Escape Velocity

Discussing our poor luck with castles over a home cooked full Scottish breakfast, Jan, our diminutive Irish landlady, at least I think she said her name was Jan, said, in her heavy Irish brogue, “Well you needn’t go far. We’ve our own just over in the village, don’t ye know.” I’m pretty sure that’s what she said. It was something like Closeburn.

We punched our best guess into Google maps and sure enough a pin appeared on the screen. What could go wrong? We cranked up our trusty Vauxhall and plotted a course to our very own castle. Basic rule of thumb should you find yourself driving in Scotland is when you do find yourself on a path that is too narrow to fit your car between the weeds you are lost and it’s time to consider extricating yourself. Well, that’s our newly revised rule. It started out fine.

I missed the first turn. I mean it was so improbable and narrow that I was sure it couldn’t lead to a castle. Marce said they hold events at this place. Not to worry, Google plotted a new workaround that completely circumnavigated the village. The closer we got to the pin the more narrow the road became, following the familiar pattern. (We have no photos of this.) Now we’re down to muddy narrow two track heading down towards a dip at a turn where, if I’m any judge, some other idiot became mired in mud.

I could see a fancy wrought iron gate just beyond. That’s got to be it. You see how this works? We judged the mud wrestling pool as passable and didn’t slow down until we found ourselves in somebody’s courtyard. I did take note as we passed that the gate was chained and padlocked. Closed. Waving politely we motored on through, eventually finding the narrow road that I missed in the first place.

We decided this afternoon’s adventure had to be a sure thing. Caerlaverock Castle, that’s the ticket. Famous, moated, triangular, medieval stronghold walls with a gorgeous renaissance palace within those walls. In short, a “please exit by the gift shop” kinda place. And we even heard rumors of overnight campervan parking! Worth the hour drive while the authorities make life difficult with regulations to buying the camper van.

Never ones to follow directions, first we entered via the gift shop which featured actual stone carvings from the castle.

As we made our way towards this amazing castle pleasantly nestled down in the valley below us, we noticed an uncomfortable amount of fencing around the structure.

We reached the drawbridge and were crestfallen to read the sad news. Closed. It seems the structure is unstable. We could walk the perimeter though.

At various points along the path Marce found the augmented reality plaques. She dutifully downloaded the app and watched every one of the animated characters who told what life was like in the castle.

You can visit the foundation of the original castle which had man made canals to the sea back when sea levels were much higher.

Nice idea, but apparently the castle flooded and the sea was destroying it. It had to be abandoned and rebuilt on higher ground.

So let’s see, I think that leaves our castle record at 0-4 attempts. We will press on regardless! We are Escape Velocity.

As long as I have a few days of admin to finalize the camper purchase, and we weren’t going to take up residence for at least a week, I booked us into a little Airbnb cottage near Dumfries so I could focus on the tasks at hand, and for another, special reason.

Longtime readers may remember that one of my hobbies is family history research. If you’re interested you can check out some previous posts here and here and here or search for genealogy or family history in the search box in the blog.

I’ve continued to research even while we were in the far flung corners of the cruising world, and last year I had a giant breakthrough because new records were made available online by the Danish National Archives. I’m not one little bit Danish but some of my ancestors lived in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, owned and governed until 1917 by Denmark. The records they released are probate records from the 18th and 19th century, handwritten and mostly in Danish.

I spent hour after hour during much of the pandemic lockdown paging through the records, hoping a familiar name would pop up. And it did! I learned that my great great grandmother’s birth name was Roddan and for the big breakthrough, I learned that her father was from Dumfries in Scotland. This is the first time I’ve been able to make the leap across the pond to my ancestors’ origins in either Ireland or Scotland.

With that new information I’m able to start to piece together a previously missing branch of my mother’s family tree, and now that we’re in Dumfries and Galloway, I’m hoping to make even more discoveries, primarily to learn what would have possessed four carpenter brothers to leave this beautiful place in the 18th century and undertake an uncomfortable journey to the West Indies.

In anticipation of our visit to Scotland I joined the Dumfries and Galloway Family History Society. I looked forward to visiting the center to see what records are available, and to pick the brains of the local historians.

Before we got here I found online a book of headstone inscriptions from a small village churchyard near the town of Dumfries.

“In Memory of William Roddan Esq., of the Island of Tortola, who died at Bilbow in the Parish of Troqueer the 13th of Sept 1784 aged 23 years And of James Roddan his youngest son, who died the 30th December 1784 aged 6 months Also of his eldest son William Adamson Roddan Esq., accountant in Kirkcudbright, who departed this life at Bowhouse of Terregles on the 23rd day of June 1822 in the 41st year of his age.”

Months ago I marked the cemetery on my Google map and we were finally close enough to find it. Jack has known of my fascination with graveyards since we met, and on our first date he took me to an old German cemetery in Pittsburgh. So off we went to read some headstones.

The yard was much larger than I thought, with a couple of hundred engraved stones. Jack was first to find the name Roddan. Unfortunately it was a century too late for my people. We kept looking.

An hour later we admitted we couldn’t find the right stone, but saw that quite a few had either fallen or broken. The stones were transcribed for the book in the 1970s and the preface noted that many of them are no longer standing or legible for one reason or another. Sadly, I think the one I was looking for might be one of them.

On the way home from the churchyard we visited the Twelve Apostles stone circle. It’s the largest in mainland Scotland, and the 7th largest in Britain.

The circle is unimpressive, especially from this distance. It rained heavily the previous night and the field was too mushy to venture into. The stones are nearly buried but were originally close to 2 meters tall and oriented toward the midwinter sunset.

I have a lot of stone circles and standing stones marked on my Google map so expect to see more as we travel further.

I wouldn’t say that we were finished jumping through hoops exactly, but with the camper van under contract it felt like the ban on having fun was officially lifted. Most of what was left to do involved a lot of waiting and as our final act of contrition, the circus of returning the car all the way back to Sheffield and then returning to Glasgow via train with luggage in tow and perhaps a little more waiting at the Travelodge of Glasgow. Trains have not been kind to us, but really, what could go wrong. This leaves us free to…wait for it, Coddiwomple!

Yes there’s gas in the car, but castles are awaiting. First a stop at Bowling Harbour where the end of a canal terminates with several locks to dam up enough water for a small marina while leaking the rest into the Clyde.

It does this old sailor’s soul a lot of good to see this clever boat harbour.

Pressing on regardless we pointed the hood or bonnet of our Vauxhall mini suv towards Drumlanrig Castle, a 17th century number with, it says here, a lavish interior, featuring paintings by Rembrandt and DaVinci among many other works of art.

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The Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch are still in residence at the Queensberry Estate. After a long and winding path through deep dark forest, We found it…closed.

We continued south and ran into this Burns memorial.

I don’t think anyone has ever done an accurate count of how many Robert Burns memorials there are but this one is quite substantial. It’s now an art gallery. Closed.

In the meantime Marce booked us into a charming garden cottage to deal with substantial admin on the camper van. This will be our view for the next few days.

We’ve known right from the start that buying a campervan in Europe would be a challenge. In most countries, non-residents just aren’t permitted to buy any vehicle. You’d think they’d be happy to have foreign tourists commit long term to spending their hard currency in restaurants, supermarkets, tourist concessions and such. But no.

Some places have workarounds. There are a few dealers in Europe who will purchase, register and insure a camper on your behalf, for a price. An enterprising agent in France assists in setting up a corporation, for a price; then the corporation buys the vehicle. Many people have successfully used these strategies. I was skeptical. Plus the timing of Europe was a bit concerning, what with uncertainty about Covid restrictions and too many border crossings. We really wanted to start in the UK before venturing further afield.

What to do? We contacted our British friend Mark and asked if we could use his address for the purpose of registration. He very kindly said yes. That’s one hurdle.

Our second hurdle was banking. The owner of our new baby told us if we were British we’d be able to transfer the money bank to bank in minutes, sign the papers and drive away. In our case we’re doing international foreign currency transfers and it just doesn’t happen that quickly. And it was a weekend. And we are five hours ahead of bank hours in New York. This is going to take a while.

We gave Davie all the cash we had on us at the time as hand money and initiated a transfer of the remainder of the deposit. Then, because there wasn’t anything we could do until all the money made it to Scotland, and the promised service and safety inspection couldn’t be scheduled for another week, we decided to spend the rest of our prepaid time in the rental car touring.

During the following week I got all the money transferred and started on the biggest hurdle: insurance. Every company I contacted said they couldn’t insure a nonresident. Lots of people advised me to just not mention it, since we are using the UK address of our friend, but we don’t want to run the risk of having a claim denied for not being truthful.

After many calls and refusals, I finally found a company to agree to insure us — at an extortionate cost. But we are over a barrel and needs must. The cost of insuring this campervan is nearly as much as we paid to insure our worldcruiser yacht with a value more than six times that of the camper.

Life is short, we tell each other nearly daily. It’s only money and we aren’t going to quibble at this point. We don’t know how much longer we can travel, or when our desire to see new places will start to wane as our bodies grow tired. Go now, go with what you’ve got. Just go.

So that decision was made, which led to an unexpected hurdle. The insurance company refused to accept our US credit card. You’re kidding, right? No, they were not. We crawled back to our English friend Mark and asked if he would pay the premium and we’d bank transfer him back. He agreed, but it took an additional three days before the company actually answered Mark’s calls and deemed to take his money.

That brought us to the final hurdle, paying the road tax, which turned out not to be a hurdle at all. We went online, entered our registration number and credit card and presto! Done.

All in all it took nearly ten days for the purchase to finalize, which turned out ok because a very important football match delayed the service and safety inspection for a few days. The mechanic was hung over.

They say that you’ll know it when you see it and after six hours driving up to Glasgow, fighting through post-football game traffic, rounding a corner we saw it. And we knew it. Big in a small kind of way, newish but with a just broken in vibe.

After confirming the particulars and a tough bargaining session where we refused to pay one pence over full asking price, we shook hands. Watching a half dozen campervans disappear out from under you changes your perspective on who has the power in these things. We did at least get the owner to throw in a fresh M.O.T. inspection and service. A few hundred pounds of cash hand money and a promise of a larger deposit to take it off the market and the deal was on.

We were overjoyed, but we couldn’t just move in and drive away. Oh no. This is going to take some bureaucratic maneuvering. More on that later.

We had to stick around town while the sale was finalized but all the hotels were booked for the aforementioned football game so Marce found, as she described it, an old pub and a room with a view over the river Clyde. Who could resist? Staying within a few miles of wherever the campervan lives for the moment seemed to make sense. What could go wrong?

We quickly found the Ferry Inn. Marce went to reconnoiter and entered a heaving press of young locals crammed shoulder to shoulder blowing off steam after a hard work week. Pardon me-ing our way through the crowd with luggage in tow was an athletic event and we had to shout over the loud music to communicate with the barmaid checking us in. I noticed a guy setting up a small DJ booth painted in day glow with “Ooh, Baby Baby” sprayed across the front.

We schlepped our way to the second floor and the promised room with a view over the river Clyde. By that time the DJ had started work, replacing the pub playlist with a continuous chugga chugga of dance tracks.

We thought dinner at the Indian restaurant down the street might be a good idea, but when we returned to the pub an hour later the party was really getting started. Back upstairs some kind of primordial sympathetic resonance turned our room into the inside of a huge bass drum. As the night wore on the volume inevitably shot up and I had concerns for the old pub structure. The vibration was such that my eyes couldn’t focus like an old TV without proper signal. Objects in the room shimmered and blinked with the booming vibration as pictures rattled against the walls and tilted. Everything seemed askew. The bed felt like it might vibrate across the floor, a funhouse version of the 50s motel “magic fingers.” Were the walls warping in and out? Marce was giddy with relief at finding our campervan, and nearly hysterical laughing at our situation.

Not me. I had to find a way to get some sleep. I’d hoped the DJ’s amp was only on 11 but I think he found an even more violent level.

Ear buds, a pile of pillows, and exhaustion seemed to do the trick.

The next thing I heard was a loud boom and then another, with a cascade of explosions to follow. We hopped out of bed as brilliant colors lit up the room.

From our window we could see there was an event at the private club next door and fireworks were part of the party. It went on for a good ten minutes, lighting up the river Clyde and our room with the view. What a way to celebrate finding our campervan!

At this point we noticed that the cacophony of sound was silent. Ooh Baby Baby, profoundly deaf by this point, probably thinks his kit is still working but no one else can hear him anymore either.

In the morning we thought we’d sneak out and grab some breakfast but the outside gate was padlocked and we didn’t have the combination. We were locked in until the pub opened at 11.

Eventually someone showed up with a mouth full of apologies and we were free.

Free to coddiwomple.

We’d been talking about a campervan for a while. The idea really took hold as the months turned to years waiting out the travel restrictions of the pandemic. But, as we all learn again and again, having an idea is easy but bringing it to fruition takes a mountain of will, energy and endurance. It took us 21 years to get a boat and start sailing the seven seas; it’s the reason we named our catamaran Escape Velocity. I am definitely not interested in another 21 year struggle.

Life is short and for us baby boomers getting shorter every day. While I would have thoroughly enjoyed the process of building out our own bespoke campervan, we don’t have a place to live or a place to build. Plus I don’t want to spend the time and effort it would take. We need to buy a camper that’s ready to go.

As Jack wrote, we found it impossible to do from America. One by one we flipped the calendar pages of 2022. Time was getting away from us. We knew we had to just get up and go. Ten years to the day after signing the papers for Escape Velocity we flew to London.

Unlike 2012 we had nowhere to go and only a determination to find a campervan as soon as we could to start making every day an adventure again.

We took the train to Sheffield where we’d found a reasonably affordable rental car, then drove to a small farm near Durham to a motorhome dealer who offered to help us navigate the challenges of nonresidents buying a vehicle.

Like any savvy salesman he showed us campervans in our price range, then pushed the envelope with a larger more expensive unit. Jack fell in love. But not me.

I was determined to stick to van size, mostly because we’ll be driving on the left (the least of our worries since we’ve been doing that since arriving in New Zealand in 2015), navigating the ubiquitous roundabouts, and negotiating impossibly narrow streets lined with parked cars. In a wide motorhome I envisioned an endless fiesta of sideswiping, leaving a trail of amputated rearview mirrors in our path.

Jack had no such worries. And Jack likes to end uncertainty as soon as he can. He pushed for the large, deluxe model from the nice dealer who sweetened the price with a very generous buyback offer that would give us an easy exit when we’re ready to move on. I tried to talk myself into it.

In the end I couldn’t bring myself to ignore my own stress, however misguided. The prospect of months of mashing the phantom passenger-side brake pedal and the inevitable arguments every time I shrieked “move over!” just wasn’t what I had in mind. Yes, it’s wrong of me, but we both get a vote and in the end we have to agree on such a big step.

The same thing happened while we boat shopped ten years ago. Jack fell in love with one of the first boats we saw but I had misgivings and it didn’t get my vote. It was quite the discussion and it meant our quest took a few months longer but I know Jack would agree that we ended up with the best boat for us.

During the van shopping we met up with our dear friend Mark Owen of Macushla, who, you may recall, lost his beautiful wife Sue four years ago. We met Mark and Sue early in our journey on Escape Velocity and so many of our most memorable experiences were shared with them. It was a joy to see Mark again, and as with all the best friendships, it was as if we’d seen him yesterday.

Our initial two weeks came to an end with no campervan and no prospects. I found us a cheaper rental car and booked a further two weeks, and as the stress and disappointment was wearing on us we took a few days off and had some fun.

We visited a couple of castles, drove to some beautiful vistas and oh, I tested positive for Covid. I had no symptoms and Jack was negative but we booked into an Airbnb cottage in the country and isolated for a few days. It was exactly what we needed.

During our isolation we narrowed our vehicle choices, scoured Gumtree and Autotrader and eBay and I marked the potentials on Google maps. I contacted them all, researched their history, made lists. One by one they disappeared. We knew we’d need to jump on a new listing right away. One of the best possibilities was an earlier year model with a layout we weren’t crazy about and with no solar, but the price was right and it needed very little work. The salesman gave us time to talk ourselves into it then dropped the bomb. He was not willing to pay for the work, and he was “backed up” and couldn’t deliver for six weeks. We walked away.

Four new listings sparked long discussions. This layout or that, solar or no solar. Two were priced to sell, two were above our agreed budget. We spent a couple of intense days, feeling the ongoing drain of hotels, Airbnbs, restaurant meals and car rental. Spending most of each day driving then figuring out where to sleep and eat was wearing us out. The contenders were scattered in the four corners of the country.

In the end we chose to go for one that was relatively close by. It didn’t have solar but it was a year newer than the rest with a clean service history. Decision made I called the dealer to arrange to see it. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ve just sold it.” Damn.

Our second choice was actually our first choice because it already had add-ons we wanted, but it was a full day’s drive away, in Scotland. I contacted the owner. “We want to buy your camper,” I said.

“Great! I have someone coming Sunday to look at it. I’ll be here all day. You can come then.” It was Friday night.

Jack and I looked at each other. “We’ll be there tomorrow.”

We’re going to Scotland!

Ok, so where was I? Oh yes, after all thefrenetic activity of selling Escape Velocity, shipping our entire worldly goods to America, getting last minute PCR tests in time to catch a plane to Tanzania with a two week African safari and quick hop over to Zanzibar, we finally made it to New Jersey where, after more PCR tests we were ensconced into the safety of our family. Any one of which events, by rights, could have been an individual blog post.

We voluntarily chose to set up shop in the family’s comfortable basement where our noise and clutter would be less annoying to our patient and sympathetic hosts. And there we sat. After redistributing everything we own, the full weight of the loss of our home and adventurous lifestyle began to envelop our subterranean existence. Seemingly powerless we descended into a funk lower than where we slept every night.

We tried to ameliorate the loss with rental cars and short trips to see the kids, Gettysburg, and the sights around Old Tappan.

Too many options and no clear direction emerged from our brainstorming sessions. It wasn’t like us. Timing or cash pressures seemed to preclude just about every way we turned. Touring the USA in a camper van in times of Covid seemed to me to be the safest and easiest but Marce was quite resistant, having already done a lot of domestic travel. Prices for class B camper vans in the US had ballooned into the stratosphere, we’re told not due to greed but Covid. Be that as it may, we weren’t having it! Europe, where camper vans are very popular, had many choices and reasonable prices and the UK even better. Marce setup our google nest hub to scroll through photos of our adventures just to remind us of who we are and what we’ve done.

The hunt was on.

Weeks spilled over into months spent pouring over terrible, poorly organized websites with SOLD emblazoned over 80 percent of their outrageously priced offerings until we found ourselves mindlessly wordle-ing or descending the inevitable rabbit hole of cat videos.

It turns out it’s very difficult to buy a camper van in Europe! Eventually Marce came up with the name of a small dealership that had great reviews and who agreed to help us. “That’s it,” I said, ”we’re going to England.”

As a kid if you’d grown up in Pennsylvania you’ve been to Gettysburg, site of one of the pivotal battles of the American Civil War. One could be forgiven for saying, “Been there, done that.” But you really haven’t. Apparently over the decades since I was last there they’ve made a few improvements. Let me just say at this juncture that nobody does mass battlefield carnage better than the good old U. S. of A.

First, the totally restored, brilliantly colored cyclorama is now housed in a new building which finally presents the 377 feet long by 42 feet high canvas, it says here, as originally designed and painted by Paul Philippoteaux in the 1880s. It depicts the final day of the battle, and especially Picket’s Charge, the last Confederate assault that sealed their fate.

The theatre is entered from below on an escalator and as you rise up to viewing level you’re enveloped in a predawn misty blue sky.

Real wagons, shrubbery and field pieces are artistically arranged in the foreground like figurants in a play, but still blend seamlessly into the perspective of the cyclorama.

Soon a few clashes start up and lights begin to flash, cannons boom with smoke rising over the area where the fun is commencing. Let the carnage begin!

If you’ve never visited a cyclorama (there aren’t that many left in the world) it’s the original multimedia presentation, where the audience stands in the middle and lights draw your attention to various parts of the painting while a narrator tells the story with a backing track of music and sound effects.

The action of the battle ranged over a wide area and it becomes obvious that it’s many skirmishes over miles of varied terrain.

This has everything, a cast of over 150,000 men maneuvering for advantage, cavalry, and just to allay any fears that this exercise is nothing but savagery, brother killing brother, we have booming artillery and a crowd favorite, frontal charges up the hill into the teeth of semi rapid rifle fire. I think that covers it. Lovely stuff.

For those of us who still have not had enough there’s an excellent museum just below the cyclorama. I always like to gaze at the real stuff and wonder how you could dispatch so many fellow Americans one at a time, in so short a time. As an aid to understanding it all there are several excellent short films to watch, some of them produced by the History Channel.

I caution you to take some sort of tracking device or you will get lost, just as Yours Truly did. I promised to mention the guard who found me, in the blog, so . . . Apparently I’m just no good anymore without a GPS chart plotter.

The weather had turned cold, wet and nasty so finding ourselves ahead of schedule for a change, we decided to return tomorrow to tour the battlefield by car.

Editor’s note: Most Pennsylvania natives can claim veterans or casualties of the battle of Gettysburg in their family tree. In my family, my great grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, was recruited among many other new arrivals to bolster the Union effort. He played the cornet and spent most of the rest of his life in the US Army as a bugler. He died in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. This photo was taken long after the Civil War was over. —Marce

It took some doing to find a PCR test site we could walk to from our hotel, but we managed and tested negative and finally got to insinuate ourselves into my sister’s home for a few weeks. Jack and I were suffering severe culture shock and were barely communicative at first. The sale of the boat happened so quickly, we had no plan for what’s next, and the Covid situation in America was much worse than we’d experienced previously, especially compared to our safe little island in Malaysia. But my sister and brother-in-law gave us the space to process and kept us fed and watered while we adjusted to a culture that’s familiar and alien at the same time.

Eventually we rented a car and started off toward Pittsburgh, our old home town and still home to other family members.

We took a few days to drive what normally would take one day, zigzagging north and south, shopping for warm clothes and exploring back roads along the way.

Pennsylvania, we learned, boasts more covered bridges than anywhere else in the country and we made it our mission to find a few and appreciate their construction.

It was comforting to be on the move again, and even though we miss the endless blue of our life on the water, driving through the hilly piedmont and over the familiar Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania helped calm our uncertainty. Lovely as it is, even in the bleakest of seasons, we agree we don’t want to live here anymore. But we’re on our way to see some of our favorite people, and that’s the joy we’ve been missing.