February 18
Hi from Clarksville, KY. We’ve been traveling for the last 2 days. Yesterday we drove for about 8 hours from Tampa to Dalton GA, just south of Chattanooga TN. We decided to take a little time today to visit a few National Parks that were on our route. We passed several yesterday, but we were focused on making time. It was hard to pass them by, but we wanted to get as far north as possible. Today, though, we decided to make a few stops, so we didn’t quite make it as far as we originally planned.
Our first stop today was Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Battlefield which straddles Georgia and Tennessee. We didn’t get a chance to see the entire battlefield, but they had a very nice visitor center and a great movie that explained the battle. It’s not one of the more famous Civil War battles and we didn’t know that much about it, so the movie helped a lot.
Then in Murfreesboro (about 30 miles south of Nashville) we made a short stop at the Stones River National Battlefield. We knew even less about this battle so, again, the movie was helpful. It turns out that all three of these battles involved the same participants on both sides. Stones River was first over New Year’s 1862/1863, followed by Chattanooga and Chickamauga in Sept 63. The final battle at Chickamauga is considered the “death knell of the confederacy” as their loss opened up the path to Atlanta.
Finally, we stopped at Andrew Jackson’s home, Hermitage, just east of Nashville. It’s not a National Historic Site so Lynn didn’t get a stamp in her Passport, but it was fun anyway. This was the stop that made it impossible to get to Indianapolis tonight, which was our original plan. We spent over 2 hours there, but it was worth the extra time. The first floor of the mansion is undergoing renovations, so it was covered in plastic, but the upper floor was beautiful. We wandered the grounds a bit before heading back to the car.
So, tonight is the last night of the first half of our very first wintering over adventure. It truly was a great adventure. We left Chicago on Oct 24th, so we’ve been gone almost exactly 4 months. During that time, we put over 12,000 miles on our Honda CRV, we traveled through 10 states and all four time zones. We visited 22 National Parks/Sites/Monuments and two foreign countries (okay so we were only in Nogales MX for 2 hours, but we had to show a passport, so it counts). We spent time in the desert, the mountains and the beach. We had temps from 32 in San Antonio TX (go figure) to 95 with 88% humidity in Costa Rica.
There were several reasons for this trip. The first is that we’re homeless so why not be warm and homeless. But the second reason is that we’re searching for someplace to winter over every year. Given that Chicago is having a brutal winter, we so glad we were in a position to start our search this year. As much as we enjoyed Costa Rica, we’ve crossed it off the list of places to winter over. We would enjoy another vacation to see the things we missed, but we think we’d be bored there for an entire winter. We’re not big beach people and what little golf we found is quite expensive. Besides the heat and humidity, while better than cold and snow, was difficult on Lynn’s joints. Not only that but she hasn’t had a good hair day since she left Arizona. The same can be said for Florida so that’s off the list as well.
Henderson NV was great, but we enjoyed Green Valley even more so right now that’s in the lead, but who knows what we’ll find in Europe. We’ve heard that the Algarve region of Portugal is a terrific place to retire. We are not sure we’d want to retire to Europe, but it might work for the winter. We’re spending some time there next month, so we’ll check it out.
Thanks so much for spending the last 4 months with us. We’re going to go quiet as not much is happening this week other than unpacking, repacking, getting taxes done, visiting doctors, running errands, etc. But, a week from tomorrow (Monday) we’re heading to Lisbon, so we won’t be quiet for long. Talk with you soon.
Love to all…. Lynn and Peter