Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads  massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement.  This indirectly led us to Table 10.

The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….

Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….

…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.

1.  Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?

2.  We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?

3.   Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?

Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.

Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?

Anyway those of us who are crotchety older full-timers, and here I do refer to you or at least the people we prefer to hang with (“hang with” being a younger person’s phrase typically but among geezers still appropriate while taking on a whole new and admittedly unfortunate connotation) dislike KOAs because they are loud and always have some organized activity going on that we wouldn’t participate in if it meant the return to health of our 401Ks. OK, that last is an exaggeration; if it meant money we WOULD participate, but it never does and so we don’t. Speaking of money, KOAs are also amazingly expensive and we always feel that we aren’t getting value as we don’t participate, this becoming something of a Catch-22 for those few of us who are driven by logic, but excluding Irene the rest of us aren’t so we only recognize overt high prices, coupled with the fact that they, more than almost any other campground chain, will raise their prices tremendously during peak seasons, and since those seasons define as “That period of time when Irene and AJ are nearby”, we always wind up paying more for what we perceive as less….and having just come from the Tiffin factory and several dog hospitals, where, disregarding the fact that in both cases we were getting something we wanted out of it,  people lined up starting at dawn to get what’s left of our money…yes, disregarding this, or perhaps in spite of it or because of it we have none to spare.

This lengthy preamble, of course, only forcasts the obvious….that I’m writing these golden sentences from the comfort of our coach parked reasonably comfortably inside…wait for it….the Lexington, VA., KOA. Why? Because it’s the only place in town that’s worth a damn, the profanity becoming obviously appropriate in just a moment if you’d please wait. I swear you have the patience of a ferret.

Anyway, the last two days we’ve been driving, driving, driving…up at dawn, animals fed, animals walked, throw ‘em into the coach, roll up the sewer hose, unhook power, hook up toad, check for road kill, toss into coach for later Zone-favorable meal (mostly just kidding), head out, rawhide (stirring music and lowing cattle in background)… up from Alabama through Georgia, down the road across South Carolina, up through North Carolina, across a tiny piece of Tennessee and into Virginia, it’s all good, nice roads, blue mountains, lush meadows everywhere, nice stuff, but it’s a long way and we switch Sirius channels endlessly, going from PBS to Bloomberg to CNN to FOX and back again. Way too much time, way too much talk, too much nonsense passing for news….too many issues by far, and certainly too few solutions. It’s clear that the forces of darkness are fast approaching and I doubt that even Obama will be able to turn the tide. It’s a bad day in Black Rock when the best I can look forward to is that I won’t be here long enough to worry about it, a bad day made worse by Irene’s struggle, as we drive, to find suitable campgrounds where we can overnight and also hopefully go see something in the few daylight hours she allows me.

Generally, when it comes to approaches for considering this particular problem of where to overnight, I prefer worry. Worry is easy; it’s something of a way of life for me. In fact it’s always been so for me, and as much as I’d like to believe that somehow time will magically change this, a condition like this that’s successfully fought off the miracles of multiple talk therapies, anti-anxiety diets, lung-busting exercise regimenes, mucho Internet research, a library of books, an almost-infinite number of most-prescription drugs and near-endless whining, well, it probably won’t. But as I worry I’m reminded of the paranoid’s lament…”Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to get me!”. Likewise, just because I’m certifiably neurotic doesn’t mean there isn’t anything I should worry about. Today alone I found the following worthy topics for extreme worry while driving:

1.  In the far-right lane,  how far to the right can I drive our big rig without hitting traffic signs or getting the back four wheels stuck in a rut or a ditch…either of which circumstances would most certainly result in the coach  flipping onto its back like a huge, multi-colored turtle?

2.  If I do flip the coach over, will my insurance pay? They’ve been wonderful to deal with thus far for stuff like answering questions, but I’ve never put in a claim. Insurance companies, I’ve heard, don’t like claims, seeing them as anti-profit.

3.   If the insurance company doesn’t pay, I won’t be able to repair the coach. Will I then have to give up RVing? Where would we live? What would we live IN? Living in a cardboard box has always idled along beneath my seeming placid exterior, probably because it’s so close to my old fav., living on a park bench, covered with newspapers. A worrier’s aside; if we DID go for the cardboard box option, where would we find a box big enough for ourselves and our dogs?

Granted, the things I’m worry about here, while possibilities, are basically mental masturbation and not likely to come to pass, and as such eventually I would probably let them go. And when Irene announced that, like it or not, we were staying at a KOA outside Lexington and I could just shut my yap because she didn’t want to hear about it, I did as she requested but changed the focus of my worry instantly. After all, based on many experiences, I now had something more real to worry about. And my worry suddenly had more focus. It wasn’t whether or not we would be inundated with kids, it would be which group of kids…the mewling, pewling, toddlers or the skateboarders who would do jumps through our yard, nearly taking out poor Jake in the process? It wouldn’t be whether or not we would be subjected to unworldy amounts of noise at all hours, it would be where would it come from, and what, if anything, could we do about it? I’ve been known, at KOAs, to go visiting the neighbors in the early-morning hours when the drunks were in full throat. I’ve also been known to take Rocky the Girl-Dog with me, back in the day when her very appearance garnered respect…rest her good-natured soul, she never intended a minute’s harm to anyone but there were at least two groups that quieted instantly when she showed up. What would I do now? Could Jake put the fear into anybody? Could Spyro? Well, perhaps Spyro…now that his teeth are cleaned they gleam in a most ferocious way, so if anybody alive can be intimidated by a Cocker Spanial they certainly could be by Spyro if the light was just right.

Reality is always an slap in my worried face, presenting me as it does with totally unanticipated outcomes. In this case it was Karaoke. If I ever go to hell, which if it exists is probably a likely outcome given my sins, I will at least be joining my friends, as the Irish expression goes, and more to the point I’ll be used to the experience as karoake at the KOA will have showed me the way. Nobody in the camp could sing. None of them could carry a tune, even with the tune and the published words apparently trying to carry them. And, being directly downhill and under the swimming pool and stage areas, we were bombarded by the noise as if we were in the flight path of cargo jets. And, of course, the summertime hours had just gone into effect, meaning that the quiet times were diminished and didn’t start until 11 PM, which doesn’t sound late but when you are as old as I am it might as well be dawn, especially when you factor in that I must lay awake for at least an hour or two settling my mistakes of the day before the books are balanced and I can go to my restless sleep. Probably in an ideal world I would go to bed about 8 and get to sleep by 10 or so…in this case, starting after the noise finally backed down a bit meant that it was probably 2 AM or so when sleep finally arrived. When you are looking at traversing 50 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway later today, a beautiful route unfortunately characterized by turns wrapping endlessly around each other, one leading into the next, it is good to have your wits about you, and, unfortunately for the motorcyclists and bicyclists and joggers and hikers who will be in the road up there, today I won’t and most of THEM will be lucky if they get through it alive.

Well, it could be worse for them. They could be sentenced to the KOA. And me? I’m gonna go find some coffee.

I get that frog, and I suppose I get the limitations to the approach as well. When I feel good about myself I can describe me as a Renaissance Man, interested in almost everything. When I’m feeling judgmental I recognize the same reality differently; to be interested in so many things is to focus on nothing and (while limiting risk around putting oneself out there) certainly assures you will never be acclaimed as number one at anything, either, thus insuring that no waves of adulation will ever lap at my feet. Too bad, so sad…..

….and yet this character strength or flaw does allow me to experience other lives, sometimes one after another, if only in my still-fertile imagination and if only for a few moments. Take today, for example….

Irene and I started the morning exactly where we have been for awhile, on the outskirts of Auburn, AL., a small still-redneck not-quite-cosmopolitan University town about an hour out of Montgomery, if that helps you geographically. Jake, now recovering a bit more regularly from his cancer surgery of this past Tuesday, actually walked with us all the way to the trash receptical and almost all the way back, a distance of half a mile, easily the best he’s done by two times and prompting us to believe we could leave him alone for an hour and get a bike ride in before the humidity came to join the already-evident heat. Changing into our bicycle touring gear, putting on the orange breathable top, the dark gray pickleball short, the cool lighter-gray short-fingered gloves, the charcoal hard helmet, I became like Lance Armstrong, of course too old, too heavy, riding a hybrid bike that Lance wouldn’t laugh at, him being seemingly way too polite a guy, but surely would snicker at behind a metaphorical hand, but I was he for just a moment, and straining to cross the semi-busy rural highway and rocketing up and down over the train crossing just past it. Just for a moment, but I got it. The ride, no more than ten miles and maybe an hour, was done with no stops to celebrate my Lance-ness…the first longish ride we’ve taken non-stop, as it were. VERY cool, good to be him.

Fifteen minutes later Irene and I were bound for the Jule collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, a pretentious title for a fine modern building housing a few terrific permanent collections. One of them, Dale Kennington’s Shifting Mythologies exhibit, consisted in part of five richly painted multi-panel screens and brought me so far into the art that I thought I could never escape. All of her perspectives are uniquely arranged to draw her viewers in, take for instance the panels depicting a beautiful pre-pubescent girl, standing and struggling through some obvious anguish, glancing at us as if to recognize that we weren’t going to save her, but could, if we only wanted to. And in THAT moment, I wanted to, wanted to have the skills of Dale Kennington, knew I never would, but, oh, my….I got it, and her, right then, if just for that second.

Around the corner, same gallery…and there is a permanent exhibit of…would you believe it?…pop-art Icon Andy Warhol, arranged to show first the polaroid snaps he took of subjects and then the paintings themselves, so heavily stylized and yet so true to the photos, showing another exposure, another side of the same thing that didn’t exist until he put brush to canvas, and what genius, and, after we talked about it a bit, I think both Renee-girl and I got it, and him,  although I could feel myself losing it as I turned the corner and left him behind.

The rest of the day has gone like that. At lunch in the wonderful Amsterdam Cafe (“wonderful” and “cafe” are two words that only juxtapose in Auburn at that particular place, home of, among other things, a lump-crab-meat-and-avocado-on-croissant sandwich that ranks as “one of the hundred things you have to eat in Alabama” for very good reason.), I talked over with Irene this book I’ve been reading, a great little first-edition of Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player, by Anthony “English Tony” Holden, in which, ala George Plimpton, Tony takes on another life, a life EYE have often dreamed about, playing in, among other places, the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. VERY, VERY cool…a life that I still want, but believe that, now, I may never see it unless something changes. That something may be in me or just in my finances but I’m putting it out there now….just give me a year, and let me show just a small profit, and I’m a happy man. The book is written well enough for me to know that I don’t want to be Tony, not all the way through…I just want to do what he did, and still dream about it.

I wasn’t through yet, though. When we left, we stopped by, next door again, into a vintage clothing shop, and as I look to my left into the mirror here in our coach, I see a short-haired aging geezer-jock, not quite over the last hill yet, wearing a true vintage tie-died tee-shirt, orange and red mostly, with the most bitchin’ picture of Mickey Mouse falling down on the front. Who IS that cool dude, I ask out loud, just playing, knowing, of course, that it’s another version of me, a version that may continue to please, who knows? And, really, who cares? Consistency can be badly over-rated, don’t you think? Vrooom, vroom!

In fact, I’m sitting pretty today, typing away in an amazingly tasteful and even more comfortable customer lounge, (and, hey, you wanna look? Check it ooouuutttt….), Irene and I just waiting (and OH how we love waiting!) for six things to simultaneously get done on our Allegro Bus. Outside in the almost-spotless shop, Brannon and his consistently hard-working family – his brother, father, father-in-law and his wife – stay hard at it, replacing my 2,000 Watt inverter with a 3,000 Watt version, adding two more house batteries, and getting ready to install our Kenmore residential refrigerator, which will roughly double both our refrigerator and freezer capacities while simultaneously working, which the Norcold refrigerator standard to most motor homes hasn’t done very well. In fact, I could tell you stories about the Norcold but won’t, at least today – all I can say is that Irene is liable to be so happy having a reliable, working, decent-sized refrigerator instead of, as she so succinctly says, “that friggin’ Norcold” – that it could bode very well for me if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

But it’s all taking some doing, and don’t tell me ‘cuz I’ll tell you, nothing fits easily when you are doing a retrofit. For instance, the six batteries will be increased to eight, but there is no good other place to install the extra two batteries, so they are customizing two battery slide-outs and will install six batteries on the bottom on one and have the other two batteries on the top. The space they have to work with is exactly the size it needs to be…to about the sixteenth of an inch. If they get it working correctly, and right now it looks like they may, it will be a feat of custom engineering that will alone be worth the price of admission, not that I’m telling Brannon that until this is all done, of course.

Nor is the refrigerator install the end of the story, even given all it entails. By the end of tonight, per Brannon, not only will the refrigerator be installed (and the supporting batteries and inverter), but a residential-style fan will be in the bedroom,

Brannon and friend install fan

the old-school night drapes will be gone from the coach’s front and the new-school drop-down day/night shades will be in place, and Brannon’s peer Chris will have also showed up after having worked three other jobs to install our flat-screen TV in the bedroom. There are other things….trouble-shooting a water-pump light that shows a continuous “on” condition and putting a new power plug into a wall to facilitate the subwoofer’s new home, a change in placement necessitated by the previous replacement of the cabinets by the dining table, done yesterday by the famous Tim (who has yet MORE cabinet work to do, but that’s Friday…what day is this, anyway?).

They work hard and they apparently don’t stop and I recently learned they don’t sleep. Brannon has estimated we will be finished up by 11:00 PM this evening. But he and his brother won’t be finished. A bit ago he received an emergency phone call from the famous Bob Tiffin, who owns Tiffin Motor Home Company. Bob has a highly irate customer in a new Zephyr…the top-end Tiffin coach….without air-conditioning for three days now. In Raleigh, NC. Five hours away at least.  In 90+ heat and supercharged humidity. And, when Brannon and his brother are finished here, they will, without sleep, drive five hours to Raleigh and help out the guys there. Because, you see, Brannon is still working for Tiffin, and until July that’s the way he’ll roll.

If, when I talked previously about my observing a somewhat lackadaisical work ethic in some of the Tiffin employees over the month we’ve been here, I bet you thought I meant EVERYBODY who works back here, didn’t you? Let me say right here, right now, I didn’t. I didn’t mean everybody. I didn’t, at least, mean Brannon and his gang. Or Tim or Chris. I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for them. These guys, at least, rock big.

This morning  I spent in dismayed conversation with Irene, having suffered the sticker-shock of the scale, which showed I had found a way to 211 pounds. My sausage-like self seems to evidence this creeping gain correctly; I haven’t been this round for some time. And I have to say I don’t care for it;  my (or perhaps “our”, given Irene has signed up to help) new goal is a comparatively svelte 180 by the time we get back to the Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort, our winter home, on or about November 1. And my “new” approach will be the Zone Diet, which, ever since oldest son Roy sent me three books on said subject for Christmas, I’ve been flirting with. By “flirting” I mean eating one Zone-favorable meal and then eating whatever the heck I feel like for the rest of the day. From here on out it will be more like marriage…a commitment…and less like dating, not to say that there’s anything bad about dating, of course. (If I can remember that far back correctly, I seem to recall I used to gain weight when dating, too…not that that has much to do with this subject.)

The Zone diet purports to be simple and may be, once you are into it. But to GET into it requires a little effort. Among other things it requires you to go through your kitchen and literally throw away (although they will allow “give away” to a local food bank, somewhat grudgingly) anything which is not Zone-worthy. This is most everything I’ve been eating up to this point, especially complex carbohydrates, which, it appears, push Insulin levels unpleasently and  promote not only Type Two Diabetise but Cancer, Dementia, Hernias and hairy palms, too. God knows how I’ve made it alive this far, but hopefully He will keep me alive during this next couple of months to see if I can benefit from what I already perceive is going to be a pain-in-the-ass program.

More to come…..

1.  Everybody in town either IS a Tiffin or WORKS FOR (or has worked for) some Tiffin. There is the Tiffin appliance store. The Tiffin hardware store. The Tiffin-owned campground we’re staying in. The Tiffin factory, of course. Tina, who served us at Ezzel’s barbque, was recently laid off from the factory….she used to do paint detailing…and she’s just waiting for the Tiffin biz to pick back up so she can go back again.

2.  There is no pickleball, of course, but surprisingly there apparently are no tennis courts, either. Thus it will be harder for us to find a place to stage a pickleball rendezvous as we often can use otherwise unused tennis courts for the purpose. Irene and I went out yesterday evening, late, and were dinking a pickleball back and forth to each other on the one available stretch of concrete (used during the day for coach-washing, I believe) and, naturally, two pickleball players we had previously met in Palm Creek came out to say “hey” and ask us if there is a court nearby…so I suspect we will have to mock something up while we are here. We ARE carrying a net, luckily.

3.  There are more Allegro Buses here than I knew had even been built. There are at least 100 of them and I’m probably underestimating it, because wherever I walk a dog on this massive property I turn a corner and there, stashed away like red-headed stepchildren, are yet another group of Allegro Buses. For the uninitiated, at Tiffin the Allegro Bus is the top coach exclusive of the 45-foot Zepher, and it’s the model we have as well. I focus on that model because we own one but the Phaetons, Allegros, Allegro Bays and Zephers are in great and almost equal abundance as well.

4.   People here have lots of dogs. Every other coach has at least one dog. However, the real issue here will be the friggin’ dog owners in the house behind the park and, unfortunatly, directly behind our coach. They leave their mutts out in the pen 24/7 and, unhappily, one of them barked for hours last night. And hours. And…well, you get it. Thankfully I’m back drinking caffeine so at this moment I’m still with it….but I’m gonna be fading before the day is over, I know. I hope I don’t scale the damn fence and take my own version of direct action…I, like the Republicans, am trying to be kinder and gentler.

5.  It’s a long way to anything from here. Red Bay itself has its own charms but we should run through them by noon, and thereafter it’s 50 miles to everything. More on this later.

We spent the rest of the day frustrating ourselves with things mechanical, or at least I did. My cell phone display is down. The wireless router is apparently burned out, although Nexaira’s technical support disputes this for reasons I can’t phantom. The new tire-pressure monitor system I bought day before yesterday doesn’t, when installed, want to recognize four of the six RV tires. The Garmin couldn’t find any addresses we needed to go to….but this last we worked around anyway, getting to the San Antonio Riverwalk and the Alamo around noon in spite of the obstacles, which, once we were there, included a large bird accurately targeting me from about 50 feet overhead. This was so consistent with how the day had been so far that Irene and I both laughed in spite of ourselves, telling you more than I could here about how we had been doing up until that point.

Change was coming, however. To begin with, the Alamo was amazing. We rented a couple of the audio headsets and listened to a well-acted narrative that really did help me understand where all the passion is around the place. It’s clearly one of the defining institutions in our country, expressing as it does our resistence to tyranny and setting in place the call for patriotism, bravery and idealism that has ultimately characterized us, even in our worse moments. The fact that these couple of hundred brave souls essentially knew they were dead men walking days before their final breaths almost takes my breath away. I wonder if I could do anything that brave if I needed to, and I guess I’m glad I can’t answer the question.

The Riverwalk isn’t half-bad either…two square miles of really well-done walks along the river (hence, Einstein, the name, right?) and amazingly architecturally interesting shops, sights, people. Eventually we had to stop to eat, having pretty much exhausted our way-too-early breakfast, and, with no real expectation of good food, stopped at a little restaurant along the river called Boudro’s. Boudro’s is cute but that added to our trepedation about the grub…and, really, we shouldn’t have worried. It was by far the high point of the day…the “Good” in the above title. We would wind up sharing with our waiter, one of the mangers, Kyle by name, that we were really LOOKING to criticize the food and couldn’t find anything at all to whine about. The mesquite-grilled salmon was fresh, tangy, delightful…the brisket sandwich rivaled anything I’ve ever had for truly succulent meat…the fries were thin-cut, toasted instead of overly deep-fatted, and were lightly seasoned with something actually interesting. Even the side of black beans I ordered in hopes of getting the protein count up were tasty, fresh and different. When I challenged Kyle as to why the place had such truly excellent food, he laughed and said they had won “best restaurant on the Riverwalk” every year for as long as he had been there, which I think was eleven years. He said it’s frequented as much by locals as tourists and the only reason WE got in at all (this was 3 PM….not what EYE would have thought was a busy period) was because there is a convention of dentists in town and apparently the mid-afternoon sees them all back at their respective hotels flossing. He said that, in an hour, we’d never have seen a table and (again, given the food) I believed him.

We scarcely were able to stagger upstairs from there to Mr. Edward’s Ice Cream Parlor to finish off the already-too-much food with more…this time a rocky road sundae. And I wonder why I don’t lose weight. No, I don’t.

Anyway, it was good to finish that part of the day on a high note. The doctor said, this evening, that Spryro may well be ready to go home tomorrow…so maybe we can get out of San Antonio without permanent damage and relatively on schedule. We’ll see, but in any event the day was a roller-coaster that did have highs after all.

Beans, sausage, slaw and the best creamed corn I ever ate...all from Rudy's, San Antonio

I didn’t take any pictures of Walt or Robin but I did find some photos, taken by “Gretchen”, of a meal really similar to ours.

Fatty? Hell no...PERFECT Brisket from Rudy's, San Antonio, Tx.

As Arnold used to say before he got overly busy in California, “We’ll be Back!”