Travel writers Susan and Simon Veness were trying to escape the rat race when they hit the road for a year in an RV.

“For the last 20 years we have been working flat-out, seven days a week, never took time off,” Susan Veness says. “We didn’t take vacations, and we were so burned out that we just needed to hit the reset button.”

The Venesses took off in their 36-foot RV – dog Ruthie and a subcompact car in tow – with a route in mind that went to Michigan, then across the country to the West Coast before swooping down across the South and back home to Apopka.

“The challenge was to try and see as much of the country as we could. We really wanted to see America,” Simon Veness says.

Their mission was completed, mostly, and ended recently with a stay at Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World. There were bumps along the way, including mechanical difficulties, a stretch of 19 days without hot water, tight mountain passes and harrowing bridges that might have contributed to high blood pressure.

“We met a lot of mobile technicians in those first months,” Susan says. After two months and another frustrating RV repair, they considered pulling the plug on the 12-month project that had been in the works for four years.

“So we had to take the rig in, stay in a hotel. We spent a couple of days really just saying we’re not sure we can do this,” Susan says. “And then we bucked up our courage and decided, yeah, we want to keep going. And then, for months, it was just beautiful. Smooth sailing.”

“The last six months were the gravy. They just seemed to go so fast,” Simon says.

The Venesses are the creators of “The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World” book sires and the “Brit Guide to Orlando and Walt Disney World” guidebook. They have written for blogs, magazines and newspapers, and their trip updates have appeared in The Independent newspaper in the U.K. The second edition of Susan’s “Walt Disney World Hacks” book came out in April.

They submitted another book days before heading out in the RV. This fall, their new book “111 Places in Orlando That You Must Not Miss,” will be published.

Their on-the-road workload was “doing this easy stuff that we can do remotely rather than the press events and the openings and the restaurants and everything that goes with it, which is what makes it feel like you’re on a treadmill,” Simon says.

A stand-out state for Simon was Utah, he says.

“Absolutely everywhere we went, there was a stunning panorama … amazing national parks, just incredible vistas right throughout the state,” he says.

Another highlight for the couple was watching “wave after wave” of sandhill cranes at Wilcox Playa in southeast Arizona, Susan says.

“We spent a whole evening one night watching these birds flying in from literally out of the sunset into this wildlife area of marshlands, where they were settling for the winter,” Simon says.

“It was mind-blowing watching those. The noise, the site, the backdrop. It was like a David Attenborough nature documentary. You’re sitting there open-jawed for hours watching those,” he says.

Travel writers Susan and Simon Veness stand with their 36-foot Winnebago, their home for a year, while rolling across the country. (Courtesy Veness family)

So much togetherness in such tight living quarters was not an issue for Venesses, they said.

“We’re always together. For 20 years all of our work has been together. So that was really the easy part,” she says.

“Our office is only 11 feet square [at home], and both of us are in there pretty much every day,” he says.

Along the way, they decided their initial itinerary was too ambitious, so they opted against Washington, Oregon and northern California, which allowed them to slow their pace.

Simon says he eventually got used to the conditions of driving an RV.

“You’ve got to be dialed in all the time because it just takes one small give in the road, and it throws you off course because of the weight of the whole vehicle,” he says.

“By the end of the trip, I didn’t want to stop because I love the view from the cab,” he says.

The trip covered more than 35,000 miles between the RV and the car in 22 states.

The Venesses check out Mount Rushmore, one of several landmarks visited during their RV adventure. (Courtesy Veness photo)

Once they got back to Florida, they stayed at Disney World before heading back to their house.

“We really wanted to end the trip where, really, everything for us started. We met through Disney, you know, we got engaged to IllumiNations [at Epcot]. A huge portion of our work has been around the theme parks,” Susan says.

They say they missed their Florida neighbors; they didn’t miss the humidity.

They plan to write something about the experience, but they’re mulling the best angle to take. They believe they’ll make another RV trip, but for a shorter duration and in a smaller vehicle.

“We definitely want to do more,” Simon says. “We still have unfinished business out west.”

dbevil@orlandosentinel.com

By Summer Lin, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — First came a rare solar eclipse, followed by the northern lights, fueled by a solar storm. The next celestial phenomenon will come next month, when skygazers can look forward to an alignment known as a “planetary parade.”

The parade will start June 3, when Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will be aligned, according to Star Walk Astronomical News, a planetarium phone app.

During such events, multiple planets can be seen across the sky. A “mini planetary alignment” is when three are aligned; a large alignment comprises five or six, according to the outlet.

But don’t expect to see them all.

Related Articles

Review: ‘The Beach Boys’ is a sentimental documentary that downplays the band’s squabbles

Movie review: Action-packed ‘The Garfield Movie’ bridges generation gap

The Black Keys cancel upcoming tour, including Target Center show, without explanation

Skywatch: Little crown of night sky may pop a new star this summer

How many bird species nest in Minnesota? A new book has the answer.

Preston Dyches of NASA’s “Skywatching Tips” video series explained that only two planets will be visible to the naked eye June 3, if any.

“Contrary to many reports and social media postings, there will not be a string of naked-eye planets visible on June 3,” he said via email. “Mercury and Jupiter will be far too low in the sky at sunrise. Even under ideal conditions (a dark sky, free from light pollution) Uranus is very dim and challenging to spot. The skyglow near dawn makes matters worse.”

Neptune, which is six times dimmer than Uranus, requires a telescope to be seen, according to Dyches.

The “real parade,” he said, will occur about four weeks later, on June 29, when Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the three-quarter moon will be visible in the morning twilight. In Southern California, this should occur around 5 or 6 a.m., according to Paul Robertson, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine.

“If you went out that morning, you could actually see all of those four objects at the same time, and that’s not really the same for the June 3 thing,” he said.

The parades won’t be the end of this year’s sky spectacles.

A nova outburst is expected to take place at some point before September, Robertson said.

The outburst will be visible in the constellation Corona Borealis and will be as bright as the North Star for about a week before fading, according to Space.com.

The phenomenon occurs when a white dwarf and red giant star orbit each other. As the white dwarf takes stellar material from the red giant, a flash of nuclear fusion is ignited, launching a nova outburst, according to the outlet. The event is expected to be a “once-in-a-lifetime stargazing opportunity.”

“I think people may have gotten a little more interested in watching the sky since the big eclipse,” Robertson noted. “I know people traveled for that. It changes your perspective on things.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times

I will (almost) always watch a film about the Beach Boys — the latest, titled simply “The Beach Boys,” premiered Friday on Disney+ — not just for the part they played in American musical and cultural history but for the part they played in my own. From 1966 to 1969 my father worked for the band, in the capacity of a tour promoter; that these were their years of lesser popularity, as rock got heavy and dour and jammy, meant that this relationship gave me no cachet among my peers. But it was interesting to me.

I saw them play, in striped shirts, white suits, colorful velours and out of costume, at the Hollywood Bowl, when the kids still screamed during their shows; at the Melodyland theater-in-the-round across from Disneyland, when they seemingly couldn’t get booked any closer to L.A.; and at the Whisky A Go Go, when “Sunflower” was released. I saw Dennis Wilson drag race; his Shelby Cobra rolled over my toe as it was being pushed to the starting line, but as much of the weight had been stripped out of the car, no damage was done. Bruce Johnston introduced me to Eric Clapton backstage at a Blind Faith concert. (“This is Eric,” he said. “Hello,” I said.) I rode for a minute in a car with Carl Wilson and his parents.

I knew them as much as any child knows a parent’s business associates, which is to say, not at all really, but they were familiar characters, as were the support staff in the office, the studio and the road. They came together in stray bits of news and gossip, coalescing into a pantheon that floated about my life. The Maharishi, with whom the band briefly toured, gave my dad his mantra. And there was Charles Manson, of course, the ineradicable dark blot in any telling of this tale, who attached himself to Dennis looking for pop stardom. My father had moved on by the time of the Tate-La Bianca murders, but as he had once thrown Charlie out of the office — that was a moment in our house.

Related Articles

The Black Keys cancel upcoming tour, including Target Center show, without explanation

Nicki Minaj’s England concert postponed after rapper was detained by Dutch authorities over pot

John Koerner, bluesman who inspired a young Bob Dylan, dies at 85

Raihala: Let’s talk about what’s wrong with Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list

Tennessee attorney general looking into attempt to sell Graceland in foreclosure auction

Directed by Frank Marshall (“Rather”) and Thom Zimny (whose documentary “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” is one of the best films about Elvis), it covers well-traveled — oft-surfed? — territory. Not even counting the scores of online videos and the all-star tributes, there’s a wealth of full-blown films about the band as a whole and of Brian Wilson, the foundation of their sound, going back decades, including three biopics: two for television — the Dennis-focused “Summer Dreams” and “The Beach Boys: An American Family” — and the well-regarded big-screen Brian young-and-old movie “Love and Mercy.”

It’s irresistible material, a show business story and a family drama, salted with child abuse, drug addiction, mental illness and recovery, a war between art and commerce and an arc of success and failure and success — when “Endless Summer,” a two-LP best-of package went to No. 1 on the charts in 1974, it catapulted the group into permanent residency as “America’s Band.” With its range of good-time rock ‘n’ roll and ambitious, eccentric art-pop, they’re at once a band for everybody and a band for geeks.

Running less than two hours at a time when four-hour rock docs are not unusual, this is a swift, compact telling, with surprisingly little in the way of music and whole swaths of recording history skated over. But it looks fantastic, with a bounty of archival photographs and home movies, many of which are new to me, even as a veteran of these things. Apart from new interview footage with the survivors, in and around the band, and the customary pop musician testimonials, not much if anything will be new to the fans. What is new, among Beach Boys documentaries, is the tone, which does not linger on the sensational episodes and downplays the squabbling to emphasize the love.

For a group whose relations have been famously divisive, and whose story has been marked by tragedy — the early deaths of Dennis and Carl are represented only by a closing title card — it’s essentially good-natured, even sentimental. (The film checks out early in their ongoing, competitive careers, before the Beach Boys became Mike Love’s band and Brian a solo artist, and surprisingly omits their 50th-anniversary reunion tour and final studio album, the 2012 “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which is not bad at all.) Everybody, even problematic Wilson dad Murry, gets their due. A staged but genuinely sweet closing scene may bring a tear to your eye.

Like the Beatles or the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys are a perennial act whose influence will long outlive them. And eventually the idiosyncratic pop music they made in the late 1960s — my years in their orbit, which is to say my Beach Boys music — came to be celebrated. Few bought “Friends” when it came out in 1968, but now you can listen to a four-part podcast in which well-informed fans take it apart, tenderly, track by track, instrument by instrument, voice by voice.

‘THE BEACH BOYS’

MPA rating: PG-13 (for drug material, brief strong language and smoking)

Running time: 1:53

How to watch: Disney+

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

Since 1978, cartoonist Jim Davis has explored the quotidian dramas of pet ownership via the daily travails of beleaguered Jon Arbuckle, his eager dog Odie, and the titular tubby orange tabby, Garfield. If the comic strip (the most widely syndicated in the world) is the weekly sitcom version of their story, then “The Garfield Movie,” the latest effort to bring Garfield to the big screen, is the oversized action-adventure film, replete with references and comparisons to Tom Cruise.

Those Cruise-inspired Easter eggs are laid not necessarily for kids, but the adults who have accompanied them to the theater, such as when the score references “Mission: Impossible” while an ox named Otto, voiced by Ving Rhames (who plays Cruise’s techie Luther in the action franchise), lays out the plan for a heist. Later, a triumphant climax featuring airborne food delivery drones offers the chance for a bit of the “Top Gun” theme while Garfield (Chris Pratt) brags that he does his own stunts, “just like Tom Cruise.”

The line is a bit of overemphasis that this is the big, thrilling version of Garfield, not a “Jeanne Dielman”-style study of domestic life. In fact, after a quick framing device that shows us Garfield’s heartstring-tugging history as a starving stray kitten who encounters Jon at an Italian restaurant, the film speeds through a quick montage of our favorite Garfield tropes: he loves lasagna, hates Mondays, torments Jon and manipulates Odie.

We know him, we love him — Garfield’s unique characteristics have been printed on coffee mugs for years — and once that’s out of the way, onto the high-stakes and highly contrived plot. Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a couple of thuggish pups, Nolan (Bowen Yang) and Roland (Brett Goldstein), who are working for a Persian cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). She wants them to collaborate with Garfield’s deadbeat dad Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) on a milk heist as revenge for the time she did in the pound after a scheme she and Vic pulled.

The heist plot allows for the action, adventure and suspense to come into play, as well as the aforementioned Tom Cruise references, and nods to film noir and early silent films (there are a lot of sequences set on trains). There’s even a “Rashomon”-like flashback as we see Garfield’s childhood abandonment from Vic’s perspective, changing the way we understand how Garfield found himself alone in that alley that night. The heist may make up the majority of the story, but it’s merely a means by which an estranged father and son can escape the emotional prison of masculinity and express their feelings to each other.

“The Garfield Movie,” directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds, may sport a deep knowledge of film history that can delight cinephile parents, but it is still a kiddie movie and comes with the same zany, harried energy one might expect from such a project. The aesthetic hews more closely to the look of the comic strip than the CGI-animation/live-action abomination of the two Garfield movies of the early aughts, which is on trend with other animated films that embrace an illustrated style, though this is less edgy than some of the other examples (the “Spider-Verse” movies, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem”).

Bill Murray voiced the rusty, rotund feline in “Garfield: The Movie” (2004) and “Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties” (2006) in his dry, laconic manner, and Pratt does a fine job taking over vocal duties. Harvey Guillén offers his voice for Odie’s noises, and the rest of the voice cast (Nicholas Hoult as Jon, Cecily Strong as a Midwestern security guard named Marge) round out the world.

Though the film is formulaic and somewhat annoyingly energetic, it’s cute and irreverent enough, and manages to bridge the generation gap, offering up a kid-friendly flick that can keep adults somewhat entertained for the duration, proving that even after all these years, Garfield’s still got it.

‘THE GARFIELD MOVIE’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for action/peril and mild thematic elements)

Running time: 1:41

Where to watch: In theaters May 24

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC