BIG, BIG plans for the summer of 2017

Yeehah! It’s that time of year again folks. The temperatures are rising, the Pasleys are packing and quicker than you can hit the delete button your inbox will soon be overflowing with links to scintillating travel blog posts containing compelling news, pithy commentary and, occasionally, a bit of hyperbole.

Power Couple

This summer’s travels will be a little different than recent years because our plans are driven by two compelling events. On May 21 Tex and his fiancé, Ms. Rachel Ellen Simon, are graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Go Wahoos!!

Then, on August 19, Tex and Rachel are getting married near Rachel’s hometown of Lexington, Kentucky.

Needless to say, these two events are driving our summer travel plans. Nonetheless, there is plenty of time in-between and before and after for some adventures.

So, with that in mind, here’s the itinerary:

We are loading up the travel trailer right now and plan to pull out of San Antonio bound for Houston on Wednesday. We’ll spend a few days in Houston taking in an Astros game and Betsy and her cousin will conduct a family-history-oriented video recording of her uncle. From there we will spend a couple of days meandering through East Texas visiting state historic sites before crossing Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in a fairly (for us) straightforward fashion to Knoxville, Tennessee where we will encamp for a couple of days before proceeding on to Charlottesville.

Tex and Rachel are moving to Knoxville the day after graduation so we’ll spend a couple of nights there getting to know the town a little better.

For three weeks following the Knoxville stop we will stay at an RV “resort” in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, 20 miles or so west of Charlottesville.

Prior to graduation we will help Tex and Rachel move out of their apartment in Charlottesville and into the condo they are renting in Knoxville (which is owned by a former Trinity University classmate of ours).

The day after graduation Tex and Rachel will leave for Knoxville and we will stay on in Crozet (Charlottesville) for another week before moving down the road to Richmond.

On June 1 we will begin a six-week gig volunteering at Moores Creek National Battlefield. This small, obscure national park is located in a rural area of southeast North Carolina, about 100 miles southeast of Raleigh and 20 miles northwest of Wilmington. Wilmington is a city of about 115,000 located on the Atlantic coast and it has (at least) three endearing (to us) attributes; a Walgreen’s, a Costco and a minor league baseball team.

We had initially planned to spend the time between the law school graduation and the wedding volunteering at one of the many national parks in Virginia while “really getting to know” Virginia on our days off. Unfortunately we were not able to find a volunteer gig at a park that fit our schedule. Ditto for Maryland.

So we began looking into Washington DC and, even though it would have been expensive and precluded staying in our travel trailer, we became enamored with the idea of living (temporarily) in the nation’s capital and volunteering at one of the monuments on the National Mall. Unfortunately, we were not able to get the Park Service as enamored with the idea as we were.

So we shifted our focus to North Carolina and immediately got two great offers, one from Cape Hatteras National Seashore and the other from Moores Creek. We chose Moores Creek partly because we will have a lot of autonomy and flexibility in our work duties and we’ll be able to swap duties with one another at our choosing. Primarily one of us will be staffing the park’s small visitor center while the other works outdoors on grounds and facility maintenance and upkeep. Another big selling point for Moores Creek is that we will only work three days per week, so we should have plenty of time to travel and “really get to know” North Carolina, a state we know little about (except for their public bathroom policies).

We’ve committed to stay at the park until mid-July but we might stay a week or two longer if we like it and don’t develop other plans in the interim. In future posts I’ll go into more detail about the Moores Creek NB, its history and its odd journey to becoming one the 400-plus NPS units.

While the late July/early August time frame is unplanned and open ended right now we will definitely make it over to Lexington, KY by mid-August to begin gearing up for the wedding.

After the wedding the plan is to store the trailer in Knoxville and scratch some of that DC itch by spending a couple of weeks in Washington with a side trip to Philadelphia. That should take us into early September when we will return to Knoxville, check in on the newlyweds, pick up the trailer and head down the road to Nashville to attend the Tennessee State Fair. We’ll start for home from there and expect to be back in San Antonio to enjoy the first, crisp, cool days of beautiful Texas fall weather.

Stay tuned and keep your finger close to the delete button because there will be more posts coming this summer.