New Jersey, and then south for the winter

Ivy has a sister who lives in Livingston, New Jersey with her teenage daughter who is heading off to college next year.  So we took a drive in our little red car from Gettysburg to her place to stay for a few days and visit.  On the way, we stopped at my cousin Sheila's house in Rutherford, New Jersey to visit and catch up with her and her husband.  The New Jersey traffic was, quite frankly, horrible, and I was glad we had decided to leave the RV.  It was a lot simpler.  Even so, our GPS got confused and tried to send us on an unnecessary trip through the Holland Tunnel, and there was much anxiety and confusion over how to get where we were going.  But it all worked out.

We went out to lunch with my cousin and her husband.  Sheila is very knowledgeable in family history, so we had lots of discussion about that.  She also gave me a CD recorded in the twenties by my uncle Roger Kahn, who was a bandleader for a number of different jazz bands in the era.  He composed also, and his most famous number was Crazy Rhythm, which is on the CD.  It was a real treat to get it.  We enjoyed a relaxing and pleasant afternoon in Sheila's house with her many cats.

Later in the evening we went to Ivy's sister Susan's house.  She lives in a pleasant suburban neighborhood, and we luxuriated in having an indoor shower larger than a breadbox and a guest bedroom to sleep in.  Over the weekend we had a visit from Ivy's stepmom and sister from Long Island, who braved the traffic to come to New Jersey to visit with us.  And we did some shopping, and had some east coast luxuries, like good bagels and deli.  Then it was back to Gettysburg to continue our trip.

The next day we were back on the road, heading to Virginia.  It was definitely time to start heading south, as nights had been getting down into the low thirties pretty regularly.  We knew we didn't have too much time and we fled south to escape the frost line.  Our first stop was at the town of Luray, Virginia, just west of the Shenandoah National Park.  We happened onto a very nice RV park, run by a Swiss couple, a few miles outside of town.  Using that camp as a base, we toured parts of the National Park with our little car, travelling along the famous Skyline Drive that travels for about a hundred miles down the spine of the mountains.  The park was partly closed this late in the year, but the views off the drive were spectacular as advertised  

Next we toured the Luray Caverns, a cave system that advertises itself as the most visited in the country.  It is indeed a spectacular set of caves, equal to or better than the caves at Great Basin.  These are caves of the "decorated" variety, with huge complex formations made of limestone over centuries.  It's a much larger cave set than others we've seen, and has some huge rooms with dramatic formations.  I took lots of pictures.  And I took a great bike ride the next day, from the RV park into Luray and back, over some beautiful countryside with the Shenandoah National Park in the background.  Stopped for coffee in town and toured around taking pictures.

It was here in Luray that we managed to break our RV toilet.  One of the flushing levers broke and the toilet became unusable.  At our ages, the lack of a toilet is close to a crisis, so we had to work quickly to get it repaired and replaced.  Luray was too small to have the necessary resources, so we headed to our next stop, Roanoke, where we could get some repair facilities.  We camped outside of town at the Smith Mountain Lake State Park, a lovely spot in the hills about thirty miles out of Roanoke. From there, we were able to utilize the the big city resources to get a new one.  Unfortunately, may attempts to install the replacement ran into problems that the local folks couldn't deal with, and we had to push the repair down the road into a Camping World in North Carolina.

We visited Ivy's aunt and cousin while in Roanoke. Ivy's aunt is 95 years old, and still living in her home and taking care of it herself.  Since she no longer drives, her daughter and son in law help her frequently.    We all went to a local restaurant for an excellent lunch and then  took Aunt Annie to see the Roanoke Star, a monument atop a high mountain around Roanoke.  Although she had lived in Salem   for 20 or so years, Annie had never seen this particular sight.  So we had a good time taking her up there.

While we were staying at our campground, we visited the Booker T Washington Monument, which was located nearby.  This is a large scale restoration of the small plantation where Booker T Washington was raised as a slave before the Civil War.  It was small farm, typical of the period, where everyone worked in the fields and the slaves lived in dirt floor huts, cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The buildings were simple and primitive, and gave us a bit of an education about conditions in that era. 


We headed off toward North Carolina, staying just a few miles ahead of the frost line.