets the most press because “you don’t have to walk far from the parking lot to get to it.”

We couldn’t get enough of the other sites – we laced up our hikers and walked the boardwalks, paths and overlooks to see steaming hot springs, mud pots belching blobs of liquid clay, geysers that erupted columns of superheated water, green, yellow and blue hot pools. And everywhere, streams of steam rising into the air.

The park is actually the location of a huge collapsed volcano caldera, the remains of the last major eruption 640,000 years ago. The huge crater marks the volcanic heart of the park. Oh yeah . . . It’s due to blow anytime and the eruption would wipe out most of the Northern hemisphere – isn’t that a cheery thought?

A few facts to wrap your mind around:

Yellowstone contains more hydrothermal wonders than anyplace on Earth (10,000+).
Half the world’s geysers are located here.
Hot springs seep to the surface and form steaming and bubbling hot pools.
Yellowstone is connected to the centre of the Earth – the source of heat for these geothermal features is molten rock.

Here’s our list of the best of the best – geothermal features that really captured our attention:

Grand Geyser – about a 30-minute walk along the boardwalk trail from Old Faithful and worth every step. It blows about every 90 minutes (a guesstimate) and shoots seven storeys into the air. Bonus: it lasts quite a while, five minutes plus.
Castle Geyser and Beehive Geyser – also on the Old Faithful boardwalk trail.
Mud Volcano and the Dragon’s Mouth – luckily we arrived early (7am) and well before the tour bus crowds, so had most of the place to ourselves. Imagine what a dragon would look like with its mouth open, constantly belching steam and fumes from the bowels of the earth and you’ve got a pretty clear picture.
Artists Paintpots with its fascinating grey clay mudpots. Imagine mud in the top of a double boiler and you’ve got the idea.
Norris Geyser Basin and the Porcelain Basin boardwalk is filled with geysers, mudpots, thermopools, the latter is the home to extremophile and thermophile organisms that thrive on the high temperatures and acidity.
It is impossible to find words that do justice to how expansive and otherworldly all this geothermal activity is. So, we’ve added an additional “photos-only” post. If you’ve been to Yellowstone, we’d love to hear your impressions. Please share your link to our posts and let us know about your own adventures to this part of the planet.

www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm

www.YellowstoneNationalParkLodges.com provides info and online reservations for lodging and campgrounds in Yellowstone

www.travelwyoming.com

www.visittheusa.ca

Hitting the road in our “new” Roadtrek 210 for a trial run …

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Summer is a crazy time for us both – Craig is gigging and we both have all sorts of writing assignments on the go. This translates into very few available days for our camper van travels. We always try to head out for several long (6-8 week) trips in the delicious fall and spring “shoulder seasons” when campsites are only half-filled and the weather still tempts. Shoulder season works the best for our lifestyle.

Read below for two parts: 1. Our Vermont camping trip and 2. What we learned about Class B travel this time around.

1. VERMONT IN THE SUMMER

We’ve been itching to do a trial run in our newly acquired 2006 Roadtrek 210 (we are carrying over the van’s nickname – High Cotton), so we blocked off four summertime days and crossed the border into Vermont. We have a long trip coming up in the fall – exploring U.S. national parks in South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado – and really needed to get acquainted with the workings of the “new” van before departing on the Big Trip. 2016 is the centenary of the U.S. National Park System.

The Vermont state parks are lovely – no hookups, so the big rigs stay away and the campgrounds are small, nicely wooded with nightly rates that are very affordable (even with the dollar exchange). It’s Class B heaven.

We hopped around the state, starting with our all-time Vermont favourite, Silver Lake State Park in the hamlet of Barnard, just north of beautiful Woodstock, VT. Silver Lake is compact, the swimming in the small lake is perfect, it’s a 10-minute stroll to the quintessential VT country store in Barnard, a five-minute drive to the trailheads of the Appalachian Trail, and just 15 minutes into Woodstock, home to beautiful New England architecture, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Site and the time capsule at the Billings Farm & Museum.

From there we travelled east, stopping at the Cabot Cheese outlet – loved the Alpine Cheese and the Special Reserve. Then north to Stillwater State Park, which was nice but a lot like our Ontario Parks, so we are not likely to travel there again, given that we have something very similar (and nice) just down the road from home.

Our final stay was at Grand Isle State Park, on Lake Champlain. It is one of Vermont’s largest state parks but did not seem huge or crowded. The sites were nice, clean and private. But the real find of the trip was the day-use park at Niquette Bay State Park (about 20 minutes north of Burlington, VT). What a fantastic find! It’s a one-mile hike through mature woods to the two swimming spots. We opted for Calm Cove: less crowded, slab rock shoreline, more secluded and – wait for it! …- off-leash dog friendly! Rigby had a blast jumping into the water and swimming about (as did we). There were three of four dogs there at a time – all well behaved with attentive owners. Not a single issue or problem. Niquette Bay is a bit off the beaten track, so fewer people go there, but it was the highlight of our travels.

2. THE CLASS B LEARNING CURVE CONTINUES …

Vermont has hills – small by the Rockies standard but pretty big by Ontario stats. We learned that a Roadtrek 210 is not a car; it is more like a truck so it needs to be driven like one. On the long, winding downhills, this means being judicious with the brakes (or they will overheat – very scary) and shifting to low gears to use the engine to provide some of the braking needed. The advice we received was to power down when cresting a hill to be at the speed you’d like to drive down the hill at – then use the lower gear and brakes to maintain that low speed.

All in all, we are in love with our new High Cotton. It performed flawlessly and we had fun learning the new, upgraded systems – water, dump tanks, sleeping compartment, etc. We also added an external Coleman camp stove with a combination grill/burner bought at Canadian Tire. Our van has an external propane hookup to go directly to a BBQ, so it was super easy. The camp stove is more compact and more versatile than the larger barbecues. Loved, loved, loved it. Cooked and ate outside every day. And we happened to be in Vermont just as corn season was beginning.

TravelsWithRigby.com

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