Is it beginning to make sense that when puttering along a winding highway at 25MPH, for fuel saving and safety sake —of course pulling over to let impatient sport cars strut their particular stuff— that our RVs happen to be the closest thing to a mind warping time machine ever invented?

Consider that those of us who remember how very long the active summer play days between first and second grade lasted, now note the phenomenon of a sedentary lifestyle where mileposts of Christmas-Memorial Day-Labor Day weekends pass rapidly by.

This adventure loving little boy who strapped himself into the cockpit of a “space and time explorer” six years ago — almost a lifetime ago! — loves pulling out his daily journal to prove the point to his navigator, because we were traveling so slow (i.e.: just a few miles travel every third or fourth day to stretch our monthly Social Security “Fuel Supplement” budget) that truly only a week had passed since sharing a sundowner at Salt Point camp with deer wandering past our backyard barbecue deck, where our border collie Maggy, enjoying as no-one-was-about freedom of being off-leash, just lifted her head to join a moment of connectivity. Wow! Even being retired going nowhere, we had packed so much into seven days, it was hard to believe it all hadn’t happened seven months ago.

We are still working on our “go slow along back roads theory” to show others it can add days to a retired life. This may be difficult to prove scientifically, but someone has to make a sacrifice researching for all those Baby Boomers we shall soon be competing with for a parking space. Perhaps we deserve a grant, as rumored of a fellow Alaskan to prove that we who live near the Artic Circle travel through space at less than half the speed of those poor souls laying on a sunny beach near the equator to keep cool, escape wrinkles by actually only being half as travel worn as someone doing 24,000 miles each and every day.

Just as leaving Fort Ross and Alaskan history behind —a couple months ago?— we rounded a bend in Wonderful One in our time machine and BAMM, a confusing left turn took us to a 19th century seaport in Maine. Curiously, with a Spanish name, I think, for nearby Cape Mendocino.

I would tell you who and what Mendocino was, and how this quaint village is so out of place and time, but big tripods slung over a shoulder are not that welcome in chinaware gift shops. At least that is the excuse I used sending Bobby off to girl-shop for something we didn’t need to carry around in our limited space land yacht. “Too much weight,” I keep telling her, “we sink right to the bottom.”

So off I went filming Victorian gingerbread B&Bs that all seemed to have some sort of placard advertising that Angela Landsbury had done something spectacular here for yet another minor variation of the plotlines of TV’s Murder She Wrote.

Experienced crank-a-dank travelers as myself rarely will ask a befuddled looking man on the street for directions, and — especially since being kicked out of the Alice, Texas city park, thanks to wrong advice distributed by the Alice, Texas, Chamber of Commerce, through a “Big Howdy from a G-r-e-a-t State of Texas Travelers Welcome Center” — we will never again stop at any local tourism tax dollars at work INFORMATION KIOSK with rack after rack of outdated and wasteful dead tree four color brochures, all with a map directing visitors to a place they already found on their own.