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!