FDR’s Canadian Getaway

Campobello Island, New Brunswick

We picked another rainy, foggy day to check out the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. We are not even beginning to question the advice of our blind psychic advisor, Chris Macleod, but we press ahead, fearing to question the radio waves instructions of our guru which we receive though the microwave implants in our teeth. I begin to consider fashioning a new tinfoil hat, but fear the retribution that we might suffer.


FDR’s parents built a “cottage” here in the late 1800’s and Franklin grew up spending his summers on the island.

Franklin and Eleanor built their own “cottage” here in 1910 on four acres.

The cottage had over 10,000 square feet, 12 bedrooms and six bathrooms. Strangely, the beds are very Spartan. Franklin had a windmill to draw water to a tank in the attic the attic, but no electricity. FDR called this his "beloved island". He started spending summers here at age one. He had a clay tennis court and his own golf course. The rich are different. They have more money.

FDR contracted polio here and was evacuated on a stretcher. 13 years later he was sworn in as President of the United States and served an unprecedented 12 years and four months before dying on the job.

Six of the 12 cottage bedrooms were for servant girls. FDR never visited his cottage after 1939 when things were going south in Europe. In 1952, new owners installed electricity in the cottage and later donated the building to the International Park Commission.


This is said to be the only International Park in the world. The visitor center has some interesting displays about the cooperation between the U.S. and Canada.


- The 5,900 mile undefended border between the two counties is the longest in the world.
- Canada provides more energy to the U.S. than any other country.
- Canada is by far the biggest trading partner of the U.S.
- The cooperation between Canada and the U.S. during WWII and the Cold War was very close.

There is picture at the park of a Canadian Voodoo 101 intercepting a Russian “Bear” off the Coast of Newfoundland in 1985. Both the Bear and the Voodoo were seriously obsolete at the time.

The Scientific Method

Cobscook State Park, Maine

I picked up another copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” back at a rural flea market in Vermont for 50 cents.

I got my first copy of ZMM in 1975 from a hitchhiker. I picked him up in Tallahassee on the way back to Tampa. I asked him if he minded making a short detour so my son and I could float down a spring fed river near Perry, Florida. I had an extra inner tube for the hitchhiker.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good?
Do we need to ask anyone to tell us these things?

...Robert M. Pursig

We are dry-camping in the Cobscook State Park in Maine, near the Canadian border. It has rained hard five of the six days we have been in Maine.

My blind psychic guide and spiritual leader, Chris Macleod, strongly advised that we explore the Canadian Maritime Provinces this year rather than return to Alaska, the West Coast and the American Southwest. Chris and his lovely wife, Helen, are with us on this trip in an purely ectoplasmic sense. As we progress, his wisdom will no doubt be revealed more fully...radio waves...

Yesterday we explored the town of Eastport in Maine which is said to be the easternmost town in the continental U.S. Of course, the Aleutian chain in Alaska sits on the 180 meridian so Alaska really is both the eastern and westernmost State.

We found John 2.5 miles off US 1. He makes smoked salmon and we bought some salmon dip and smoked salmon popsicles from him.

Our house batteries (two big six volts wired in series) have been going quickly dead. This creates all kinds of problems in dry-camping: no cabin lights, no refrigerator, several fire and carbon monoxide alarms beeping and other nasty issues. We're getting up into the Bay of Fundy area with it's 20-30 foot tides and great seafood.

My first hypothesis was bad batteries, but as I checked the water levels in the two batteries I noticed that the nut holding down the attached cables to the negative terminal of one of the batteries had worked loose and fallen off.

I asked Princess Firecloud to reach her thin, graceful, delicate hand down into a cramped area to retrieve the fallen nut. My hypothesis has now changed. I think the batteries are ok, but we had a bad ground. I love the bulldozer of the scientific method.

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called “yourself”.

...Robert M. Pursig

The batteries are back to normal function...some doofus at the factory failed to tighten a nut...I have complete faith in the bolt, but never the clown with the wrench.

Statement of Problem: one of the RV stabilizers has become slow to retract. My working hypothesis is that it needs a shot of lithium grease on the exterior of the shaft. Hypothesis two: look for the existence of a grease fitting.

Standing on the Corner

Winslow, Arizona

We backtrack 60 miles to see the Arizona Meteor Crater and the "corner" in Winslow, Arizona immortalized by the Eagles.



The crater is not the biggest in the world, but it might be the best preserved. The Apollo astronauts trained here. Some think the moon landings were filmed here, maybe by Steven Spielberg.



The crater is 2.5 miles in circumference and 500 feet deep. Since the circumference is 2.5 miles, the diameter of the crater must be about .75 miles. As you look down into the center they have an astronaut figure six-feet tall that you can just make out with a telescope. It's a big crater. The walls rise well above the surrounding desert, but have eroded 200 feet in the last 50,000 years. The impact released 2.5 megatons of energy and formed high pressure minerals usually associated only with nuclear blasts. In 1964 a couple of commercial pilots flew a Cessna into the crater and were prevented by downdrafts from climbing out. They circled until their fuel was exhausted and crashed on the crater floor.

Route 66 ran though Winslow until Interstate 40 killed the mother road. The town is struggling, filled with empty stores for sale and homes that need maintenance. It's a girl, my lord, and a flatbed Ford.


In Winslow we see the little corner where they celebrate the Eagles song. A loudspeaker endlessly recycles Eagles tunes and they have a statue to celebrate the "standing on a corner" song. Mrs. Phred seems to think that a member of the Eagles had a car break-down and wrote the song, but this seems elusive.


To avoid the tourists, I lead Mrs. Phred to an empty corner and sing my own version for my friends in England, Helen and Chris. Penpals, this song's for you.



I've noticed that the "Wow" factor decreases the more you travel. Part of the problem is that it's a big country, but after you circle it three or five times, you tend to have seen many of the highlights. Here we are in Flagstaff, with Sedona and Cottonwood just to the south and Page and the Grand Canyon to the north, but we don't want to see them again. Maybe some jungles in Thailand? Easter Island?

The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Pontchartrain RV Park, New Orleans

I find the Voodoo queen of New Orleans online. She sells a love candle for $575, but clearly states that the money is only for the candle and that the spell is complimentary. I’m uncomfortable with online “gris-gris” so I decide to make a real gambler’s gris-gris for my gambler friend Chris . It’s made of chamois, a piece of red flannel, a shark's tooth, pine-tree sap, and dove's blood. I mixed blood and sap together, and used this mixture to write the (undisclosed) amount that I want Chris to win on the chamois. Then I wrapped the chamois in the red flannel with the shark's tooth between the two layers and sewed it all with dead cat's hair. This charm needs to be worn in the left shoe to bring good but uncomfortable luck.



On Bourbon Street a desperate man asks me for $5 to buy crystal meth. We walk the street at night and I eye the girls dressed in scanty outfits. Mrs. Phred points out that most of the girls, while attractive, are actually men with strong legs and relatively flat muscular chests. I regard it as impolite to take pictures.



We do the Katrina tour and get a little more insight about the lingering disaster. The City is, of course, in a huge swampy bowl that sits about six feet below sea level. Lake Pontchartrain on the North and the Mississippi (which flows though the City) is twelve feet above sea level. There are canals cut though the City, one of which connects the Mississippi to the Inland waterway at sea level.



There are levees and walls everywhere which are intended to keep high water out of the city. A barge broke though a wall in the lower ninth ward and flooded a third of the city at varying depths. Most of the damage was due to wind blowing South on Lake Pontchartrain in Katrina’s NE quadrant. Fats Domino, age 78, spent two nights on his roof and was picked up the third day. A lot of the dead fled to their attics and drowned or died of heat exhaustion.



The houses sat in a lake of putrid water laced with motor oil, sewage and dead bodies for over a month while the Corp of Engineers pumped it out. The heat produced thick layers of dangerous mold within the homes as well as a later of mud and filth. The contents of refrigerators were unimaginably foul. Each house has to be gutted and dried out, rewired and re-plumbed before it is habitable.



Brad Pitt is helping to construct a number of new homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. I know where he lives, but I’m not telling. Here's one of the Pitt homes in the lower ninth ward.



To put this in context, the bodies here are buried above ground because of the water table. To build a house, you drive in 80 telephone poles and pour a concrete slab on top of the poles. Even so, houses sink, sidewalks sink, roads sink, walls crack and you have to redo everything again about once every ten years (including shoring up the house). We hit the casinos, took a steamboat dinner cruise on the Mississippi, went to the aquarium and IMAX and the WWII museum. We also saw some fine antebellum mansions, a few cemeteries and wandered the French Quarter.



Our RV Park is Pontchartrain Landing. It’s very nice, with a pool, cable, book exchange and runs a 10 minute shuttle to the French Quarter three times a day. It’s Passport America, so you can get a nice spot for about $30 a night. We could spend another week here, but we have reservations in Abbeville tomorrow.



If you get a chance, come to New Orleans. It’s still a lot of fun and they could use your tourism dollars to help the recovery.