We're Free!

We are finally free from our Lazydays experience!  Actually, in all fairness, they did a fabulous job getting our variety of little things fixed and we plan to make them an annual stop if we have anything that needs to be addressed in the future.  They were also great at "putting us up" each night -- wether in a service bay or in a parking space -- but always with at least electricity and sometimes with water/sewer connections too. We also saved a decent amount of money from refunds from the on-site campground we barely used.

We still have 2 items to get addressed (waiting on parts), but we knew there would be a re-visit at some point in the near future -- hopefully before we leave Florida in late February so we'll have a clean slate (at least until we manage to break something else!).

Moving on, we are now in Clermont, FL in Lake Louisa State Park.  We got a surprise in that our site does not have full hookups -- electricity and water only -- so we'll likely have to drive the rig over to the dump station a few times during our 2-week stay to empty our gray and black tanks.  That being said, so long as we don't do a bunch of laundry, we should be great.  In fact, the campground has a small laundry facility that is cheap ($1 a load to wash) and is MUCH faster than our own smaller washer on board.

We have only been here a few days, but have already "cleaned house" (doesn't take long!), re-provisioned our groceries, and visited with some of  Jeffrey's local family.  Today is a "down day" -- catching up on some email, making the next allergy shot appointment for Jeffrey (which involves finding a new doc in the next town), arranging our next mail delivery, etc... our new "normal" life while on the road.  The good news is that we do all of this with a beautiful view of one of the park lakes right out our window (see picture)!

New experience in Tampa

Okay, I know pretty much every day is a "new experience" in this lifestyle we've chosen, but this one deserves a little reflection.  We arrived in the Tampa area at the Lazydays campground to enjoy the sights and get a little final warranty work done on Max while we are here.  Little did we know, but it turns out Lazydays is somewhat famous nationally for their RV sales and service business.

After enjoying a quiet weekend and terrific evening visiting with family, we took Max over for our Monday morning appointment at the Lazydays service center.  Our service experiences so far have been very "hit or miss", especially with a rig as big as ours, so we were a little stressed.  Nevertheless, we turned over our "home" to strangers so they could tackle our remaining warranty items.

As I write this, we have been in a service bay for 3 days now and the service techs are REALLY kicking butt and getting things fixed!  Almost all of our items are minor things and none are preventing us from traveling, but maintenance and repairs are part of life when your house drives down bumpy roads. Instead of having to return to the campground every night and pay there, they save us a few bucks and just give us any hookups we need and just let us stay in the service bay. The only downside is that our roof satellite dish can't see the sky, but we have a portable unit that we set up on top of the car instead.  We are far from alone as there are folks living in their RVs in the service bays around us (this place has over 200 bays!).

Lucky for us, most of our issues are already fixed and a few others are just awaiting parts being overnight air-shipped from Winnebago (what a great company!). Lazydays is offering us free breakfast and lunch every day and also has fabulous free  seminars so we can stay entertained and learn more about using, maintaining, and enjoying our RV.  We are anxiously awaiting the outcome of investigations into a few remaining repair items ... so stay tuned to the next blog entry!

Celebrating the 2012 Holidays in Florida

We proceeded on to our next big set of linkages with friends and family is in south Florida... specifically Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound.  From there, we have lots of folks we want to see who are conveniently located either a short drive north or south of us.  We had two more hops to make to get there -- Tallahassee and Bushnell, FL.

Wet and windy weather seems to be chasing us across the country this whole trip, so we cut our Tallahassee RV Park stay to just one night (turns out we thankfully missed a huge storm the night before we got there) and added a night to Bushnell at the Sumter Oaks RV Park. This is another "Escapee" park, so we enjoyed meeting a number of other full-timers.  It is always fun to share stories of "life on the road" and we especially like getting new "RV" tips.  You'd think we wouldn't have too many stories of our own yet, but we find that is not the case.  Especially nice was participating in the weekly "dine in" -- dinner of pulled pork, beans, slaw, and dessert for only $6 each.  What a deal!

Finally made the last drive segment to Hobe Sound on Dec 21, arriving just in time for an overnight cold snap of 40ish degrees. Enjoyed meeting some RVers next to us who are planning to go full-time in another year or two. They had also traveled quite a bit world-wide and Maren went to see the movie, Lincoln, with them one evening (Jeffrey not interested, though I suspect he just enjoyed having some time alone!)

Our two weeks in Hobe Sound were super full of lunches and dinners almost every day we were here... such a treat to have enough time to see everyone for a change!  Rang in 2013 with the usual resolutions to exercise more, eat less, yada yada  :-)

Finally on Florida soil

Continuing on our journey to Florida, we left Louisiana and spent 2 very cold days at the Hollywood Casino RV park in Bay St. Louis. I (Maren) tried my luck on the day's date, 12-12-12, at the slots and walked away $200 richer, so we enjoyed the huge buffet for dinner the night before we left -- "on me" :-) 

The rest of the money went to partially fill up Max with diesel fuel (I say "partially" because filling his tank completely would cost almost $400).  It is interesting to drive in to a new town... we can't help but inspect each gas station as we drive around.  While we'd love to take advantage of the better fuel prices than we'd find on the interstate, the vast majority of "in town" stations are a definite "no-go" of fitting Max+car in tow on their diesel pumps.  In Bay St. Louis, we didn't even see one we'd be comfortable driving Max alone in.

Ergo, it was with careful planning ("The Next Exit" is a great book for RVers) that we picked a truck fuel stop along I10 that we could fill up on our way to Pensacola.  Turned out to be a non-event.  Lots of pumps, lots of room... even got a burger from the Wendy's that shared its building.  Now if we can just get our "Pilot / Flying J" card working so we'll get a puny discount at the pump.

Arrived in Pensacola Thursday evening and was happy to be back in the "Land of Sonny's Real Pit BBQ", which we promptly ate dinner at with Jeffrey's brother and his wife, John and Susan.  While in Pensacola, they gave us a great tour of Pensacola's downtown area, we explored Ft Pickens state park, we stocked up on seafood for the freezer at Joe Patti's Seafood and, for a grand weekend finale, we went to the Naval Aviation Museum at the Naval Air Station to see the museum and enjoy a big commemoration of the 40th anniversary since the final Apollo mission.  As part of the agenda, we got to hear a presentation from the flight directors and 2 surviving astronauts of Apollo XIII (Jim Lovell & Fred Haise).  We also got to hear a bit about the Gemini and Mercury programs by a number of astronauts from that era.  Very cool! How nice that our timing in town coincided with this terrific event.

First 450 miles under our belts!

Well, we have survived our first two travel days!  Left Georgetown Dec 5th and enjoyed a 200ish mile drive to Livingston TX, home of the Rainbow's End "Escapees" RV park (which also serves as our mail forwarding service).  We think we need to adjust our RV GPS a tad.  It had us on some lovely but curvy back Texas roads.  Thankfully they were in decent shape except for the railroad crossing that "looked" smooth but jarred our teeth as we crossed it.  No crashes in the house behind us, so we survived that one with no casualties.

Rainbow's End was an interesting mix of traveling as well as retired RVers who had homesites with specialized parking for their rigs.  There is even a facility for RVers who need temporary medical care and assistance as they heal.  We went on a tour and got to see their state-of-the-art mail processing center.  It processes more mail for full-time RVers than the entire town of Livingston's other residents.  They wouldn't let us take a picture inside or we would have snapped one of us posing with our own personal mail slot.

One of our big accomplishments while there was to use the "SmartWeigh".  It gave us an accurate weight of each corner of Max so we could see if we were overloaded.  You do this process with a full fuel and water tank (and other tanks empty).  Turns out we were at the max weight overall, but a little lopsided in the rear -- probably due to the washer and dryer being on one side.  We don't normally travel with a full water tank, so we'll definitely be "under" the max when we travel.  Hopefully nobody noticed when we went back to our site and drained out 50 extra gallons so we don't have to haul it across bumpy Louisiana roads :-)

We left on Dec 8th for Henderson, LA the next day and had a nice ride until we got within 20 miles of our destination -- that is when the roads went to concrete segments with seams every 10-15 feet.  All I can say is OMG!  About halfway through the steady bumping, a heavy speaker cover fell off the wall and banged to the floor.  Luckily it didn't do much damage on the way down and still worked fine when we screwed it back in place securely the next day.

The Cajun Palms RV Resort we are at for 3 days is really something -- hundreds of RV pads and very targeted to families.  In the warmer months this place must be a madhouse!  For our stay, only a fraction of the spots are in use and many of those cleared out Sunday morning as the few families that were here went home. Right next door is a Crawfish Town U.S.A. restaurant, so we got to enjoy some gulf seafood (at least I did -- Jeffrey found a non-seafood entree).  We also went into nearby Lafayette and wandered through the Science Museum.  They had a planetarium as part of it and we enjoyed 2 different shows.  Pretty much had to drag Jeffrey out of there!

As I write this, our last full day in Henderson is a deluge of rain and wind -- perfect for catching up on some chores, email, etc. Heavy rain inside an RV is like sitting in an Igloo cooler under a waterfall... you have to turn up the volume on the TV when it gets really loud on the roof!

SCHEDULE from 12/5/12 through 4/10/13

Here we sit just a few weeks away from hitting the road on our first big road trip!  We still have a to-do list to accomplish before we leave, but it is thankfully getting shorter every day.  We have managed to actually plan out our first full 4 months on the road -- mainly because we will be in Florida for a big part of it and were forced to get reservations for the parks we will stay at since it is "high season" for RVing in that state :-)

Here are the dates we'll be in each location (note that the first day is when we arrive mid-afternoon and the last day is the day we leave in the morning to head to the next destination)

12/5/12 - 12/8/12:  Livingston, Texas (Rainbow's End RV Park)
12/8/12 - 12/11/12:  Henderson, Louisiana (Cajun Palm RV Park)
12/11/12 - 12/13/12:  Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (Hollywood Casino & RV Park)
12/13/12 - 12/18/12:  Pensacola, Florida (Pensacola RV Park)
12/18/12 - 12/20/12:  Tallahassee, Florida (Tallahassee RV Park)
12/20/12 - 12/21/12:  Bushnell, Florida (Sumter Oaks RV Park)
12/21/12 - 1/4/13:  Hobe Sound, Florida (Jonathan Dickenson State Park)
1/4/13 - 1/16/13:  Tampa, Florida (Lazydays)
1/16/13 - 1/18/13:   Bushnell, Florida (Sumter Oaks RV Park)
1/18/13 - 2/1/13: Clermont/Orlando, Florida (Lake Louisa State Park)
2/1/13 - 2/22/13:  Williston, Florida (Williston Crossings RV Park)
2/22/13 - 2/27/13:  TRANSIT to Raleigh NC -- stops TBD
2/27/13 - 4/10/13:  Raleigh, North Carolina (Not confirmed:  Cooper's RV Park)
... after this... Washington DC for a few weeks and then TBD :-)

These are the plans so far and we'll be happy to stay on this schedule.  Having said that, living in a moving home sometimes makes its own itinerary based on weather and potential mechanical issues!

The Education Continues -- Camp Freightliner!

Holy cow!  We can't believe October is almost over.  Only another 5 weeks before we hit the road.  We plan to be gone from Texas for over 8 months, so it is going to be a BIG road trip!

The last month has been focused on visiting doctors (annual checkup stuff) and continuing our RV lifestyle education. Doctor-wise, we only have our teeth cleanings left plus get Maren graduated from physical therapy treatment for plantar faciitis.  Education-wise, Jeffrey passed his non-commercial Class B driver's license written test + driving exam -- a feat that required us to drive the rig to Taylor, Texas for the afternoon.  He even had to parallel park "Max"... okay, a few points deducted on that part but the rest was flying colors!

The other education was the big deal.  We flew to Gaffney, S.C. for a 2-day "Camp Freightliner" class.  We were with about a dozen other RV owners -- some full-timers like us -- and we were taught all about the chassis that Max sits on.  Topics covered the engine, transmission, wheels, suspension, and all of the other things that Freightliner pre-installs before the chassis is delivered to the "body builder" (Winnebago in Forest City, Iowa).  We now know enough to be dangerous ... especially if we have a problem and need service.  One cool thing is that we know what filters and other parts to carry with us in case we need emergency fixing somewhere.  If we have what they need, we won't be delayed in our travels.

Our big remaining tasks are to get the car (Moby) and Max in for service appointments... thankfully just checkups / preventative maintenance stuff.  We still have a few warranty items for Max and hope that they can be addressed here locally before we leave.  If not, we can do them in January while staying at LazyDays in Tampa... lucky for us we are in their campgrounds for 12 days already while we visit family and friends in the area.

Thanks for checking in on us!