Summer Fun, 2019
27 stories, in order from the beginning of the trip.
1July 7, 2019
Dateline July 7, 2019, Innisbrook and the Summer Ahead
A June shakedown weekend of golf at Innisbrook turned up a flat that was really a second cracked Sprinter wheel, just like Billings last year, but five new wheels later the Roadtrek is finally sound. We met fun playing partners, launched a new chapter writing up courses around the country, and marked our twentieth anniversary at The Cellar in Warren Harding's old winter home. Monday morning we point north, bound for New England and then British Columbia.
2July 8, 2019
Dateline July 8, 2019, Tallulah Gorge, Georgia
We pointed the Roadtrek north on July 8, John's new VA hearing aids freshly installed, and put in eight hours to reach Tallulah Gorge in the Georgia mountains. We hiked to the 1913 dam and down to L'eau d'Or Falls, passed on the twelve hundred stairs to the bottom, and crossed into West Virginia, where getting an EZ-Pass proved anything but easy.
3July 10, 2019
Dateline July 10, 2019, Beckley and the Coal Mine
Having loved the Soudan mine last year, we went down into the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in West Virginia, riding the mantrip five hundred feet in behind a guide who spent twenty years underground. He showed us the thirty-inch seams worked on hands and knees, the rats that meant the air was safe, and twenty cents a ton for a brutal day's labor. Above ground, a whole company town, homes, church, school, and the store that kept a man in debt, told the rest of the story.
4July 12, 2019
Dateline July 12, 2019, Blackwater Falls and Hershey
From the West Virginia highlands we hiked to Blackwater Falls in its morning sun and out the muddy mile to Lindy Point, then took the back roads north to Hershey. We played the West Course in the shadow of the chocolate factory, where Byron Nelson won his first PGA Championship in 1940, and spent our first Harvest Host night at a farm winery and brewery, with a Friday band and the Gellatly family's story.
5July 14, 2019
Dateline July 14, 2019, Cape Cod
On the way to the Cape we played the Rees Jones layout at Pinehills and fell in with a friendly twosome, then settled in at Harwich for our yearly visit with Janice's Uncle Bill and Aunt Margaret. Bill, ninety-one and still walking the hills, nearly shot his age at Cranberry Valley. We left not with goodbye but see you next summer, and pointed the rig toward New Hampshire.
6July 18, 2019
Dateline July 18, 2019, Into New Hampshire
Getting into New Hampshire meant first chasing down a generator that wouldn't start, then a fine stretch of family and country: Connie and Lee in Derry, where Janice retold her 1986 Corvette adventure; the Sunapee mill and Jeff Trow, keeper of the town's cemeteries; a stream-side site at Northstar; and a glorious morning at the Country Club of New Hampshire under Mount Kearsarge.
7July 21, 2019
Dateline July 21, 2019, Lake Sunapee with the Family
Brian rented a house right on Lake Sunapee for the whole family, and we raised the traditional martini toast at Janice's parents' grave. We won the Sunday match, then watched an oak come down across the rented pontoon boat with Steve and Marilyn aboard, mercifully unhurt. There was a wet boat ride to a closed restaurant, good food in spite of it all, and the loons calling morning and night.
8July 25, 2019
Dateline July 25, 2019, Sunapee Golf and Goodbyes
With the generator finally reinstalled and a fine breakfast with our Flagler Beach neighbor Frank behind us, we played Lake Sunapee Country Club, a Donald Ross course and Gene Sarazen's old home club where Janice's family once held a membership. The last days on the lake brought sailing and sculling, Connie's chicken legs, a farewell dive, and John's ribs, before we packed up Friday for a winery in New York.
9July 27, 2019
Dateline July 27, 2019, The Road to Chicago
Leaving the family at Lake Sunapee, we drove west through Vermont and New York to a Harvest Host winery on Seneca Lake, then on to Cleveland for lunch with Janice's niece Kim and a fine evening in Fremont with Ari and Hedi, friends from our 2011 Alaska RV trip. A morning round at Swan Lake in Indiana, and we pointed the rig toward Chicago.
10July 31, 2019
Dateline July 31, 2019, Janice Qualifies
We stopped in Libertyville with Pete and Bunny, friends from the Alaska trip, and Janice picked the Chicago qualifier so we could visit a while. At seventy she opened with a double bogey, laughed it off, then came home in 37 and sank a birdie putt on the sixteenth in a playoff to make it, the oldest qualifier in Chicago and bound for the USGA Senior Women's Amateur in Iowa.
11August 2, 2019
Dateline August 2, 2019, Cedar Rapids and Donald Ross
With Janice qualified, we drove to Cedar Rapids to get a look at the course that will host the USGA Senior Women's Amateur, and what a course: a 1915 Donald Ross design, restored to his original plans, with raised greens that shrug a ball off into the rough, wooden rakes and flagsticks, and suspension bridges over the streams. We found a county park nearby and booked it for tournament week.
12August 3, 2019
Dateline August 3, 2019, Iowa, Looking Back at 2018
Coming back into Iowa stirred up a year of memories, so we finally told the 2018 stops the RV troubles had kept off the blog: the American Pickers store at LeClaire, the Hoover Library, the covered Bridges of Madison County, John Wayne's birthplace at Winterset, and the Amana Colonies, seven old German villages with a communal past and a refrigerator company in their future.
13August 4, 2019
Dateline August 4, 2019, The Disneyland of Quilting
We crossed into Missouri for one reason: Hamilton, and the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Janice came to quilting through a bag of squares her mother and grandmother sewed in 1930, and here was a one-stoplight town remade into the 'Disneyland of quilting' by Jenny Doan and her family, with J.C. Penney's first job and a lounge called Man's Land thrown in.
14August 6, 2019
Dateline August 6, 2019, Across South Dakota
Leaving Cedar Rapids, we pointed west toward Montana and the Bohlingers, by way of South Dakota: the falls in the heart of Sioux Falls, a Harvest Host night parked on such a slope we slept with our feet below our heads, a hilly round at Red Rock in Rapid City, and a stop at the cheekily named Naked Winery, where the wines turned out as good as their names are bold.
15August 8, 2019
Dateline August 8, 2019, Deadwood and the Bohlingers
On the road to the Bohlingers we swung through Deadwood, hoping to see the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, only to be turned back by a road that would not take the RV. Then on to Billings and dear friends John and Nancy, a grandson's birthday with three generations on hand, cheesy eggs in the morning, and a hearing-aid fix before we rolled toward the Lewis and Clark Caverns.
16August 10, 2019
Dateline August 10, 2019, The Lewis and Clark Caverns
Janice found us the Lewis and Clark Caverns near Whitehall, Montana, and what a history they hold: discovered by hunters in 1892, made a national monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, fought over for decades by a tour-running quarryman named Dan Morrison, and finally, after the CCC carved its way through, Montana's first state park. The tour itself, bats and broken columns and all, was not to be missed.
17August 12, 2019
Dateline August 12, 2019, Big Sky and the Idaho Club
From the caverns we made for Missoula and the Big Sky Brewery, home of Moose Drool, then took the back roads into Idaho, sharing them with a fine roadside buck, to play and write up the Idaho Club at Sandpoint, a tough, beautiful course on hard times with cliffside lots running into the millions. Then a brewery for the night and on toward Washington.
18August 14, 2019
Dateline August 14, 2019, Spokane and the Kalispel
Our first Washington stop was Spokane, John's family city, and we played the old Spokane Country Club where his grandparents belonged and he took his first lessons at eight. The club, now owned by the Kalispel tribe after a long road through the courts, gave us an immaculate test of golf, three moose on the fairways, and a grand resort for two nights' rest.
19August 15, 2019
Dateline August 15, 2019, John's Spokane Roots
We spent a Spokane morning tracking down John's family. We found his grandparents' old Rockwood house, were invited in, and heard about the basement safe no one had dared open; we visited St. John's Cathedral, where his parents married and his brother Peter was baptized; and we picked out the Desert family home and the old Desert Hotel downtown. At seventy-two, John's memory held.
20August 16, 2019
Dateline August 16, 2019, Across to Whidbey Island
We crossed Washington by way of Wenatchee, the Apple Capital of the World, and the state's astonishing farm country, then drove over the Cascades and rode the ferry to Whidbey Island and John's brother Will's place, Camp Wilson. Will fed us like kings, and we took the ferry over to Port Townsend, where uptown sits on a cliff five hundred feet above downtown.
21August 18, 2019
Dateline August 18, 2019, Camp Wilson and Old Friends
Our last days on Whidbey were all old friends: the Taylors at Diamond Knot, a friendship that goes back generations; Cathy's sister Beth and her new Langley home, near where John fished with his father as a boy; and a Friday barbecue at Camp Wilson with the Wanicks and the Hoversons. As the sun set on what Will calls one of the best views in the country, it was time to say goodbye.
22August 25, 2019
Dateline August 25, 2019, Canadian and USGA Senior Women's Amateur Championships
Janice's late-summer run at two national championships, the Canadian Senior Women's Amateur at Osoyoos, British Columbia, and the USGA Senior Women's Amateur at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a twenty-seven-hour drive stitched in between. She made the Canadian cut, then gave up her spot to rest a swollen ankle for the bigger event. The road carried us over the Continental Divide, past Wall Drug, and through a good deal of Montana and South Dakota. At Cedar Rapids we watched a fifty-two-year-old newcomer play the round of the week, and two faraway companies went out of their way to keep our RV running.
23September 1, 2019
Dateline September 1, 2019, The Pete Dye River Course of Virginia Tech
On the way east to Janice's cousin in Williamsburg, we stopped for a round at the Pete Dye River Course of Virginia Tech in Radford, one of the state's top courses, laid out along the New River. We met head pro John Norton, who told us how the place came to bear Pete Dye's name, and shared the story of Pete's Revenge, the howls the pros let out when Dye first unveiled his Stadium Course at Sawgrass. Small, unforgiving greens and tiny deep bunkers are the Dye signature, and the River has them in abundance.
24September 2, 2019
Dateline September 2, 2019, Appomattox
Following the by-ways toward Williamsburg, we came on the signs for Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant and the Civil War effectively ended on April 9, 1865. We read the courthouse displays, learned the story of Ely Parker, the Seneca officer whose hand penned the surrender terms, and were taken in hand by costumed living-history players at the Clover Hill Tavern, where Emma Hix carried us back to the weeks just after the surrender. A terrific stop, and not one to be missed.
25September 3, 2019
Dateline September 3, 2019, Williamsburg and Yorktown
A Labor Day weekend in Williamsburg with Janice's cousin Kathy and her husband Eddie, who had just lost Kathy's mother. We walked the Saturday Farmers Market, took in a Virginia Symphony concert of cartoon music on Yorktown Beach, worshiped at one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the country for the dedication of its new organ, landed in the Colonial Williamsburg stocks, and played Kathy's father's old course at Ford's Colony, where we picked up the funniest single in Virginia.
26September 6, 2019
Dateline September 6, 2019, A Winery, the High Country, and Old Friends
Out of Williamsburg and down into North Carolina, where a Harvest Host stay at Grove Winery turned into a party, and a round at Linville Ridge, the highest golf course east of the Mississippi, gave us one of the most beautiful days of the whole trip. Then on to Cherokee to meet our friends Sandie and Skip for a steak dinner and a tubing run that did not go entirely to plan, and up to Grandfather Mountain and its Mile High Swinging Bridge, the first day all summer we needed a windbreaker.
27September 8, 2019
Dateline September 8, 2019, Raleigh, the Grandchildren, and Home
The last leg, and the best kind, a few days in Raleigh with our son James and his family, the grandchildren far more interested in the RV than in us, a day at the natural-science museum with experiments and a butterfly house, and then the early-morning drive south to home in Flagler Beach. The close of a long, full summer.