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  :-)