...and in summary.....

Well, the first phase of our grand odyssey is over. We are currently on our way back to Austin to relax for a couple of weeks, have some work done on the car, go through the mountain of mail that has accumulated and plan our next adventure. All plans are subject to change, of course, but as of right now, it looks like we’ll be heading down to the South Carolina/Georgia area for most if not all of the winter.

This summer was definitely a learning experience, to say the least. We had originally planned to rent a house or apartment somewhere and tour around from that base but that didn’t work out so we had to adjust to just staying in motels. It’s definitely more expensive doing it that way but the up side is that we weren’t tied down to any particular location for long periods of time. We were able to travel around wherever we wanted whenever we wanted and as a result, we’ve decided that that is the way to go from now on… to trade dollars for freedom of movement. We also learned that we don’t need anywhere near the amount of “Stuff” that we originally left Austin with way back last May. In other words, it’s amazing what you can do without when you get tired of lugging it around.

We had many enjoyable experiences in the northeastern states. We visited a lot of nice places, met a lot of nice people and would highly recommend that everyone try to visit there if possible… especially if you like history; the place absolutely reeks of it.

We did have a sad occurrence when our 19 year old cat Boris passed away while we were in the Philadelphia area but life goes on and we made the best of our time visiting many interesting places. Some of the places were Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Rochester, New York City, Hartford, Providence, Niagara Falls, Ottawa, Salem (ooooh, Witches), the fall colors of Vermont and New Hampshire, the Thousand Island area of the Saint Lawrence River, the Maine coast (yummy lobster), the Adirondack mountains, the Berkshires, the Pocono’s, the Catskill’s, the Hudson River Valley, Coney Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket Island, Martha's Vineyard Island…and dozens of other places too numerous to mention but every bit as enjoyable.

We’ll be doing some site seeing on our way back to Austin but I may or may not post any more blogs before getting there… it just depends on what we do, how interesting it is and whether I can make interesting reading out any of it. At a minimum though, I’ll still post some pictures so you can see where we go and what we do on our way back to Texas.

So, stay tuned, kids, for more exciting adventures when we head off to the southeast sometime next month.