Jim and April's Roadtrips

Keeping a Road Trip blog going requires some flexibility.  If you want to post only about actual trips while you are on the road, one of two things will happen.  Either you won’t be posting very often and the blog will stagnate, eventually starting to stink, or you will need to go somewhere on a frequent basis, which can be expensive.  So, we’ve kind of split the difference.  There have been times when we didn’t post for a while, more because we were busy than by plan.  But we also post about other things and past trips, just to keep the activity going.

One of the reasons for our trip to Ohio a couple of weeks ago, was to plan another trip later this year.  The first weekend in June, we will be hosting a Pearson family reunion near Louisville.  I say “a” because I know there are many Pearson families out there who are not directly related to us.  In fact, there are probably a lot of Pearsons out there who are related by six degrees or so and don’t know it, but that’s a genealogy trip which we may take later on.  For now we are focusing on the children and grandchildren of my father’s siblings and our only remaining aunt.

This group normally meets in Ohio near where my grandparents lived.  This is only the second time it’s been held in Kentucky.  This is reasonable because there are many more relatives there than here.  However, everyone who came to Kentucky Lake when we hosted previously had a great time and we are hoping for a successful repeat.  This time, we are planning the Louisville area because it is about half-way between the Ohio groups and us. …

Read More Read More

This past weekend in Ohio was mostly an exercise in exploration for Jim.  He was only two when we moved to Kentucky, so he doesn’t have any real memories of living there.  It’s just things he’s been told by others.  I doubt if any of my brothers remember much about that time.  Even Eddie was only five when we left.  For me, it’s an odd mixture of things I’ve been told, that sometimes don’t seem to agree with what I think I remember or what I see when I’m there, and actual memories.

I remember going to church.  I was in a play there once.  I remember learning lines and being on stage, but not what the play was about.  I know it wasn’t a traditional Christmas pageant about the birth of Christ, but I’m simply not clear on any other facts.  I knew the church was out in the country.  There don’t actually seem to be any churches in Conover, where we lived.  However, I didn’t realize until Aunt Jean was reminiscing on Saturday that it was the same church she attends now.  We’ve been there several times with her and I had no deja vu at all. …

Read More Read More

Since we got back from California, I have been troubled by the number of people who have asked how we made the trip without killing each other.  It seems that some of our friends are under the impression that Jim and I don’t get along very well.

They hear us bickering and think we must be angry, but we never get angry.  We sometimes disagree and when that happens neither of us is willing to give up.  It’s in our DNA to always be right.  However, we are mature enough to know that our instincts are frequently bad for us and we never get angry with each other about disagreements.

In fact, there are times when we deliberately pick at each other just for amusement.  We don’t really indulge this idiosyncrasy with anyone else in the family.  The strength of our relationship is the reason we can push right to the edge of anger without crossing the line.

I guess people who don’t really know both of us have trouble understanding.  I am the oldest of five children.  He is the youngest.  Growing up, we didn’t really spend time together.  When I got married the first time, he was only nine years old.  When I moved to California, he was only eleven.  We began to develop a real relationship when I returned to Kentucky, but he left for the Air Force not long afterward.  We didn’t get to spend enough time together to discover how much we are alike until years later. …

Read More Read More

It’s been nearly two months since I had a normal schedule. I am so far behind on updating websites, it’s embarrassing. I still had thousands of photos to sort through and edit when we left for the Pennyrile Fall Photo weekend which, of course added hundreds more to the total.

My brain feels like that scrambled egg in the anti-drug commercials.

I simply wasn’t feeling creative or inspired enough to come up with good shots. At the end of two days of shooting, I had more than 500 pictures and none of them really pleased me. Participation involved submitting four shots whether I liked them or not, so I did, but I wasn’t surprised when none of them even placed. If I found them boring, I didn’t expect the judge to feel any different.

The good thing is that I now get to stay home and start catching up. For the next two weeks, I do not plan to leave Madisonville at all. In fact, I don’t plan to even leave the house most days. I do love road trips, but 5 weeks of travel is enough even for me.

The trip to Baltimore to pick up my grandson, Brad, and his family from the airport is probably what finally killed my enthusiasm. Going up wasn’t too bad, except for being tired to begin with, and the people at the airport were great., However, coming back it rained, the truck broke down, and things just kept on getting worse.  I took very few photos.  Later on, I’ll do a post on the trip and add those.  At the moment, I think they are on the laptop.  I’m just too tired to pull it out and transfer them over.  Right now, I need to get back to work on updates to my church website.

Well posting every day on our California trip didn’t exactly work out as planned.  Driving around 400 miles a day with extended stops for photo ops didn’t leave much time for writing or editing pictures.  The first hint of a problem came in Oklahoma City when we spent a total of about 4 hours at the National Memorial for the 1995 bombing.  I did manage to pull the pictures off the camera and put them into labeled folders on the laptop every night, but that’s about all.  The few things we managed to post along the way are not even the tip of the iceberg that our ship crashed against.

It’s been a very busy month, with no end in sight.  We’ve been home (well sort of) for a week and I haven’t even gotten caught up on all my email, much less updating websites and editing pictures.

To do the trip the way we originally conceived it would have taken, at least, twice as long.  We really needed to visit attractions and shoot photos on one day, spend the next day editing pictures, checking email, working on websites, and updating the blog-, then travel to the next destination on the third day.  Then we would have needed to add on the week for visiting with friends.  So we would have been gone about 2 months.  Oh well, the dream’s still there.  Maybe when Jim retires again, we’ll be able to make the trip that way. …

Read More Read More