You are using an insecure version of your web browser. Please update your browser!
Using an outdated browser makes your computer unsafe. For a safer, faster, more enjoyable user experience, please update your browser today or try a newer browser.
I have, in the 18 days since I returned from the 10-week TN8/TS8 road trip, shed all of the 7 pounds that I gained. But I am not in shape, softball season is approaching and pickleball beckons… So time to get back to the gym. I started today with a 1.5-mile brisk walk but hope to get up to at least 3 miles within a week. Then I will add in some jogging and some rowing, to tighten my gut. The aim is to thumb my nose at Father Time and have the best softball season ever. Starting weight: 210.
UPDATE 10/15: 2.5 miles walking, 20 minutes of core exercise. 208 lbs.
UPDATE 10/28: 3.5 miles walking, 25 minutes of core work, 204 lbs <– lightest on this date since 10/2016
This eponymous mystery is #6 in the series by David Baldacci featuring Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, two former Secret Service agents who formed their own private investigation business. It is a small, 2-person operation (though at the end of the book they take on an employee). Being fit and attractive and forced to spend long hours together, there is some sexual tension between them, but in this book it is (almost) all business.
In this book they acquire a client – a 16-year-old high school student and swimmer who they happen to see running down the street carrying an antique revolver. It is never quite clear why he had the gun, but it doesn’t matter – it is just a “meet cute”, a device to get the plot rolling.
Maxwell chases the boy down, subdues him and calms him down. She learns that his father – an army reservist who was called to duty in Afghanistan – has been killed in action. She comforts the boy, takes him home and explains the situation to his stepmother, who married the father just a short time before he went overseas. They leave, having done their good deed for the day, but Michelle does not return the gun. She wants an excuse to return because she senses something is not quite right.
Nope, not right at all. Soon the questions start piling up. Is the father really dead? Is he really a reservist? Is the stepmom really his wife? It is the start of a slide down a slippery slope into a very deep mystery involving huge amounts of cash, treason, kidnapping, murder, the settling of a 25-year-old grudge and a renewed relationship between King and his ex-wife. They have to survive several attempts on their lives to get to the bottom of it all.
It is a fun ride. Quick-moving with interesting characters and plot.
It is now Ian+10 days. I have all of my utilities back, though my internet is still very slow. My life, unlike many around me, is almost back to normal. Tony, my son, got his electricity back on Friday and water returned on Saturday.
But for many in Fort Myers, life will never be the same again. And for 54 people in Lee County, there will be no more life at all.
UPDATE 10/12/22: OpticalTel, my internet service provider, has admitted that there is a resort-wide problem with internet speed! So maybe it will actually be fixed.
I have now lived, fulltime, in an RV for over 10 years. You would think I would know everything there is to know about my rig. But you would be wrong.
Example #1: I have been without power for 4 days and have taken some very cold showers since I got water service back on Friday. It occurred to me last night that I don’t need electricity to produce hot water – the water heater in the RV is dual mode: electric and propane. This morning I flipped the switch to use propane and was able to enjoy a nice, warm shower. I knew the heater was dual-mode but in the 7 years I have owned this 5th wheel I have never used the propane side of the heater.
Example #2: I discovered yesterday that my attempts to recharge the RV battery using the truck via the umbilical were futile: the battery went dead even after hours of running the truck. I had believed for years that the RV battery would be charged via the umbilical while traveling. I switched to using booster cables from the engine to the RV batteries and that did the trick, so I was beginning to think that my understanding of the truck/RV relationship was incorrect. But this morning, with the assistance of my kind neighbor, Todd, I learned that my understanding was correct but that the fuse that controlled the recharge pin on the umbilical (which I didn’t know existed) had blown. Don’t know when. Could have been years ago and it could explain some of those mysterious “refrigerator didn’t stay on” problems that I had encountered. What I do know is that I wasted about $40 in diesel fuel doing nothing but fouling the air.
Normally when I finish a book in 4 days it means that I really like the book. In this case it means less than that because the 4 days were days without electricity following Hurricane Ian. Still, not a bad book.
This is #15 in Kellerman’s popular series of mysteries featuring psychologist Alex Delaware. In this one he treats, briefly, a troubled 15-year-old girl, Lauren Teague, and then, 10 years later, is approached by the girl’s mother because her daughter has gone missing. She is unable to get the police to care and she knows Alex has contacts within the force. Alex uses those contacts – primarily his gay detective buddy, Milo Sturgis – and embarks on a quest to find out what happened to his onetime patient.
Kellerman’s books are realistic as the plot moves forward, often slowly and incrementally, but always plausibly. In this case a few other bodies show up along the way, including another university student who disappeared a year before Lauren. Is a serial killer stalking the campus? The trail leads to several other psych department professors and then to the estate of the publisher of Duke magazine, an upscale soft porn periodical (can anyone say Playboy?).
Unless you have been living under a rock, you know by know that southwest Florida – including Ft Myers – was devastated last Wednesday by Hurricane Ian. I said in my previous post that I would have to wait for better bandwidth to document my experience. Well, my power is still out 4 days later and I don’t know when it will be restored, but I have a pretty reliable way to recharge my cell phone and laptop – and the connectivity via cell phone hotspot has improved – so I will give it a shot.
My site at The Glades
I arrived Friday and did a quick (20 miles) “test drive” of the RV on Saturday to convince myselft that the rig, after being stationary for almost a year, could safely go 40 miles. The test had some minor problems but was successful overall. So I booked 2 nights at The Glades in Moore Haven, about 40 miles east of my site and about 50 to 60 miles east of the projected path of the storm. I thought that would be far enough from the eye to prevent damage to the rig.
Then the storm moved east. When I made my plans the projected landfall was Tampa Bay, about 2 hours north. It actually made landfall first on Sanibel Island, just west of downtown Fort Myers (and about 15 miles from my home site), and moved across Cape Coral, Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte – a path much closer to my home than originally anticipated. The result was devastation – and death – all along the coast of southwest Florida.
The first night in The Glades was fine – I had power and water and it was a pleasant, if somewhat breezy, evening. The next day got progressively windier and by nightfall the RV was rocking as badly as it has rocked in 10 years of travel. I think I experienced some hurricane-force winds (about 75 mph) and had gusts of 50 to 60 all night long.
By Thursday morning the winds had subsided and I thought I could probably return to Ft Myers. But the reports of the devastation on the radio were so dire that I was not certain what I would encounter if I tried to go back. I considered calling the resort, but expected that no one would answer the phone. And even if they did they would not be able to tell me if the route was passable.
So I decided to make a trip with the truck to check out the route and the resort. I got within 5 miles of home before the traffic signals were dead. Travel from that point got slower. I tried to go the “back route” down Orange River Rd, but found that it was flooded about 18 inches deep – shallow enough that I could take the truck through it but wouldn’t want to haul the RV that way. So I decided to return a different way.
Debris at the resort entrance
The RV park was damaged – gates down, royal palms badly beaten up, tiki huts without caps. But the RVs that were there were undamaged and the clubhouse and common areas (swimming pool, etc) actually looked none the worse for wear. Pretty cosmetic damage, really. But no power, no water, no sewer, no cable, no internet. Still, no worse than what I had at The Glades. So if I could find a non-flooded route back, I would bring the RV home.
I went back via FL 80 (Palm Beach Blvd) and it was fine, except that it had more intersections with dead signals. Sill, passable. I brought the RV back. The normal 50-minute trip took about 90 minutes, but I made it without a problem.
My son’s home, sans porch roof
My site had tree and shrub damage, like every other site in the resort, but no damage to the Toyota or the shed. I spent much of the day clearing the site, then took my new, never-used, still-in-the-box generator to my son’s house in North Ft Myers (which lost its porch roof and had a tree fall on the car). I found it difficult to navigate as many roads were closed. I crossed the Caloosahatchie River on the US 41 bridge, which is a bit out of the way. On the other side of the bridge one of the southbound lanes was blocked by a cabin cruiser. I was driving and couldn’t take a photo, but it was a sight I have never seen. And never want to see again.
By Thursday night I had settled into my RV on my home site. It was sad seeing all the tree damage, but royal palms are good at recovering from nasty hurricanes so, hopefully, the place will be beautiful again within a year or so.
Other nearby areas – Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach in particular – were not so lucky. Utter devastation and many lives lost. I don’t like being without power (the water was restored by Friday) but feel very fortunate compared to many in the area.
Chronologically, this is the third of the (many) Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. I like them all, as I have mentioned before. This one isn’t my favorite as it is long on suspense and air travel, but with relatively litte (for a Reacher story) action. It is also a book which, I realized when I started reading it, that I had read before, so much of the suspense was spoiled in a second reading. But I hadn’t reviewed it, possibly indicating that I had read it a long time ago. So I will review it now.
The story begins with Reacher in Key West, doing manual labor. A guy comes to town looking for Reacher. He finds him, but Reacher denies his identity – he didn’t know the guy, didn’t know the person (“Mrs Jacob”) who sent him. Why complicate his life?
Then two other guys appear, also looking for Reacher. And the first guy shows up dead. So much for keeping his life simple. What is going on? Reacher feels compelled to find out. He travels to New York City where the dead guy – a private investigator – had his office. He then discovers – by unintentionally crashing the funeral of his former commanding officer, Leon Garber – that the mysterious “Mrs Jacob” is the married name of Garber’s daughter, Jodie, now divorced.
Leon had been tasked, before his death, with investigating what had happened to a local boy, Victor Hobie, who had never returned from Vietnam but, oddly, was not listed as MIA. Child lets us, as readers, learn what happened to Hobie long before Reacher figures it out – he returned home, without telling his parents, and was living a life of crime in New York. Unraveling the mystery and taking down Hobie – and, in the process, falling in love with Jodie and saving her life – is the crux of the story.
Reacher, an inveterate drifter, inherits Garber’s home on the banks of the Hudson River. This creates a crisis of identity for Reacher which is not resolved when the book ends. But no one should be surprised that Reacher is still a drifter in later books in the series.
The 8th trip south (TS8) is in the books, so it is time to do the wrapup.
By the numbers:
10 hops, 2,919 route miles (292 miles per hop).
22 nights, all in hotels, $3,023 in hotel charges ($137.41 per night).
1,844 total driving miles, 93.6 gallons of gas (34.8 miles per gallon).
$312.24 in fuel costs ($3.34 per gallon).
The hotel costs were more in line with my pre-trip expectations (about $130 per night), but were still more than I originally budgeted. The fuel cost per gallon – and the mileage – were both considerably better than on the TN8.
Highlights:
The visit to the Corning Museum of Glass. It was MUCH better than I expected and Ooma liked it very much too.
A visit with Jimmy and Michelle, Ooma’s long-term friends, in Erie PA. They gave us a first-rate tour of the area, which we both liked more than we expected. And I was impressed with the quality of the wines produced there.
The Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison WI. I hadn’t been there in over 40 years and they were much better than I recalled. Ooma liked them too.
My 55th high school reunion. This was not a big thrill for Ooma – and I didn’t think it would be – but she tolerated it well and it was nice seeing some (very) old friends, both at the reunion and at several smaller events afterward.
My visit to the Chicago Art Institute. Ooma wasn’t feeling well and didn’t go, which was disappointing, but it was a nice afternoon for me.
The St Louis Zoo. This had been on my Zoo Bucket List (which isn’t very long) for many years. We both enjoyed it very much.
The Holiday Inn in Tupelo MS. I don’t usually include a hotel in a list of trip highlights, but this one was exceptional.
A visit with Ooma’s sister Maggy and her husband Tom in Daphne AL. A nice couple and a fine dinner.
Speaking of dinner, we ate very well on this trip. Good restaurants at almost every stop. I gained a few pounds – which is not a highlight – but is evidence of how well we ate.
The car performed well. No problems whatsoever.
Lowlights:
Poor weather in Erie PA. We had a good time despite the rain, but it could have been even better.
The Ohio Turnpike. Expensive and, despite their advertising, did not accept my EZPass. Annoying.
We didn’t get to Circus World in Baraboo WI. I was looking forward to this but time ran out.
Ooma’s continuing bout with “long COVID”. She didn’t feel well for much of the trip.
Planned versus actual routes:
TS8-1 planTS8-1 actialTS8-2 plan (revised)TS82 actual
Other than the diversion away from the Ohio Turnpike there were no major route changes.
I packed well for the trip – there was nothing that I needed that I didn’t have. But I actually packed too much. I could have gotten by with about 4 fewer shirts and 2 fewer pairs of shorts.
When I got back home the RV was intact. The problem with the internet (which was revealed early on when I was unable to connect with the shed’s air conditioner) turned out to be a disconnected cable, easily fixed.
But a hurricane – Hurricane Ian – is looming. I haven’t fully unpacked because I may have to haul the RV away if it heads toward Ft Myers. Only when that threat is gone will I feel like the TS8 is truly over.
