Often times full time RV life is depicted as all rainbows and unicorns. Well I am here today to tell you it is NOT! Not by a long shot! Ok, I take that back. We love this lifestyle but sometimes, when it rains it pours. This week has been one of those weeks! We are still here in the beautiful Palo Duro Canyon State Park, but since we have been closed to campers and limited day use, the wildlife has definitely made themselves known. We have seen coyotes, dall sheep, a herd of free roaming cattle in our camping loop, turkeys constantly in our campsite and that is not all that have found our campsite... Mice and packrats have taken up residence and caused an all out war for us trying to fend them off. I am afraid we are loosing the battle! These are determined rodents and we have reached the breaking point! We have tried everything from bright lights under the RV, sonic plug-ins in every bay and inside, peppermint oil, fresh cab, sprays, powders, etc. But now the packrats have destroyed the outer and inner seal on our kitchen slide and we have had to tape up the damage. That's it, waving the white flag! Oh not only that, but last night the power went out in our loop and came back on but not for us. After some investigation, it looks like our EMS system took the hit! Oh great, another $400 to fork out, however, bright side, it saved our entire RV electrical system and expensive electronics inside from getting zapped. Well good news, after letting the EMS system sit and recover from the hit, it is back up and running today. Did I mention the area is the latest Covid-19 hotspot??? However, we have really limited our personal contact with people outside the park. We have only been to two restaurants in the past month and one we were the only people there until another family came in and were seated far away. We do grocery pick up for the most part and have also started receiving meals from Home Chef. We have really enjoyed these dinners as they have included everything we need to cook a delicious, high quality meal and get us out of our same old, same old rut. It is highly customizable for the number of dinners, low carb, vegetarian, extra protein, etc. If your interested, you can check it out here and get a $35 off! Our sightseeing has been limited to drive bys. We have tried to make the most of it, but there are several things we will need to check out the next time we are in the area. We were able to visit the famous Cadillac Ranch where there are several classic cadillacs buried in a field on the side of I-40. The big draw is that you can bring your own spray paint and go to town until your hearts content. It was interesting to see some real artistic pieces and someone's take on the current epidemic. We also visited the Legs of Amarillo and Combine City. Amarillo area certainly corners the market on quirky roadside attractions! Our time here at Palo Duro Canyon State Park is coming to an end and we finally have campers back again, albeit only open to those who already had reservations. We are enjoying having a normal camp host experience again. We are leaving tomorrow, but not before we had one last interpretive host experience. We took Coy, the park coyote mascot, for a photo shoot around the park. We had a great time posing Coy for "Where's Coy" pictures and the park guests were entertained by him as well. It is also getting pretty hot here and has hit 100 a couple times. Time to migrate north to cooler temps! We have booked a couple Boondockers Welcome and Harvest Host sites for our journey north and we have been very lucky they offer electric hookup...for free!!!! A castle near Oklahoma City is our next destination. Camping at a castle??? Yup! See you down the road! SHOP AMAZON HERE
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I must say we have had fun putting this post together and reminiscing on all the places we have been! Truly an amazing adventure and we got to see family and friends along the way and even made some new friends for which we are ever grateful! We have traveled to 16 different states and put 9860 miles on the Solitude. Many people qualify a state they stayed in differently and for us that is staying at least one night in the state, not just driving through. We stayed at 50 different locations. That is almost 1 new location a week, however some were just a day while we were traveling to a new location and others were for over a month. Of those, we stayed at: -2 free workamping spots -2 family & friends moochdocking spots -1 Boondockers Welcome spot -2 Harvest Host spots -2 Fairgrounds -7 Passport America locations -2 County Parks -3 City Parks -3 Corp of Engineers Parks -11 State Parks -15 Private Parks Favorite Places We Have Stayed Of course our friends and family are tops on the list!!! Fort Wilderness at Disney is a no brainer, but at an avg night rate of $115, this was a special visit and not a normal occurrence! We stayed in the 1200 loop and really liked the location. It was half way between the lake and the bus stop to the parks. We rented a golf cart from an off-site vendor and had a great time zipping around the campground because it is sooo big! THe amenities were amazing, including the laundry rooms that had a site online you could see if there were machines free to use or how long your laundry had to go! Amazing idea! We stayed 11 nights, which was perfect to visit Disney and the greater Orlando area. We flew our boys down and enjoyed a memorable family vacation! Read about our Disney trip here. Another great, but expensive place was Anchor Down in Dandridge, TN, just north of Pigeon Forge and the Great Smoky Mountains. Beautiful views, great amenities and the sites with fireplaces...oh my!! Read about our time at Anchors Down here. In the reasonably priced private campground category, Belle Ridge Retreat in small town Monterey, TN was a winner. This is a relatively new campground that has some great amenities! Nestled in the woods on the Cumberland Plateau, this beautiful park has tons of trails for hiking and ATV's. You can rent an UTV and go exploring, including caves! The bath house and laundry room is also top notch! Read about our peaceful time here. Best up and coming park is Rest Up Camping & RV Corral in southern IL. When we visited in July 2018, they had just opened and we were one of the first campers. This will definitely be a contender for top park with FHU and lots of activities and a yummy saloon and grill! You can read about our time here. Best Corp of Engineer park had to be hands down Mill Creek COE park on Table Rock Lake in Branson. Our site out on the end of the Peninsula had water views on three sides with amazing sunsets. Great site to relax and enjoy time with friends. Read about our time at Mill Creek here. Best State Park is a tough category because we had a bunch of great parks that we love but Topsail Preserve State Park in Santa Rosa Beach, FL topped the list. How can you beat being that close to the gulf and have full hook ups! A true gem and we met up with friends and had a great time! Read about our time here. We really do need to mention Don Carter State Park in Gainesville, GA as a runner up! Most sites have lake views and with almost FHU (except for black tank), it really was a wonderful park. This is also close to where we used to live in GA so we had a great home base for visiting the old haunts and friends. Read about our time at this great park here. Our best public free spot has to be Mortimer Farms in AZ, part of the Harvest Host network. Rick made a lifelong friend with Pedro the donkey and we enjoyed the hospitality and delicious food they have to offer! We could mention soo many other parks that were close runners up. We really got lucky with some great places to stay this first year but had a couple of duds. Oh well, that is why the house has wheels, right?! For those interested in all the locations we stayed, you can check out our campground tab here. We will try to keep that up with every place we stayed and the details in hopes that it helps others find great sites too. Workamping Gigs We have been fortunate to find some pretty cool workamping gigs in our first year on the road. We have heard horror stories from other workampers and we are happy to say that we did not have any crazy stories to add! We really did enjoy all three of our gigs and, they were all different. -Peninsula State Park- We were camp hosts in one of the 5 campgrounds within the park for a month in July and August. We took care of Welker's campground and Welker's Point day use area. We had about 55 sites that we picked up in after campers left, checked trash and spot checked the restrooms. There was full time staff who cleaned the restrooms. You can read about our time here. -Lee Bottom Flying Field- Here we helped the really cool owners, Rich & Ginger, on some projects around the airfield such as powerwashing and painting picnic tables and a fuel wagon, replace a door and cleaned up a bath house, some landscaping and much more. We spent September and October down on the river bottom and had a great time exploring the area and hanging out watching the planes land right in front of our RV! You can read about our time here. -Val Vista Village- At Val Vista we worked for Cal-Am Food Services in the bar & grill. This was quite the experience, especially when Happy Hour rolled around every day. Rick rocked it in the kitchen and I ran food and drinks out to the tables and pool. You can read more about our experience here We have some really neat workamping gigs lined up for our second year. These workamping opportunities allow us to not only continue this lifestyle, but explore places for longer periods of time that we may not have gone to without the job. We really love all the different experiences and will continue to search out the next cool opportunity. Who knows...we might just be photographers in the near future...hint, hint. Top Places We Visited We also want to identify the top places we have visited and again, really hard to keep this to just a couple so we will post pictures from some of them. Again, we could go on and on because we have seen an unbelievable amount of amazing things! This year has allowed us to see more than we ever would have in our old sticks & bricks life. We are truly blessed and are excited to see what year 2 brings! Speaking of year 2, we are back in the Midwest for a couple more months and then we will be making our way down to TX for some camp hosting and some R&R on the beach for the winter. After that remains to be seen. Now that we have a year under our belts, I am trying to lay back a bit on the planning and see where the road takes us. SHOP AMAZON HERE
Would you like to help support our blog and keep these updates coming? It is easy to help, just do your Amazon shopping through the link above. You still get all your Amazon Prime benefits and the prices are the same. Since we are in the Amazon affiliate program, any shopping you do through our link, provides a little kickback to support this blog. Thank you for stopping by!!!! Wow, we still cannot believe an entire year has gone by since Rick retired, we sold the house and everything in it and hit the road! We are now a month into our second year and we can both confidently and passionately say that we love it and have no regrets!! Has every day been rainbows and unicorns? Hello no, but what lifestyle is? Life is a rollercoaster and we take the ups with the downs but we love this full time RV rollercoaster. Cruisin down the road in our rolling earthquake! We always are checking the truck and RV to ensure we are staying on top of any issues and fixing them as they come up. Thank goodness Rick is very handy and we are not left to waste away at a RV dealership while we wait for them to fix something. So let's start there... What have we fixed or updated this year?? Upgrades --We have replaced the micro/conv oven...twice. We had internal circuits and fuses blow. The first time Grand Design shipped us a new one to where we were workamping and the second time we went and bought a nicer Samsung residential unit that fit in our space with an extended warranty. We are currently working with Grand Design on a possible reimbursement. --We replaced our TV's with all Samsung Smart TV's. We also installed a TV in our front bay so we can watch sports and movies outside. The Samsung's also give us the ability to mirror off of our Samsung phones. We have an AT&T unlimited plan and with that, we got a mini Directv Now package that gives us some cable channels and we download channel and sports apps to mirror shows onto our TV screen. That has worked really well and we don't pay for any satellite or other TV packages. --As you can see in the picture, we also installed Snap Pads on our jacks. They are made from recycled materials and really give a nice big foot pad and in parks that require something under your jacks, these fit the bill. Super easy to put on! --Early on we were faced with no cell or internet service so we needed to solve for that one quickly. We had no Verizon or AT&T...ohh the horror! LOL We invested in a WeBoost cell booster were able to boost the almost non existent signal we had to something we could use. This baby is not cheap but saved our bacon several times and since I now do some online work as we travel, it is really now a necessity to have a good connection. --Decorating...or shall we say lack of. I have not done much of anything in this area. I am not sure I want a bunch of stuff that I need to put away and set up again every time we move. We have come to like the simplicity and the quick cleaning around the RV, so we may not do too much decorating. One thing I did want were some pictures. We found a great solution for a family picture wall. We use WallPops frames. Think of them like FatHead stick on/peel off which hold pictures and you can easily switch out pictures. We also then ordered a cute custom family name wall decal on to complete the grouping. --In the area of comfort, we decided to take the leap and upgrade our RV mattress. We did a good bit of research and went with a Tuft & Needle mattress. We really liked that it had cooling features and a 100 day sleep guarantee. Another plus was that we bought it while in Mesa and it just so happened they had a storefront where you can go and try out the mattresses, hassle free. Super duper bonus, they offered a military discount! After 6 months, we can confidently say that it provides the needed support and for me with my joint replacements, it cradles my hip and shoulder nicely. --One thing we loved from our previous camper that we immediately did in our new home was to upgrade our showerhead with an Oxygenix showerhead. It really does give you the feel of more water pressure with less water! Finally, we added an On the Go portable water softener as we find ourself in areas with hard water often. It really is a nice unit that is easy to regen and set up. Whew...that's alot of stuff, not to mention several are pricey investments, but in the end, that is what they are, investments for our home on wheels. And first year ones at that. The first year is always the most expensive. So from here, we should hopefully have less upgrades...well umm, except for the big one we just had done in Elkhart, but more to come on that in another post coming soon! Repairs We would be lying if we said the rig was perfect and had no issues. However, as rolling earthquakes go, we have been fortunate to have had some minor things that we could repair, besides our one ooops. --While at our first workamping gig at Peninsula State Park in WI, we had a stuck gray dump valve. You can read about how Rick fixed it here. --As we left our first workamping gig , we bent the back left jack and foot. Fortunately we were on our way to the Grand Design rally in Elkhart, IN and they replaced that free of charge for us! They also fixed a couple other minor things for us as well. Read about the repairs and our first rally here. --When we arrived at our second workamping job in S. IN, we noticed that the living room AC was not operating as well anymore. Rick found the issue with the divider baffle and then tapes all the vents, greatly improving the output. Read about that here. --During our stay here we also found the electric side of the hot water heater was not working. Rick talked with one of the GD techs online and was able to fix it by replacing the electric side thermostat. --For the rest of 2018 into 2019 we were doing well with just regular maintenance such as servicing the generator for the first time, flushing the water heater and replacing water filters. We even made it across the country on the very bumpy I-10 to AZ without any issues. --March 1st, as we got ready to move from one RV park to another down the street, we uncovered the RV tires to find a flat tire that we must have picked up a nail in AZ somewhere. This was our first time changing a tire on the RV and working with the spare. Read about it here. --While we wandered around northern AZ, we picked up a stone that cracked the windshield on the truck and had to have that replaced while we were visiting the Grand Canyon. Looking back over the year and recounting our repairs, we really did not have that many issues. Nothing we couldn't take care of. Thankfully!!! I think some of that comes with the anal vigilance we have in checking everything on every move and throughout our travels. Here's hoping our future years are as good as our year one shakedown!! Up next, our first year numbers, where we've been, what we saw and where we worked. Thanks for stopping by!!! SHOP AMAZON HERE
Would you like to help support our blog and keep these updates coming? It is easy to help, just do your Amazon shopping through the link above. You still get all your Amazon Prime benefits and the prices are the same. Since we are in the Amazon affiliate program, any shopping you do through our link, provides a little kickback to support this blog. Thank you for stopping by!!!! We wrapped up our workamping at Lee Bottom Flying Field on Monday, October 29th. We can truly say we enjoyed our time there and consider our hosts, Rich and Ginger, new friends. It is great to see the work we accomplished, with several group projects too. We look forward to stopping by again, either as workampers or even visitors. In preparation for leaving, we were able to do a deep clean and get a few tasks taken care of in the RV. One was the lovely job of defrosting the freezer. It has been almost 4 months since we did it last and it really needed it. We had tried to eat as much food from the freezer as we could over the last couple weeks so that there would not be much to store in the cooler while we defrosted. Once everything was out, I set hot bowls of water in the bottom and chipped away some of the build up since it was soo thick. I then used the hair dryer to speed up the last bits. Once everything was melted, wiped up and dry, I placed cheap, flexible cutting mats on the back wall of the freezer with the shelves holding them in place. This should allow me to just slide those out next time and rinse off the frost which will take much less time to do this in the future. Fingers crossed it works just as slick as it sounds! From Hanover, IN we headed south to Nashville. As Rick was driving, I was scrolling Facebook and saw that a couple we met at the Grand Design Rally in Sept were heading back home to IN on 65N as we were going south on 65. We were able to stop at an exit parking lot and catch up for a bit. It is true, you really do cross paths again and it is never really good-bye but see you later. We had visited Nashville over 10 years ago for one of Rick's Army Reunions, but only stayed for a quick weekend and did not get around town to see much, so this would be a chance for us to be real tourists. We stayed at Two Rivers Campground on the north side of Nashville, near Opryland. This was on the recommendation from RV friends who just stayed there a couple weeks ago. It is a smaller campground with full hookups, a pool, musical entertainment and a shuttle to downtown, which was very convenient. As with most RV parks, sites were close together but for a couple nights, and us being gone most of the time, that was fine. We took advantage of the shuttle to downtown and walked around Lower Broadway and the surrounding streets while marveling at all the honky tonks and stores. They all had live music and even at 11 am on a weekday. We stopped and had lunch at Luke Bryan's 32 Bridge. There were a couple of guys playing in the bar/lounge area who were really good! We sat and listened to them while we ate. We then took a double decker bus ride around Nashville and saw the highlights of the city such as the Parthenon, Ryman, Capitol and the first Fort in Nashville. The tour guide had alot of great information about the towns history as well. Did you know that Nashville's biggest income stream does not come from country music but from healthcare. There are more than 30 hospitals in Nashville, including Vanderbilt. They also have more than 30 higher education institutions. Who knew?? That night we went to the Grand Ole Opry. They started the evening with an interesting video montage of the history of the Opry, the move to the current location and the flood of 2010. We had a great time seeing some current country music acts such as Carly Pierce, Charles Esten (Deacon from Nashville) Lo Cash and Chris Jenson. There was also some up and coming artists as well as some legends, like Bill Anderson who did a very moving tribute song he wrote about a WWIl veteran, who was actually in the audience. Henry Cho, a very funny comedian also performed. It was a really nice evening and even nicer that it was only 5 minutes from the campground! The next day we took a scenic drive down to Franklin to visit my Aunt & Uncle, who we haven't seen in many years. It was great to catch up with them and see their beautiful home. After lunch they took us on a tour of historic Franklin, which is really an adorable town with a wonderful little downtown area. There is alot of growth in the area and construction is everywhere. On the way back we stopped at the Opry Mills Mall near the campground. I have not been in a mall for awhile, and I can honestly say I do not miss it. I can do without the pushy salespeople that aggressively try to get you to try their product while you are walking by, even when you say "No Thank You.". I quickly got my soaps at Bath and Body and we headed over to the Bavarian Bierhaus for a wonderful german dinner. I may not ever get to the real thing in Germany but this one is a close second! We even left with some Asbach brandy chocolate covered cherries! Yumm! The following day we leisurely packed up for our 1 1/2 hour drive on I-40 E to our next destination. It was a rainy, crummy day but the drive did not disappoint with spectacular color! Unfortunately, the pictures just don't do it justice! SHOP AMAZON HERE
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