The Sandcastle

Once a major transportation system, now a major walking path. Although, if you look closely at the right bank of the left picture below you can see the top step of a series that still leads down to the water today in case you want to load your boat here.

The Erie Canal Museum had many items I found interesting.

The museum is in a former canal weighlock building. The canal was originally a toll road. Boats were weighed to see how much should be charged for their passage. The gravel is where the water used to be and behind the big glass windows is a canal boat in the weighing area.

As you can see from the model below, not all boats were required to go through the locks. Some were canal maintenance boats and some had been weighed at other scales. In the background you can see the video game that teaches you about various types of boats and how the charges were based on types of goods carried as well as their weight. I made assistant dockmaster by weighing enough boats in a timely manner to help pay for the building of the canal. 🙂

We went aboard a sample canal boat. As you can see, there not much of it above the water–those low bridges, you know.

Boats, like RVs, make the best use of space possible. Here we see storage under benches where people could sit. And the very short beds available. Picture Dave rotated horizontally; I think his legs would hang off his from knees down. There was plenty of head room, though, to allow for maximum amout of cargo I suspect.

Reading about women’s jobs on the canal felt like I’d never left the Women’s Rights Museum. Note the secondary “position” women were expected to fill.

The museum had exhibits upstairs as well. You could climb the stairs following the levels of rising water painted on the walls or you could enter the lock, otherwise known as an elevator.

The inside of the elevator was painted to look like you were inside the lock on a canal boat listening to a father and son talk about the process of going through the lock.

Upstairs there were exhibits about other places in Syracuse. The tavern was my favorite one because of the sign on its register.

That’s all for today, folks. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

TTYL,

Linda

Seneca Falls, New York. Those word immediately bring to my mind the fight for women’s rights. Yesterday we visited there and my mind has been spinning ever since.

As seen above, the park is actually spread over several sites. We stopped only at the visitor center. Before I even finished looking at all the displays there my mind was on overload. So much to absorb even though I knew most of it before.

One of the things I did not know was that the original presentation of the women’s thoughts were written based on the Declaration of Independence with which we are more familiar with some changes in the wording. The women’s declaration states, ” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”

One of the displays quoted  the Bible as the basis for this thought. In Genesis 1 it is written, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Note that this does not say God made woman subordinate to man.

This quote shows what happened after that.

At the time of most of these displays the main question of the day was slavery. Were slaves people? Did they have rights? As is still typical today, women addressed themselves to these social questions.

The combination of slave’s rights and women’s rights were well represented in the person of Sojourner Truth.

Many people supported the concepts of women’s rights.

These people each did what they could, drawing on their own skills. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton could not travel she could still write speeches for others to make.

There are many side roads of the issues of women’s rights and many are still being decided all these years later.

I watched a man going quickly from one display to another with only a glance at each relating to women’s domestic issues. He stopped a little longer at the one relating to sports. So, I began thinking about women’s sports. When I was in high school we were taught women’s basketball rules. It was thought then, in the early 1960s mind you, that it was injurious to women’s health for them to run about getting hot and sweaty. So we were allowed to stand still while dribbling the basket ball but once we started to move we could only go two steps before were were required to either shoot a basket or pass the ball to another player.

Then I saw this:

And I was reminded again of my high school years when my school had a girl’s dress code that allowed us to wear slacks to school only on Friday and only if there was a football game right after school and we wore those slacks, not jeans, under our regular school clothes. Those clothes required a skirt hem that reached below our knees. If a girl’s hemline was in question she was required to kneel on the floor. If her skirt did not then touch the floor she could be sent home.

Women today are still fighting for their rights to be treated as equal to men, primarily now in the work place and in political office. How far do you think we have come in more than a century?

On the way home we saw this sight which reminded me we all still have hope.

TTYL,

Linda

Deadlines are a familiar word to most working people. You have certain tasks that must be completed by a certain time. We thought that word would be completely dropped from our vocabulary once we retired. We were wrong. We don’t have as many deadlines as we used to have but they are still there.

For instance, in Minnesota every summer we have the deadlines of when we need to be there for medical appointments. If we make reservations for camping, we have deadlines for arriving. If we register for a rally, we have a deadline we try to meet.

We are on our way to Maine to see our daughter. She is leaving on vacation September 21st. Our planned route and stops along the way will take us somewhere between 12 and 18 days to get there. Which works.

But then we face the other major deadline we face every year. Winter. Our list of things we’d like to see in New England while we are there has nearly 50 items on it. That’s the list of things to see AFTER we visit our daughter. Then there’s nearly 50 more items we’d like to see before we get south far enough to escape winter. If we visit one site a day that’s three months!

We don’t plan to make another trip to New England so what do we do about all those sites we want to see? I guess we dawdle less along the way there. So, no we are not going to the Gypsy Gathering next week. We need to be moving on. We can catch another Gypsy Gathering somewhere down the road much easier that we can see those sites that are so far away. New England, here we come.

TTYL,

Linda

For two month we were, more or less, parked at the Shakopee Valley RV Park in the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. Discounting the short moves up to the meadow and back down caused by the Minnesota River flood, we never moved the RV in all that time. Then we drove it about 2 1/2 hours south to the Winnebago Plant where we only drove it back and forth between the overnight spots and the service center for most of a week. Yesterday, they finished the work on it so today we hit the road for the first time in more than two months.

We are headed to New England to visit our daughter in Maine and see the sights in that part of this beautiful country of ours. Now we don’t like to drive very far on any one day. Mostly because our RV is MUCH more comfortable when parked than it is while driving. So we usually limit ourselves to four hours of driving time plus however much time we spend at stops along the way. Four hours from Forest City, Iowa, would take us to a Corps of Engineers campground on Coralville Lake where we stayed once in the View and which we liked very much. Of course, we never looked at it from the point of view of driving a motorhome like we have now let alone one towing a car but we were sure we would still like that park so we set out mid-morning as is our usual style.

We didn’t make it. We can blame it on the winds we had to fight today but I think we’ve just forgotten what it is like to travel any distance. So we are at Colony Country Campground in North Liberty, Iowa, which my mapping program tells me is really only about ten minutes short of the CoE campground. But this is a real RV park where we don’t have to wonder if our RV and car are both going to fit. We were just too tired to deal with the possibility that the CoE would be a disappointment in our bigger rig. We must be getting old.

Tomorrow we plan to drive to Joliet, Illinois. My mapping program says that’s 3 1/2 hours. We should be able to handle that, right?

That lets us drive through the Chicago area on Sunday when there SHOULD be less traffic than on weekdays. Having said that, now I know I’m getting old. When did driving in metropolitan areas become such a hassle? Of course, Chicago is not just any metropolitan area, right?

That would put us just 2 1/2 hours from Elkhart, Indiana, where the Gypsy Gathering, http://gypsyjournal.net/Eastern_rally,  will take place next week. We could take a break and spend the week there but we’d have to settle for a 20 amp hookup since we didn’t reserve anything before the 30 and 50 amp sites filled up. And it would keep us from traveling on toward Maine and all the great stuff in New England. Are we ready for that? Stay tuned to see.

TTYL,

Linda Sand

We are at the Winnebago Factory in Forest City, Iowa, having warranty and repair work done. Winnebago provides four camping areas. All of them have electrical hookups. There are fresh water fills and sanitary dumps available at the Rally Grounds.

The closest camping area is a row of blacktopping right outside the service center. It was full when we arrived.

Behind that row is a small camping area that feels more like a park. It was full when we arrived.

Up the hill, by the Visitor Center, is another row of blacktopping. It is supposed to be for members of the Winnebago-Itasca Travelers Club and people coming to tour the factory. It was not quite full when we arrived so we stayed there the first night.

Now we are camped across the Highway at the Rally Grounds where they authorize one row of parking only for people in for service. That’s us second from the right.

Winnebago has an interesting method of serving their customers. You can make an appointment for service. You especially want to do this if you need some part they may have to order. Right now they are scheduling appointments for October.

Or you can just walk in the door and get in the waiting line. If you come in without an appointment, you can write a work order for up to seven items. Then they put your name on a white board with columns labeled “Bring in” and “Check in”. They put days/times in those columns. Check in means check back to see what, if anything, is happening. Bring in means bring your RV so they can start working on it. We got in line when they opened at 7 am Monday morning and were assigned a check in of Tuesday morning. That converted to a bring in at 11:40 Tuesday morning. By 2:00 Wednesday afternoon they had completed our list of seven items. So we filled out another list and we are back on the check in list. You can’t fill out the second list until they have finished the first list. We hope to get a bring in later this morning and be done Friday afternoon.

Wish us luck.

TTYL,

Linda