One year ago today, we finished up all the business of selling our house on Covedale Avenue and hit the road. We didn’t have our Scamp yet; first we headed to the Flanders family cottage on Martha’s Vineyard for three weeks of well-deserved R&R after all the packing and other business involved in selling a house and not having anywhere to move into directly. But then we headed up to Minnesota and got our brand-new camper, ready for a full year of adventure on the road. The year has not gone exactly as we hoped. For one thing, although we diligently made doctors’ appointments and came back to Cincinnati for them, we didn’t anticipate that they would/could lead to issues that caused us to have to find a place to stay for months in the spring, when we had planned a nice springtime loop around the middle south to southwest. We never did get that loop in, but . . . maybe someday. Our original plan had been to stay on the road for a year, but because we were off the road for more tha...

By the time we got back to Cincinnati on Labor Day, Mike’s sciatica was out of control. We had made plans for him to stay at our nephew’s house, where he could stretch out in the spare room (or, mostly, on the living room couch). I couldn’t get down the narrow streets or turn around in his cul de sac with our trailer, however, so our daughter Alice took Mike over to her cousin’s house while I went on to the Ohio/Indiana state line, the location of Indian Springs Campground, where we had a reservation. This was the first time I dropped and set up the Scamp by myself, and I did just fine. We had a new flexible hose for the water hookup; it works great. Fortunately I did hook up the water, because about a week into my solo stay there, they closed the bathrooms and showers at the campground for repairs, which is not cool. Our campsite at Indian Springs RV Park, located on the Indiana/Ohio border down off U.S. 50 However, it’s generally fine for an RV park. Nice people run it, and they ...

 From northern Minnesota, we headed south on a highway that carefully skirts the 1,000 lakes so well that you rarely catch a glimpse of water . . . though there are one or two lakes that appear briefly, including one with a great name: Hole in the Day Lake, which I think I mentioned in a blog post last year. Hole in the Day was the name of an Indian chief; the lake is named after him. I was also bemused by Upper and Lower Hay Lake, and Upper and Lower Whitefish Lake—like Upper Egypt, which was south of Lower Egypt, the upper lakes are lower on the map than the lower lakes. I think it’s more about drainage than geography. There ’ s a lotta lakes in the Land O ’  Lakes When the Lakes highway, Minnesota 371 on the map, came to an end we took U.S. 10 for awhile, and then Minnesota 15, with a stop in New Ulm, where we stayed at Flandrau State Park. We were amused that it was almost but not quite Flanders. A very nice park, but we did get a rather fierce rainstorm not long after we ...