Things I learned from six years of travel in a motorhome
In 2010 Elizabeth Gray and her husband, Gary, set off on what turned out to be a five year journey by motorhome which took them to 47 countries on five continents. They returned to explore Australia late last year.
An accident in paradise
Not all travelling is "beer and skittles" so to speak. Like life in general there are good days and better days. The reason we all invest in travel insurance is just in case we have an unforeseen and mostly unwelcome accident or incident.
This is our sixth year of being on the road and during that time they have only experienced one occasion where medical intervention was required. This was while we were in Cartagena, Columbia in 2014.
Just as we went to walk behind and around the artist, he stepped back to examine his work from a distance. His movement bumped me off balance and I fell sideways from the pavement, into the gutter and onto the road.
Immediately I realised my arm had assumed a precarious deformed position, my shoulder was badly dislocated.
The artist appeared totally shocked at what had happened.
Two passersby helped him carefully lift me from the roadway onto a chair. A taxi was summoned seemingly instantly, and I was gently assisted onto the back seat, the driver was given pesos by the artist and instructions to go a hospital emergency unit.
It transpired that the hospital was a university teaching hospital. Given that I’m a retired registered nurse I knew what I was in for regarding the treatment procedure.
The treatment I was given was faultless, notwithstanding the information flow from doctor to patient and vice versa was in perfect Spanglish… from the preliminary X-rays to the end point where a sling was applied to immobilise my arm and a letter written to give to a doctor for follow-up when I arrived back in Miami the following week.
Seeing a sling on my arm Columbian airline staff gave us priority on our return journey to the US.
Best of all, there was no residual shoulder joint damage plus from the outset our travel insurers displayed compassion and paid all expenses very promptly.
All's well that ends well!
***
The “ageing disgracefully” tango in Buenos Aires
In 2014 while waiting for our motorhome rig to arrive by ship in Buenos Aires, Argentina from Jacksonville in Florida, we rented an apartment for five weeks in the city.
What an amazing cultural tour de force that turned out to be. Here's just a taste of what we did and saw.
- A visit to a glorious old opera house that had been converted into a bookstore. This had to be seen to be believed. A stainless steel flower sculpture that opened in the mornings at sunrise and closed in the evenings at sunset was fascinating.
- "Ricoleta" a historic cemetery with thousands of elaborate family crypts and where Eva Peron and family are buried was a photographic feast.
- The best beef in the world comes from Argentina. This is by no stretch of gustatory imagination an understatement. Those of you who enjoy a good steak this is one for your "bucket list".
- Disused cranes from the now redundant Plate River port have been stylised into attractive sculptures that grace the skyline.
- "Portenos', as local Buenos Aries inhabitants are known, support the outdoor lifestyle big time, especially in the evenings. A large percentage of Portenos are noticeably body aware and fashion conscious, such a difference from their Latino relations in Mexico.
No visit to Buenos Aires is complete without a visit to the San Telmo district where the tango is very much part of the dining and street scene. My husband is by nature quite shy. But I dared him to do the tango with one of the long-legged beauties standing nearby waiting to be asked to dance.
To my surprise he strode over and allowed the dancer to place a scarf around his neck and a hat on his head then commence to dance.
Growing old disgracefully! Ah, such is life!
***
A Mississippi River sojourn
Using a Mississippi River guide book plus heaps of local information brochures collected on the way, it took us 23 days to travel the length of the mighty Mississippi.
The commencement point was at Pilot Town, the most southerly point one can drive in the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico where in actuality there is more water than land. Rising tidal waters lap and in many cases inundate the roads.
The sights and experiences along the river are all at once fascinating, interesting, historical, comical, picturesque and sad, but most of all the river becomes a constant companion. After completing the river sojourn we experienced what can only be described as separation anxiety. We fell into a funk for quite a few days… it felt as if we had lost a friend.
We saw and interacted with sights as ludicrous as Superman in the (real) town of Metropolis, complete with his costume change telephone box and the Daily Planet newspaper office where he worked nearby. Other fictional characters we met included Popeye who “resides" in the “real” town of Chester in Illinois.
There were lochs, dams, bridges, riverboats, museums, civil war battle sites and gunboats, flotsam and jetsam, fishing boats, fishermen, starboard and port channel markers, otters, cornfields, cotton fields, barges hundreds of metres long, low lying river (snow melt) flooding, hawks, brown pelicans, injured bald eagle refuges and bald eagles flying to and from their eyries in rocky ramparts in the wild beside the river. There were even flocks of opportunistic gulls thousands of kilometres from the sea.
Small towns and cities lined the river. Mark Twain’s childhood home in Hannibal Missouri, graceful and stately plantation homes in Louisiana and Mississippi, deserted "ghost" river towns, old opry halls, abandoned riverboat captains homes, murals depicting local histories on levees, cemeteries where all deceased are buried in crypts above the ground, paddle wheel casinos, historic French flavoured villages, and an atomic powered electricity generating plant.
This was a truly remarkable three weeks.
To read more of Elizabeth and Gary’s travel adventures please visit their blog here.
If you have a story to share please get in touch at melody@oversixty.com.au
Related links:
Aerial tour of beautiful flower field in the Netherlands
10 breathtaking photos of New Zealand’s beautiful roads
10 incredible things to do in Tokyo