I took Mom down to the ‘Glades last November.

It was a new experience for her. No cellphone, no internet, no gps. No signal. It was a life-changing experience. The children couldn’t get ahold of her to share their drama short of sending the sheriff out to look for her…in the Everglades.

Now we’re up on the Cumberland Plateau until we freeze our butts off. Obviously we have internet access and also have a cellphone signal. But Mom doesn’t turn the phone on. No interest at all. If there’s a family emergency they’ll just have to have it without her. She’s never going to do drama again.

The chicks have fledged, the nest is empty. Mom’s free to live again. She’s released them into the universe.

My two cents worth…

Lookit, this thing is an absolute disaster, a man-made disaster, for everywhere the Loop Current and Gulf Stream touches. Fishing/oystering/scalloping in the eastern Gulf will be a thing of the past for about 25 years.

Tarballs on east-coast beaches aren’t anything new; lots of tar and tarballs on beaches in Ireland will be impressive.

BP and the operators of the Deepwater Horizon cut corners; the DoJ criminal investigation will certainly find that. Of course that happened; it’s not much different than driving 65 in a 55 zone….until you crash.  Everyone does it.

BP stock has taken a $30bn hit. I hope no one owns a significant amount of BP stock or any oil-company stock. There’s going to be a shaking-out.

But you know what, really, no one’s to blame. Not the execs who were going slightly over the speed-limit and certainly not the crew, many of whom died on the rig. It’s just plain bad luck. Maybe shockingly huge bad luck, but bad luck just the same.

You could try blaming the politicians who allowed deepwater gomex drilling, but if they hadn’t you’d be blaming them for somewhat higher gas prices at the pump. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but most of that blame falls on you and me for wanting to, expecting to, hop in our cars and run to the corner store.

That’s right boys ‘n’girls, we have met the enemy and he is us! (Walt Kelly, Pogo)

After a couple of weeks we’ve gotten well snuggled into our private CG on the Cumberland Plateau; today we snagged the only relatively level spot (apparently for miles around) completely with electric that actually works.

Memorial Day Weekend was interesting. RVers jammed in, turned on their ACs and the power immediately went out.  And kept going out. We put the fridge on gas and didn’t care. This morning all those coffeemakers switched on and the power switched off, so we just laid there until someone pulled the breaker and I immediately jumped up and pushed the coffeemaker button. It only took a few minutes and success was ours!

Turns out our site row was only a 100A line…strung off another 100A line…as the new CG owner had just learned!

I heard a couple of other amusing stories from an old-timer. There’s a well pump down by the pond and another pump at the bathhouse and lodge; you have to have the well pump running before you turn on the bathhouse pump.

It seems that the previous owner (the CG was abandoned for five years) didn’t want to spend the bucks for actual plumbing so he just buried several hundred feet of _green garden hose_ to connect the pumps.

The old-timer also said that there are three septic tanks here but no one can find the third one.

Anyway, to get to the point,  we were sitting out enjoying our third or fourth adult beverage and the wonderful spring weather and, at the same time, we both started talking about selling the house in Florida and taking our show on the road. We’ve been out a month now and are doing just fine, not missing anything.

Probably not, though; where we are in Florida is fairly inexpensive, a gated community with real gates and a guard shack, and is the sort of place where we can go away six months, leave the doors unlocked and not worry about it. And it doesn’t get real cold. But I’ve come to think of it as a nice home base from which to go on expeditions and to store our stuff.

Unless we come across a nice recent-model Lazy Daze at a good price….