I’m jumping ahead a little on this entry, because I don’t want to bury the lede: We picked up our custom built Scamp trailer this afternoon in Backus, Minnesota. We are definitely up in the North Woods! It’s just great, our tiny home for the next year or so. And the people at the Scamp factory (Evelands, Inc. is their formal name) were great, too. Matt, Steve, and Lyle showed us how everything worked (it’s complicated, but not quite as complicated as I expected), and then at the last minute we turned around to go back to get it de-winterized, since we plan on using it now. So, here we are with our Scamp. It needs a name. We’re working on that. A Haunted Holidome and a Confusing Coffin Now, how did we get to northern Minnesota from Massachusetts? I mentioned the abandoned Holidome hotel where we stayed on Monday. It was nice, but the Holidome was sad. I worked for the Holiday Inns in the heydays of the Holidome, when the Cincinnati area had three: one in Sharonville, one in Ft. Mitchell...

  The last few days we were at the cottage on Martha’s Vineyard were sunny and clear, so we headed to Aquinnah one evening and Menemsha another evening to see the sunset, then stayed till it got dark looking for that Atlas comet. It was a no show, or else we were looking in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Ah well, the sunsets were nice and so were the stars. We went down to Lucy Vincent Beach to admire the beautiful full moon, too. So we didn't even mind so much that we never saw the comet. The very last full day we were there, we spent the morning packing and cleaning and so forth, but then headed to the beach at Katama—a kind of wild part of the island on the far east side that connects to Chappaquiddick (usually) with a thin strand of beach. The Atlantic was wild, the beach was windy, and we had a nice walk down the sand (though not all the way to Chappy). Then we wandered up to nearby Edgartown and walked around the quaint streets there for a bit. We saw the Whaling Chu...

This past week we explored some of the back roads on Martha’s Vineyard and found some interesting sites and stories along the way. Our first back road was North Road, a perfectly nice alternate route from West Tisbury to Menemsha. It’s a road that rambles through some beautiful scenery. I also noticed there are a lot of mailboxes that say Flanders along it, as well as a big old place called the Captain Flanders House, with what looks like an old windmill that doesn’t have blades any more. I think the whole place is a bed and breakfast now. Mike’s cousin Bill had told us that there was a house on North Road where the actor James Cagney used to live. He also mentioned that Cagney had bought the mineral rights to a number of acres around him in Chilmark. There had once been a brickyard there (one of the side roads is still called Brickyard Road, in fact), and Cagney had thought the brick industry might start up again; the mineral rights included the clay in the ground. Menemsha and Aqui...

It was a nice, lazy week at the cottage in West Tisbury. We hiked and wandered, but we also stayed at the cottage and read and puttered and cooked. It rained all day on Monday, which was fine, we got the too-much-stuff we packed as we emptied the house a bit more organized that day. Below is the cottage on New Lane, known as the Rookery, where we are currently staying. The Savannah There’s a nature preserve around one of the coves of Tisbury Great Pond called Long Point Wildlife Refuge, and when you get out past the very cool statue of a harrier hawk that marks the path down to the beach, it feels like you are suddenly transported to the African veldt. The twisted trees are scrub oaks and pitch pine rather than baobab trees, and the grasses around the trees include New England asters as well as beach plums, but the overall effect has you imagining elephants just beyond the horizon and watching out for lions hiding in the tall brush. Once you make it down to the water, you follow along ...

  Gay Head Lighthouse was built overlooking Nantucket Sound more than 200 years ago in the small Wampanoag community of Aquinnah at the tip of an island in the Atlantic. The Wampanoag called the island Noepe, but it is more commonly known today as Martha’s Vineyard. The Gay Head Lighthouse is one of America’s most famous beacons. From whaling days to electrification, the light has guided ships past the shoals surrounding the island, and it has twice been moved back from the eroding cliffs to continue lighting the way. It is one of the only American lighthouses with a history of Native Americans working with and even as light keepers, and it also played a part in Flanders family history. Originally built in 1799, the octagonal wooden light tower was moved back 75 feet from the eroding clay cliffs in 1844 by John Mayhew of Edgartown, but by the early 1850s the tower was in disrepair and again threatened by the eroding clay cliffs. In 1853, lighthouse keeper Samuel Flanders (Mike...

I think that, in addition to weekly updates, I will occasionally post something about an interesting place or thing we encounter on our travels. First up, the Methodist summer "camp" on Martha's Vineyard. Near downtown Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, there is a twenty-some-acre site with an open-air “Tabernacle” in the center, surrounded by miniature Victorian cottages set on paths that spiral out from the middle, with one road around it known as Trinity Circle. Before the cottages, there were tents, but from the late 1850s through the end of the century, the permanent cottages were built. There were 500 cottages by 1880, and though some were used by vendors and services, and some were for visitors, most were family-owned summer homes that belonged to members of the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association. Three-hundred and eighteen cottages remain in the summer community today. The cast iron Tabernacle in the center of the enclave was built by a cottage owner named J...

My plan is to try to post an update on our travels here once a week or so. We started our Year on the Road adventure on Thursday, September 26. On a drizzly afternoon, we made it to Cleveland, just ahead of Hurricane Helene, which brought high winds and power outages to Cincinnati as we got out of town. Then the next day, remarkably, we encountered a hitherto unknown wormhole on I-90 in upstate New York and made it across to Massachusetts the next day in quite a bit less time than Google said it would take. Inconceivable! On Saturday morning, we arrived at the Woods Hole ferry dock with a reservation for a Sunday afternoon boat. No worries, no crowds—we got on the boat that was already at the dock and arrived in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard before 1:00 pm. After quickly unloading the ton of boxes and bags we had stuffed in the van at the last minute as we cleared out our house on Covedale Avenue, we went to Edgartown to pick up our friends Mark and Anne Stepaniak. They had enjoyed...