RV Adventures

UPDATE: If you are getting this post in your inbox for the second time, my apologies. It appears my normal cjsquare email address will not let me send “stuff” to multiple people. Therefore, many people (mostly gmail users) didn’t get the blog post. So I am switching the email on the blog to my gmail account. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Let’s just say the past six months have been interestingly uneventful AND eventful. Yes, both. When we got off the road last October, I was suffering from a massively swollen left knee. COVID-19 was ramping up for the holiday surge. It was time to put the RV in storage and sit for a while.

I saw a knee orthopedic doctor as soon as I could and received the startling news that I needed a full knee replacement. What???? In the past I had been told I had arthritis in my knees, but no one ever said the words “knee replacement.” It was a total shock. I received a cortisone shot and the replacement was scheduled for February 8 with an excellent surgeon.

In the meantime, Janelle drove home from Texas for Thanksgiving and stuck around for my post-op recovery. She was (and still is) in the process of writing her doctoral thesis and did not need to be in Galveston to do that (she defends on June 3). It was nice to have her around, especially since she was more than willing to run errands for me and my bum knee.

So we had a lot of family time over the holidays. The four of us had our little COVID bubble. Nobody caught the virus and we are all now vaccinated. Yay!!!

February 8th rolled around and my surgery happened. My surgeon did a great job.

Fast forward to April and it was time to hit the road again. Jim was patient through my recovery process, but he was getting “hitch itch” (the itch or desire to hitch the car to the RV and take off). I wasn’t quite ready from a physical therapy viewpoint to leave just yet, so we sent Jim off on his own for the first week to join our March/April 2020 Lock-down buddies Dan and Amy.

Let’s hit the road!

The Blue Flame caught up with Dan and Amy in the Cumberland Plateau (region straddling the Tennessee/Kentucky state border). I missed the first week with them, but I understand there was a lot of monster movie watching (Jim and Dan) and sewing (Amy) happening.

I joined up with them a week later. I was 9 weeks post surgery and things were going well. Give it a year and I’ll be as agile as Jim and his two knee replacements.

I met up with them in just time to make the move to the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Kentucky. That’s a mouthful. The Big South Fork River joins into the Cumberland River downstream. It runs through an area of the country rich with coal deposits. The part of the Rec Area we were in used to be full of coal mines. With the coal no longer being easy to get at, the land was donated to the National Park Service when the mines shut down.

There are a number of hikes in the area. Some easy and some not so easy. I did the easy one and followed it up with a long session resting with my new knee on ice. Dan and Amy did the not so easy hikes.

It was good to be with our friends again. They too have been fully vaccinated, so it was an “almost normal” week. No masks were worn if it was just the four of us.

The abandoned Blue Heron Mining Community very close to the campground we were in. In fact, Dan and Amy hiked to it one day. Another day the four of us drove to it and explored what was there.

Although all the wooden buildings were gone, the National Park Service did its best to erect steel shells that mimic their size, location and function.

All good things must come to an end. After almost a week (two weeks for Jim) we parted ways with our friends. Dan and Amy are headed northward to get some new RV furniture in Indiana, we are headed to the Southwest, one of our favorite parts of the country.

We have made our first stop at the Tom Sawyer RV Park in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the river from Memphis. This must be our fourth or fifth time staying here. Jim loves watching the tugs pushing barges up and down the Mississippi River. We must be coming into the busy season for this park. We have never seen so many RVs here, the place is full!

We are still socially distancing, so we didn’t bother going into Memphis. I did visit the grocery store for some much needed supplies, but that is pretty much it. This time our visit is all about watching the river.

So that is where things stand. Even though we left New York fully vaccinated (what a good feeling), the CDC Guidelines are still in play, so we’ll be careful. But this feels so much better than sitting in my recliner for hours on end.