April 2021    The Bad, the Good, the Disappointment

We finally received the news we had been waiting more than a year to hear - Brian's mother in Johnstown, Pennsylvania was again allowed to have visitors at her facility.  We loaded up the van and headed east.  On the second day of our trip, we were involved in an auto collision in Tuscaloosa, Alabama at low speed.  No injuries in ours or the other vehicle and our airbags didn't even deploy.  We found ourselves with a dearth of rental cars in the area, but were able to obtain a small SUV from the collision repair shop.  We bought a small tent and camped at a nearby reservoir for a few days.  After being informed it would take two weeks for repairs, we pulled out the bare travel and camping necessities from the van, crammed them into the rental car, and continued on our way up through Tennessee, West Virginia (Monongahela National Forest), and into Pennsylvania.

We quit tent camping about 9 years ago, but we managed to crawl in and out.

We occupied ourselves with geocaching in the area north of Tuscaloosa.  Here is a sampling of some of the humorous messages we found in some of the caches:

Such an emotional reunion with Brian's mother!  Except for one doctor visit, she had not been out of her retirement community in over a year.   We were able to visit three times a day, take her to her brother's house for dinner one night, and take a long drive "over the mountain" and marvel at the emergence of spring (and drove through a snow flurry as we crossed Babcock Ridge).   While we were not able to go out to eat, we did pick up some takeout from her favorite restaurant after the drive.   As it turned out, the timing of our visit was Providential . . . visits were suspended the day after we left because of an uptick in covid infection rates in the county.   

This beautiful tree is just outside Brian's mother's window.

Other signs of spring busting out all over:

  

The morning we left dawned bright and clear and cold:

We made another visit to Richland Cemetery before leaving Johnstown:

This is the house Brian lived in as a young boy.  The cemetery is on land that was his 

great-grandfather Luther's farm.  There is a great view of Conemaugh Valley from 

the cemetery.  Fog in the valley and markers for the new walking trail that has 

been established since our last visit.

A. Ted Luther - Brian's grandfather

On the way back to Alabama, we spent time exploring the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky, mostly on winding back roads.  Over the course of a week, we observed the leafing out of trees (so many shades of green!) and flowering dogwood and redbud trees.  We camped at Big South Fork National River and Recreational Area (National Park Service) in Kentucky and visited Cumberland Falls State Park.  We discovered the beauty of northern Georgia in the mountainous Chattahoochee National Forest where we encountered an overnight temperature of 30 degrees.  We had good sleeping bags and enough clothes to layer up but forgot our gloves back in Alabama.  We were fine - not our first time to camp in below-freezing weather.

Seen while geocaching on the way back to Alabama:

monument in a Kentuck coal-mining community

Levi Jackson Wilderness Road Park near London, KY

with grist mill and extensive collection of millstones

Cumberland Falls, Kentucky

Chattahooche National Forest, Georgia at Walasi-Yi on the Appalachian Trail:

Appalachian Trail  behind Walasi-Yi Inn

A cold and windy day at an outlook along the Richard Russell

Scenic Byway, Chattahoochee NF

We were getting text messages about repairs to the van being on track, but just two days before we expected to pick it up and return to Houston, we got word that the frame was bent and needed parts were unavailable so our perfect-for-us van was being totaled.  Complications - no one-way rentals in either Birmingham or Tuscaloosa available.  One way UHaul rentals were also hard to come by. We ended up driving to another town 60 miles away to pick up a UHaul truck much bigger than we needed, but we were grateful to get something.  Back in Tuscaloosa, we spent three hours transferring our gear from the rental car and the van and removing the items from the van that we hoped to reuse in another Nissan van (step rails, hardware for luggage rails from the top, seat covers, rearview mirror camera, and the removable sleeping platform with a framework that Brian built last year).   We said farewell to our wonderful van and embarked on the 620 mile journey back to Houston in the loud, rough-riding, gas-guzzling UHaul truck.  

way more space than we needed

On the drive home, we checked online inventory at the Nissan dealership and saw a van for sale.  Text messages back and forth with a salesman to set up an appointment resulted in our driving straight to the dealership before going to our house.  Disappointment!  No NV 3500 van on the lot as we expected.  In fact, none seemed to be available anywhere in Houston.   Many hours on the internet and phone calls led us to a Nissan dealership in Houston that had a pre-owned NV on the lot.  Now I have to explain that we had a 2019 NV and Nissan discontinued the vans with the 2021 model year so they are getting harder and harder to find.  After 5 hours, we concluded a deal on the 2019 preowned vehicle with only 4,700 miles on it.  A more basic features package than the one we left behind in Alabama, but another NV 3500 that we can transfer everything we salvaged from the previous one.  Some minor paintwork needs to be done and then we will get the van and begin kitting it out again for our next adventure.

All in all, we are still grateful to be able to explore this vast and varied country.  We are unscathed from our misadventure (except for our bank account) and we made someone in Johnstown, PA very happy.  Life is good, isn't it?