Well, your strange author has been laying low for most of the last 20 months. On December 28 in 2019, I checked into the hospital with what I thought was just an inability to take a dump. As it turned out, not being able to pinch one was actually the least of my problems.
Sepsis raged within me for a bit but the truly disconcerting news was that I had renal cell carcinoma and I have been enjoying the newest marvels of modern medicine since then. I have been involved in something called immunotherapy since and it is a pain in the arm but it is also the only reason I ain’t dead. It has been a challenging 20 months but recently I finally got tired of sitting around the house and decided to get back to travelling with my wonderful spouse. We were obliged to sell our old Barbarian Invader 5th wheel trailer because going out for extended trips is now beyond our capabilities due to the requirement that I be in San Diego every 28 days for a trip to the chemotherapy infusion center to have my arm filled up with expensive medication. However, our lust for travel is undiminished but now we are limited in how far we can go and lodging. We now do hotels and restaurants instead of getting cozy in our trailer and cooking in the trailer’s kitchen.
In late May, we bought a hybrid all-wheel drive SUV which would allow us to venture forth on all the roads that were too skinny or too curvy or too unpaved that we discovered between 2014 and 2019 when travelling with our F-250 hooked to a 34′ trailer.
For our first foray, we decided to limit our travels to rural roads and state highways while disdaining the federal interstate system. The following entries are our impressions while on this first trip.