June & Dick go into retirement right

June & Dick RVING
                                                                                                                                   
June & I had planned for a long time about what we
wanted to do when we retired.

We thought for awhile that we might enjoy using
our old rebuilt  22 1/2 ft. plywood boat that I had
remodeled  with a suitable cabin and  installed  two
new  55hp Homelite outboard motors. She was aptly
 named,"The Budget Buster, our pride & joy for 17

Boat hull as we bought it

The Budget Buster rebuilt
years. We had thought about traveling up the East 
Coast, on the  Budget Buster, stopping to investigate
any interesting Port-of-Calls along the way until we
got to the Penobscot River and the small town Port
of  Bucksport, Maine where we were raised.

Bucksport,Maine (from Fort Knox)

As we got closer to retirement, we realized that our
boating idea was not practical, although I have no
doubt that it  would have been one heck of lot of fun.

Our 1986 Chevy Van & Prowler RV at Key West, Fl.

At this point, we decided to check out RVing. One
 of our boating friends had a motorhome. After we
had bought the RV that we wanted, a 291/2 ft. 1986
Prowler Regal and got it all fixed up inside and
ready to use, our friends offered to take us out
camping a couple of week ends and show us
the things that we had to know, such as setting
up the RV level, putting out the awning and much
more.We are sure glad that we have good friends.
We did make one two week vacation trip with our
other friends,Betty & Paul, down to Key West,Fl.
That was a great trip and we had a great time.
This was the 1st time Betty & Paul had ever gone
RVing and they fell in love with the lifestyle.The
next thing that we knew, they were out shopping
for a used motorhome.  They found what they wanted
and bought it. You can't beat RVing with friends, let
alone your best friends. We had many,many enjpyable
trips together.

 White House

As we were getting ready to retire,we saw an add
in the Good Sams Club Magazine for a five day trip to our Nations Capital for $500.00. That sounded like a good way to start off our retirement travels.So that was the first planned  retirement stop in our retirement travels and that was in mid-May.We spent the next 30 days checking out the many,many Civil War Battle Grounds,and there were many more we didn't get to see.


From here we traveled on up to Maine to The Flying Dutchman Campground on Verona Island across the Penobscot River from Bucksport,where we spent a month visiting family and helping my brother rewire his home remodeling project.We had a great time here for a month.


Our next main stop was at Niagara Falls. We had
heard so much about the falls but we never found
the right time to go. We found a very nice camp
ground close to the falls and it also was close to
some outdoor fresh vegetable stands, and corn was
in season. They had a special kind of corn that I had
never seen before. The corn on the cobb was two
rows of yellow corn alternating with two rows of white
corn.(Two rows of yellow,two rows of white,two rows
of yellow,two rows of white etc.) Tasted pretty darn
good anyway.

 Maid of the Mist

Picture of the "Maid of the mist".
When you board the"Maid of the Mist", You are issued a long
rain jacket with a hood. I was told by one of the crew, that if I
wanted to get a good view, I should get up in the bow. He was
right, it was a great view, it was also very,very wet with a great
view. I was soaked to the skin. It was a good thing that I had the
rain gear on that they supplied. Now you would think that I could
have figured out that standing up in the bow with rain gear on,
that there would be water there, lots of water. I know now. I didn't
even get the camera out from under the rain coat.








By now I guess that we must have the traveling "bug".
because when we got to Buffalo, we crossed over into
Ontario,Canada. It took us a month to go from Buffalo
leisurely up through Ontario to Sault St'e Marie and
back over  a very long  suspension bridge into the
U.S.A.by way of Michigan.








 A short while later we had
the pleasure of crossing over the famous Mackinac
Suspension (among the longest in the world).There were
"high winds" warning signs which gave me second
thoughts about pulling a RV Travel Trailer across.
No problem, it was a piece of cake!

I want to say what our impression of Canada and the
Canadian people are, We spent about two months in
Canada traveling from Niagara Falls leisurely making
our way to Michigan. I found the Canadian people
to be very friendly and helpful.When I would pull
off the road to look at my map, people would stop
and ask if I needed help.(try that in the States and
see how many offers of help you get).In our
retirement we have camped in every province in
Canada except NW Territories and Labrador,so
we have met a lot of nice Canadians.

From Michigan we made our way back to good
old Florida.It was nice to be back home again.

Our Winter Haven home