Back to the Sunshine State

My, how time flies!  Hard to believe it is almost the end of July.  We wrapped up June by sliding back down I95 into Florida, stopping for a few days in Jacksonville before cutting over to the Gainesville area for a week.  We had offered to help re-supply our Austin-based Lone Star Gator Club with some Gator raffle/halftime prizes and had fun going to flea markets and area stores for great deals to save them money.  No surprise that it is much easier to find this stuff in Florida than Texas :-)  Now we just have to find a place in Max to stow it all for the trip back to Austin!

As scheduled, we arrived for our big "fix the floor" service appointment at Lazydays on July 8th. We managed to add a few more things to the "needs fixing" list over the last few months, the most inconvenient being a clothes washer leak. While the floor and other items were being addressed, we entertained ourselves in the nice customer lounge watching golf, working on puzzles, doing some computer work, etc. Only had to stay in a hotel one night while the new grout was curing... and even then, we had Best Western points so it was a freebie. 

Sidenote: the campground at Lazydays has the most advanced laundry facility that we have ever seen.  You can pay for your wash/dry machines with a credit card and then get a text message when your load is done.  Pretty cool.

Now for the unexpected.  If you find yourself sitting in a great service place, it is only natural that you start thinking of any other things you'd like to do -- not "fix it" stuff but "nicer" stuff.  We calculated that we were under budget on fuel and campground fees for the year so perhaps we could indulge ourselves and get the better satellite system. The one that came with Max was tossed on as a "deal sweetener" by the dealership where we bought him, but turned out to be an older model that was very finicky and getting more problematic as time went on.  We were tired of spending 30 minutes to an hour getting the darn thing pointed and happy every time we moved to a new place.  Ergo, we splurged to get a Winegard Traveler.  Unfortunately, after that money was committed, we discovered that our "house" batteries were pretty fried and just past the NAPA 3-year date.  Kaching!  Did you know that RV batteries cost almost $300 each?  well, we need 4... sigh.  Guess the RV maintenance budget line item needs to be a bit bigger next year.

Below is a picture of Max with his new roof satellite dish  :-)

The end of a wonderful spring

By the time we left Cancun, Mexico, tropical storm Andrea (yes, it was bad enough to actually get a formal name) had made its way out of the gulf, actually dumping a bunch of rain on lonely Max in Raleigh as it went on its NE track.  Our last few days at the "Grand Mayan" were actually nice -- so long as you watched the sky carefully for the occasional shower.  Funny enough, we found this to be the case when we got back to Raleigh too.  Guess it is that time of year when thunderstorms break out randomly many days.  Reminds me of my years living in south Florida!  Anyhow, before we flew back to the U.S., we snapped some cute photos of local wildlife at the Grand Mayan resort (see bottom of post).  Gator friends, it is a crocodile, not an alligator :-)

Once back to Max in Raleigh, we helped celebrate our nephew, Karl's, high school graduation. His parents (my dear college friend, Mary, and Jeffrey's brother David -- they met at our wedding), threw him a fabulous BBQ party at home ahead of his formal graduation ceremony.  So amazing to witness this milestone in a young man I once held in my arms shortly after he was born almost 18 years ago!  AGH!  Where has the time gone?  Needless to say, it was with a heavy heart that we left NC yesterday as we continue our "just the two of us" journey south.

Our first stop was Gaffney, SC, where we had an appointment to get Max aligned and inspected -- which we deemed a worthwhile expense after our first major jaunt on bumpy roads these last months.  Lucky for us, there were no issues... just a few minor adjustment and we were on our way.  Once again, the "chassis" part of our coach has been almost bulletproof.  The "house" part will get its time in the service bay next month when we finally buckle down and get the floor grout fixed in Florida next month.  Oh Joy... probably should have our heads examined for choosing hurricane season to do this!

Weather to stay or go?

After a day visit with our final Connecticut friends, Guy & Joan Clark, we started our 5 day run back to Raleigh.  Guy and Joan had fattened us up with a fabulous dinner the night before we left, so we were energized for a few long days of driving.  By the way, "long" is relative in this lifestyle.  Four hours in a car is no big deal, but motorhome travel is a little more intense.  There is a lot more to watch out for, you generally go at a slower speed, and a small "bump in the road" is really amplified.  We still haven't gotten to a level of comfort that we even listen to the radio when driving.

Anyhow, stormy weather showed up on the forecast for the entire week, so we opted to leave our options open and not make firm park reservations until the day before or even the morning of.  Day 1 was the road back to Pennsylvania -- which sure seemed rougher than the same road to drive east on a few weeks earlier. Day 2 storms held off in the morning, so we high-tailed it over 250 miles and managed to pass through the rest of PA, a corner of Maryland, West Virginia, and finally stopped in Winchester Virginia.  Jeffrey thought this was a great accomplishment -- being in 4 states in one day. 

While Winchester looked like a really neat town and we wanted to stay an extra night to have a day to explore, the RV park we picked (Candy Hill) was a not a good experience.  It was nice enough, but it was right beside a major freeway with loud trucks cruising by at all hours.  Instead, we outran the afternoon storms again and made a run for Richmond on Day 3.  Since we only needed 1 more driving day to get back to Raleigh, we had 2 full days to explore Richmond a bit, even though it rained on us most of the time.

Our final driving day was uneventful but rainy through Virginia, finally drying out once we hit the North Carolina border. The upside is that Max had a nice exterior wash and looked pretty clean after a dirty trek to parts north.  We got settled in to our RV park near Raleigh and enjoyed a week's worth of visiting with Jeffrey's two local brothers and their families.  One casualty of our recent rough road driving appears to be our washing machine which has sprung a small leak underneath somewhere.  Lucky for us, our family in Raleigh have extended the use of their in-house laundry facilities, so our washer repair can be added to the list to be fixed at our next service appointment (at Lazydays in Florida in July).

I write this blog entry from near Cancun, Mexico where we are enjoying a pre-25th wedding anniversary visit to our "timeshare". We arrived by plane (Max was left to rest in Raleigh) and unfortunately, the wet weather has followed us once again and we managed to land right in the middle of the first gulf tropical depression.  We have had wet stuff every day and some of it torrential, but it is still a lovely part of the world.

We will return this weekend just in time to help celebrate our nephew Karl's graduation from High School.  Crossing our fingers that the rain doesn't follow us home!

WOW Connecticut!

We experienced our first "big" hills as we made our way through NE Pennsylvania, stopping for a night in our first KOA park north of New York in order to see friend and former IBM colleague Thorne Ventura and his fiance Lin. The KOA was a bit tight and heavily treed which did not make our roof-mounted satellite happy at all -- had to deploy the portable one and practically put it in the street behind us to get a signal.

Our next week was spent near New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University and close to Jeffrey's cousin Pete.  We really enjoyed touring the college and seeing the New Haven Museum... quaint but interesting.  Spent quite awhile trying to find a big "Yale" sign like our own University of Florida has, but only found a small thing.  Odd. We didn't find New Haven to be the wonderful coastal town that I had imagined.  It was much more industrial around the waterfront than expected and there were many depressed areas around the city.

Our next week in Old Mystic, CT was the complete opposite -- an absolutely fabulous area with tons to do and not enough days to do it all.  In addition to the famous Mystic harbor town (and delicious "Mystic Pizza"), there is a terrific reproduction of a 1840's shipbuilding town (part of which is still actively restoring old ships), an aquarium where Dr. Robert Ballard's office is located (he found the Titanic), the ability to tour the U.S.S. Nautilus (the first nuclear submarine), and so much more. 

But the biggest reasons to visit this wonderful area was to see Jeffrey's other cousin Tim and my former college roommate, Lisa Pickett and her husband Zack. -- oh, and their adorable yorkie Zoey! Lisa and Zack really rolled out the read carpet for us and gave us grand tours of the Mystic CT and Newport RI areas on their weekend off. We then kept ourselves very busy every day of the week and then seeing them most evenings for dinner. Good thing we were well rested from our slower "New Haven" visit!  Below is a great picture of the four of us taken from a "cliffwalk" in Newport, followed by the best beluga whale picture I took at the aquarium.  Funny, the whale looks tiny, but it is actually 15-20 feet long. 

Tim is a busy guy who bounces between New York and Niantic CT in his job.  We were lucky to get a nice evening visit with him and catch up.  His Niantic cottage is close to the water and we can see why he escapes the big city as much as he can.  We are sad to be leaving this area as we U-turn and head back south again to get to Raleigh by Memorial Day.  We highly recommend putting this place on your bucket list!

Civil War Tour

Though it wasn't actually planned this way, the last two weeks have been an amazing refresher about the American Civil War.  We arrived in Appomattox, Virginia after leaving Raleigh and realized we had landed in the heart of the civil war surrendar that occurred in April 1865.  Our RV park was across the road from a new Confederate Museum and we were only a few miles from where General Robert E. Lee surrendered the armies of Northern Virginia to General Ulysees S. Grant.

Because it was the annual anniversary of this surrender, we caught the end of a week-long series of events and presentations about the war in both the museum and at the Appomattox Court House grounds where the surrender actually occurred.  We both found ourselves remembering small pieces from our long-ago school history lessons, but we definitely got a much more detailed experience.

While in the area, we also spent a day with former Austin friends, Bob and Karen Rasmussen.  Funny enough, they took us to another historic site -- Thomas Jefferson's second home in Poplar Forest (west of Lynchburg VA).  Besides being a cool place to tour, there was a craft beer festival going on to raise funds for the organization who is maintaining/restoring the site.  Needless to say, we had to contribute to the cause and sample some of the special brews.  Below is a picture of the 4 of us in front of Jefferson's house.

Our next RV park was in Louisa, VA, for a night to visit with a special cousin, Annie Gavan Tillack and her husband David. He is an avid (and successful) hunter and we were fortunate to drive away with a lovely chunk of venison bologna to fortify us for our next stop -- Washington D.C.

I can't say enough about our 9 days there.  We were in Cherry Hill RV park which is specifically known for its D.C. proximity. It was easy to access the metro to go in to the city -- which we did almost every day.  We even drove the car in several evenings... once with the bikes so we could ride all over the Mall and see the big monuments.  We both lived in nearby towns as children and remembered bits and pieces of visits there, but to enjoy and appreciate the museums and history as adults is definitely something special too. I even got my picture taken with the cherry blossoms!

We decided to pace ourselves and not try to do more than 2 big things each day with one exception... the Holocaust Museum by itself was enough for one day.  To continue our Civil War experience, we made it a point to go to Ford's Theater where President Lincoln was assassinated only 5 days after Lee surrendered to Grant in Appamatox. In fact, John Wilkes Booth's original plan was to just kidnap him and perhaps ransom him to end the war in the South's favor.  The war surrender changed all of this and he went for a kill instead.  We didn't get to do everything on our D.C. list, so we'll just have to come back!

I write this update from our next stop -- Dover, Pennsylvania.  So far we have made day trips via car to Hershey (to visit the chocolate) and Gettysburg (to visit the battlefields). Though the exact spot where Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1863 isn't marked, we did get to see the railroad station where he arrived and see the house he slept in before that speech.  The National Park Service has a fabulous museum, painted cyclorama, and movie about the 3 days of the battle. Before the invention of "moving pictures" to visually tell stories, Cycloramas were used.  This one was opened to the public in 1883, is 27 feet tall and 359 feet in circumfirence, and is mounted in a circle so you can see the full battle scenes (and resulting devastation) in a full 360 degrees.

Not sure that we have any more Civil War history in any of our next stops.  Guess we'll find out!

Spring break cruise and then further North

After suffering through a cold month in Raleigh (have already decided to wait an extra month before heading up here NEXT year), we took a break and enjoyed a Caribbean cruise over the school "spring break" with Jeffrey's brother David, his wife (and my college friend) Mary, and their 3 terrific kids -- Karl (age 17), Anna (15), and Isaac (13).  They had never cruised before, so we got to enjoy watching them explore cruise ship life for the first time.

We sailed on the Norwegian Epic from Miami to St Maarten, St Thomas, and the Bahamas.  The boat held over 4000 passengers (biggest one we've ever been on), so there was no lack of things to do.  I must say that bowling and playing pool when the boat is rocking is an interesting challenge. We also really enjoyed the shipboard entertainment which included Blue Man Group and a Cirque show.  Mary even got tapped to go on stage with the Blue Men to be part of the show and was a celebrity for the rest of the cruise as fellow passengers came up to her commenting about it.  I have included a few pictures from our snorkeling adventure below.

Got back to Raleigh and was pleasantly surprised by beautiful warm weather.  Our RV neighbor said it was cold and rainy the entire time we were gone (glad we missed it).  We have proof of the rain part as our tupperware container that catches water from our small slide leak was just about full.  We had this leak addressed at our last service appointment and it no longer leaks when the slide is OUT, but now leaks when the slide is IN... go figure.  It is back on the list to re-look at when we have another service appointment in the summer. Luckily it doesn't stop us from traveling... just a nuisance.

As promised, below is the next few months of our travel itinerary!

4/12 - 4/13:  Appomattax, VA -- Parkview RV Park to see friends Karen & Bob Rasmussen
4/14: Louisa, VA -- Small Country Campground to see 2nd cousin Annie Gavan and husband David
4/15 - 4/23:  College Park, MD -- Cherry Hill RV Park to pig out on Wash D.C. museums & monuments
4/24 - 4/30:  Dover, PA -- Gettysburg Farm RV to enjoy more USA history
5/1:  Lake Ariel, PA -- Just a one night stay to get us closer to our next stop
5/2:  Wallkill, NY -- Newberg KOA to visit friends Thorne Ventura and gal pal Lynne
5/3 - 5/9:  North Branford, CT -- Totoket RV Park to connect with Jeffrey's cousins Tim and Pete Martin + see the CT coastline
5/10 - 5/16:  Old Mystic, CT -- Seaport Campground to see college roommate Lisa Pickett and her husband Zack + maybe a car day trip or two into Rhode Island
5/17 - 5/18:  Back to North Branford to catch a quick visit with friends Guy & Joan Clark
5/19 - 5/23:  Hightail it back down to Raleigh NC
5/24 - 6/23:  Another month with our Raleigh friends and family
6/24 - 6/28:  On the road back to Florida
6/29 - 7/5:  A week near Gainesville, FL in the Williston Crossings RV Park
7/6 - 7/7:  A few days in Seffner FL prepping for our RV service appointment
7/8:  Max goes into the shop to have his floor worked on AGAIN.  Hopefully they'll get the grout right this time... plus fix that slide leak.  We are proud that we haven't managed to break anything else yet!

Chasing the cold weather to NC

Wow, how time flies when you are having fun! It has been over 3 weeks since my last post as we were about to leave Gainesville FL on our way to a 6-week stint in NC. Heavy rain and storms chased us across FL to Jacksonville for a one-night stop so we could visit with Jeffrey's brother Richard and his wife Cathie. We almost stayed a second night to wait out some heavy rain activity, but were lucky as the weather moved past us by late morning so we could drive through Georgia for our next one-night stay near the southern border of SC and then another night near the northen border.

This gave us a chance to try our new annual Passport America membership that gives you discounts for short stays at certain parks.  If these are along your route, they are a great deal at 50% off.  We haven't yet tried the "stay overnight in a Walmart parking lot" option as we prefer a park instead. It may sound like we aren't driving very far every day, but we have determined that 200 miles a day or less is ideal and we like to get to our destination by 2pm to have some day left to explore or relax.

Made our final road trip "leg" on February 28th to get us near Raleigh, NC where we have two of Jeffrey's brother's, their wives (both of which Maren went to college with), two nephews, and a niece.  We also arrived just in time to celebrate a milestone birthday of my maid-of-honor.  She also happens to be one of our sister-in-laws, having met one of Jeffrey's brothers at our wedding.  Lucky us!

Max is parked in nearby Clayton (since Raleigh itself does not have RV parks), but we are only a 25 minute drive to the nearest family and are spending as much time as we can hanging out with the them as well as connecting with former IBM friends who are now based here. We are also getting lots of experience with cold weather.  We have had numerous nights that dipped below freezing and require us to decide to run either our propane furnaces, our heat pumps, or both.  Thankfully, Max's dark paint warms him/us up quickly once the sun comes up, so we aren't needing heaters during the day.  By the way, this dark paint is NOT as welcome in the summer months!

Our plan is to be here until mid-April, but We have been busy planning our travels for the few months beyond NC so we can find parks along our path. It is really quite a process -- decide where to go and who to see, what parks are nearby, do they match our needs, get a reservation, etc. Some RVers don't bother planning in this detail, but we are still newbies and prefer to have things arranged ahead as much as possible.  The size of our rig (41 feet) also limits what parks we can stay in as some only have spaces that are smaller.

I'll post our next itinerary soon :-)  For now, enjoy the picture below... Max hanging out with the "big boys" at a rest area we stopped at on the way north.