Folksblogen Hits the Road and Avoids Snowmageddon

January 2024, our first in Nova Scotia, was about time spent with local friends and our intrepid friends, John and Chantal, visiting from Montreal. They drove to the eastern reaches of Canada to see us and were game for exploring, even in the bitter cold. After they left, it snowed a lot. Then, our ancient and poisonous furnace conked out, and we had to get a new one installed in the middle of a snowstorm, which is when our neighbour Paul informed us that an even more significant storm was heading our way. So, we did what anyone with a campervan and an aversion to more than one big snowstorm a season would do. We fled just as the storm was hitting town. And it turned out to be even bigger than predicted. It became known as Snowmaggedon 2024. We are still receiving congratulations for getting out of Dodge before the streets became impassable and turned into toboggan hills.

In retrospect, the first week of February feels like we fit in a month’s worth of adventures. We stopped in Saint John, New Brunswick, and then Portland, Maine, which was a bivalve culinary high point. We have long wanted to visit MASS MoCA, the largest contemporary art centre in the USA, housed in the former Arnold Print Works factory building. Located in North Adams, Massachusetts, the town is in a valley sheltered by four mountain ranges. A once thriving manufacturing boomtown, North Adams, succumbed to the fate of many such cities in the 1980s and was thankfully reinvented as a cultural hub. The Appalachian Trail also passes right through the town. We stayed at Tourists Welcome overlooking the Hoosac River and basked in the uber-cool vibe of the motel and its guests. This experience well exceeded our expectations. It was also a rare treat to stay somewhere other than our campervan. The motel gets its name from the signs bearing one word, TOURISTS, signalling an invitation to shop, experience, stay and eat along the Mohawk Trail Scenic Byway, one of the first auto tourism routes in the US. Travelling this unplanned and breathtakingly beautiful route was why we love and continue to travel and explore by campervan.

We continued south through the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, stopping for a memorable and delicious break-lunch at Olsen and Co. in Saugerties, New York, en route to visit family in Potomac, Maryland. After a long overdue overnight reunion and feast, we continued south to New Bern, North Carolina, where we could finally camp, de-winterize and de-salt the van, stock the fridge and pantry, rest, reenergize and plan our route south. We continued south with stops in Myrtle Beach (NC), Charleston, Hunting Island, Beaufort (SC), Jekyll Island (GA), Stephen Foster SP, Florida Caverns (FL), and Montgomery (AL). And that was the shortest month of the year, albeit a leap year!

While at Florida Caverns State Park, we toured the caverns and loosely planned our Civil Rights Tour of Alabama. Montgomery was, while sobering and overwhelming, one of our most memorable, illuminating and educational experiences ever. If there is one museum every American and visitor to America should visit in our minds, it is the Legacy Museum, from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Because photos and videos are not allowed, we hope our descriptions of the experience will encourage others to visit. We entered the first room, where we encountered a massive wall of surging water. The experience was suggestive of what the kidnapped West Africans must have felt below deck aboard an agonizingly cramped transatlantic slave ship bound for America. We were immediately simultaneously overwhelmed, angry and sad.

We moved into the next room, where we were on the ocean floor amid all of the deceased who had never made it to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And then we were moving from cell to cell at the Slave Market in Charleston, watching and listening to holograms of women and men singing, reciting poetry, detailing their loss, abuse, fear and anguish, and children crying for their mothers. There was a room with hundreds of jars of earth taken from known lynching sites throughout the US, giving a glimpse of the breadth and scope of how many African Americans were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and others, including law enforcement. We entered a room where we were able to sit across from an incarcerated African American as though we were visiting them in the prison. We sat on a bench, picked up a corded telephone receiver and listened. We listened to them tell the story of their incarceration. We listened to many men, women, and children. We heard them, shared their pain, and left angry on their behalf.

We left understanding that the name of the museum, From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, continues to be the lived experience of the majority of African Americans. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, alternatively known as the National Lynching Memorial, commemorates the black victims of lynching in the US. There are 805 hanging steel rectangles representing each of the US counties where a documented lynching took place. This is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and impactful memorials we have ever visited. We also visited the Rosa Parks Museum and the site of her boycott, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and the Freedom Rides Museum. We followed the historic route from Montgomery to Selma and walked in the footsteps of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

We were well and truly overwhelmed when we got to Mobile. There, we visited Africatown, home to Africatown Heritage House. We learned about the last illegal ship transporting enslaved West Africans to America. Timothy Meaher and his brother, on a bet, illegally smuggled 110 enslaved West Africans into Mobile Bay on the schooner Clotilda in 1860. In the dark of night, they set the ship on fire and let it sink. It was unsurprising to learn that he was never convicted, and Meaher State Park, where we camped, was named after him. Africatown, located three miles north of downtown Mobile, was founded and created by 32 West Africans brought to Mobile by the Meaher brothers aboard the Clotilda. Here, they retained their West African customs and language until the state and city decided to build a highway and bridge through the economic centre of their community, which was, by that time, already surrounded by toxic industries such as International Paper, causing many in the community to become sick and die.

Recommended reading:

• Barracoon, The story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ by Zora Neale Hurston
• Master Slave Husband Wife, An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
• African Town by Irene Latham and Charles Waters
• Black Girl Baking by Jewelle Guy
• De Nyew Testament, The New Testament in Gullah Sea Island Creole
• Penn Center: A History Preserved by Orville Vernon Burton with Wilbur Cross
• Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror by the Equal Justice Initiative

Recommended Documentaries:

• Descendant, on Netflix – about Africatown and the descendants of the Clotilda
• High on the Hog, on Netflix – a series about How African American Cuisine Transformed America
• Hale County This Morning This Evening by RaMell Ross

We were still processing two weeks of learning our way through America’s dark history when we went to Alabama’s Gulf State Park on the Gulf of Mexico, followed by a stay at Big Lagoon State Park just outside Pensacola, Florida. We walked, collected shells, met and talked with fellow travellers and locals and ate the most incredible soft shell crab po’boys from Jaime’s Local Seafood Shack and steamed crawfish and shrimp from the famous Joe Patti’s.

While deciding where to go from here, our friends Jeanne and Jay offered us the opportunity to snag their two-week reservation at Oscar Scherer State Park near Venice Beach in Florida. It turned out to be just what we needed. Two weeks in one place with daily visits to the beach where we swam, soaked in the sunshine, watched sunsets, spent time with friends and rested.

As April closed in, we necessarily turned our compass northbound, stopping first at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg and then at three Florida state parks and another in Georgia, then again at Hunting Island in South Carolina, followed by a series of KOAs in Lumberton, NC, Fredericksburg, VA, and then our final campground of the trip near Beacon, NY.

Our stop in Beacon was twofold. Part one included visiting Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre outdoor museum in New York’s Hudson Valley. The property’s hills, forests, fields, meadows, and ponds host large-scale sculptures by artists like Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, Alicja Kwade, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alice Aycock, Nam June Paik, Alexander Calder, Martin Puryear, etc. Over a few hours, we walked more than 7 kilometres and climbed the equivalent of 15 flights of stairs. Part two included visiting Dia: Beacon, a place we’ve wanted to see for over two decades. In 2004, during our Pantry Press letterpress days, we spent a week selling our stationery at the National Stationery Show in NYC. After an intense week, we intended to stop at Dia: Beacon on returning to Toronto. Except we got a flat tire in the parking lot and never entered the museum. Fast forward 20 years, and we finally made it inside. Oh, and the solar eclipse of 2024 took place that afternoon, so we enjoyed the experience with many friendly strangers on the deck of Dia: Beacon. It was one of the most perfect days of 2024.

The following day, we walked the Hudson Valley Rail Trail portion, which crosses the Hudson River. We walked, ate, and shopped in Beacon before continuing our trek north. We love that our winter trip south began and ended with visits to exceptional contemporary art centres.

We spent the final three nights on the road in hotels (since camping season in the north had not yet opened) in Connecticut, Maine, and New Brunswick, reinforcing that we absolutely prefer our campervan to hotels.

Incidentally, we entered Nova Scotia just as the odometer hit 100,000 km after six years of part-time van travel. That’s through caring for Julie’s dad, a worldwide pandemic, a year of cancer treatment in Toronto, and then moving to Nova Scotia.

We’ve already begun adding to the next 100,000 km! Stay tuned for Part Two…