These last two weeks have flown by at the air field, literally! We have been busy whittling down the list of our workamping projects, getting in some last-minute sightseeing, getting warranty work done on the truck and making preparations for our departure and subsequent stops. These last two weeks we have been busy with a variety of jobs around the air field. We repaired and stained the porch on the cabin and touched up the stain on the cabin itself. Such a cute little cabin! We also painted some metal disks and washers that will be used to mark property lines and guide planes to parking. We have done a lot of roundup and tree trimming around the properties as well. Our focus then turned to one of the other properties with the airfield affectionately called “the nut farm”. It has a nut barn, nut shed, sunroom off the nut shed, trailer and camping pad off the nut barn and a lot of nut trees. The naming comes from the previous owner’s dedication to planting a nut tree every time he had to take down another tree on the property. There are a variety of nut trees all over the property. This last spring, the nut farm, being in the lower land, on the other side of the road from the air field, closer to the Ohio River, flooded. With that came a lot of clean up. The owners were able to move a lot of equipment and other items prior to the flood, but the buildings themselves and other items that were unable to be moved were all flooded and required a lot of cleanup. We have replaced lights at the nut shop and are using a lot of Zinser mold paint after the shop and sunroom have been sprayed for mold. Rick also rebuilt and replaced 2x4’s that were rotten under and around a window in the sunroom. One of the group projects that we were able to complete is the replacement of the windsock at the airfield. With the windsock being up on a 16 ft pole, it took a couple folks to hold the ladder for the lucky chap, Rich, climbing to the top. The new windsock looks really nice waving in the breeze! We had another couple, Keith and Kathy, visit the air field and spend a couple days with us enjoying the peaceful location, a campfire and local establishments. We enjoyed talking with them about their full-time travels, their planes and history in flying. They know our hosts, Rich and Ginger, through their aviation backgrounds. They are originally from Alaska and travel the US in a 1948 Spartan. Truly an oldie but a goodie! We hope to cross paths with them again. Keith, Kathy, Rich and Ginger were kind enough to help us cheer on the Milwaukee Brewers in the playoffs, but alas, the World Series was not in the cards for them this year. Maybe next year Brew Crew! We are excited to see them at Spring Training while we are in AZ early next year! As for our sightseeing, we wanted to spend one more day in Louisville before we left. We decided to go to the Frasier Museum in downtown Louisville. We have heard good things about this museum and it did not disappoint. It was well done and had sections on the history of the area and the building it was in, a section on bourbon, including a bourbon room that displayed a bottle from all of the Kentucky bourbon makers. There was also a section on Louis & Clark that was very interesting. After spending a couple hours in the museum, we decided to get some BBQ at Doc Crows on Main St in the Bourbon Row. All the buildings in the area have a storied past in the making of Kentucky’s Bourbon and many reminders can be seen in and outside of these buildings. The BBQ was delicious but a bit pricey. Certainly, a splurge for lunch! We then made our way over to Cave Hill cemetery which is highly rated as one of the top places to visit in Louisville. This cemetery dates back 170 years and has an abundance of Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers and families, famous people such as Colonel Sanders and Muhammad Ali and was painstakingly planned with beautiful grounds including lakes, beautiful landscaping and even a cave. They even conduct walking tours. The crazy part…we never took any pictures! It a was probably because we were in a big fat dually truck, driving on roads, just wide enough for us that had headstones right next to the road!! Yiiikes! That was the theme of our day though, very narrow roads, lots of construction and next to no place to park the big truck. But Rick managed to guide the truck through all of it. We even drove through Old Louisville area were the beautiful old mansions resided and through the heart of the University of Louisville where again, construction forced us to sneak through some pretty tight areas. The challenges we endure with a large dually truck. Our day was topped off with a visit to the Louisville Jack O’ Lantern Spectacular. This amazing event is in its 6th year and is VERY popular! We knew that going in, so we purchased our tickets online and arrived well before the gates into the park opened. With ticket booths and gates opening at 6pm, we got in line at 5:15pm. The website warns that weekend lines could be over 2 hours long. I believe it, looking at the line we had on a Thursday night, even prior to the gates opening. Once the gates open, you wind your way through the Iroquois Park Amphitheater area which is well stocked with vendors selling all sorts of snacks and beverages to keep you busy and warm while you wait for the pumpkin trail to open. The 1/3 mile trail opens at dusk and you walk through at your own pace, marveling at all of the spectacular carvings. It is really hard to describe just how amazing this experience was, and the pictures below don’t begin to do them justice. There are over 5,000 carved pumpkins, with over 100 intricately carved masterpieces, carved by various artists that come to the area for the event. The trail is illuminated and there is music and special effects for each themed section of the trail. To preserve the pumpkins, they are kept cool with small computer fans inside and moth balls to keep the animals from nibbling on them. The event is open for a month and some pumpkins will need to be replaced during that time. The artists are on site, carving replacements in a cooled trailer. We took our time looking at all of the amazing pumpkins and photographed several and it took us 45 minutes to walk thru. If anyone is in the Louisville area in October or the beginning of November, we highly recommend going to see this. We are coming into our last week here at Lee Bottom Airfield and will be busy wrapping up workamping projects and getting the RV ready to roll. We also will be going thru everything and pulling together many things to take to Goodwill. Remember our rule…one thing in and one thing out. Thanks for stopping by! SHOP AMAZON HERE
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Yep, that sums up our week. This last week we have been busy with a lot of painting. In previous weeks, Rick has been pressure washing and sanding 3 picnic tables and 2 benches. Well this week we primed and painted them red. Why red? Well they pop and they match the bath house door we replaced and painted a couple weeks ago, that they sit near. You can see before they had a brown, gritty paint on them that was chipping and the benches were unpainted. Now, several coats later, they are a beautiful red! By the way, in the before picture, that is the tractor and mower used to mow the airfield. We also painted a fuel trailer white and the trim black. It really looks sharp now! We then did a little interior decorating in the RV. Since our house is a rolling earthquake and is not suitable for framed pictures, I found WallPops, which are stick on vinyl frames that you can put your pictures in. They are really cool, in that you can move them and reuse them and you can switch out and update pictures. I also ordered a name vinyl that I think really completes the grouping. Since it is fall, which you wouldn’t know it here with temps in the high 80’s and 90’s, we got out our fall decorations. Being that space and weight is at a premium, all our fall decorations fit in a small box. Now Christmas decorations are another story. They are in two bins, but that may whittle down after we have our first Christmas in the RV. We will see. It can’t get bigger because we follow the 1 in, 1 out rule to make sure we get rid of something to bring something new in, be it clothes, dishes, decorations, etc. We are currently getting a bunch of things together to drop off at Goodwill before we leave Southern Indiana. It has been a bit slow in the plane sighting category but a night landing by a Blackhawk made up for it. As you can see in the picture, it was pretty dark out and they landed just a short way from the camper and we sat outside while they were here. Wish we could have seen what they were doing out there because they were there for about 20 minutes. This week was also busy with a lot of baseball watching. Our beloved Brewers are in the post season chase to the World Series and playing some pretty stellar baseball. The issue we have, is that the games are on cable channels and we get spotty cell reception to even get a hot spot going to stream anything, so we have been going into town to watch at local sports bars. We have really taken a liking to Off Broadway, a sports bar in quaint, downtown Madison. They have really good food and a wide range of beers for Rick. With many TV’s, they have been more than accommodating to change channels for us to enjoy the games. We have started planning our travels for when we leave here at the end of the month. The hitch itch is getting stronger and we are excited to see where our travels take us next. SHOP AMAZON HERE
Have any Amazon shopping to do?? Do it from our Amazon link above! We participate in the Amazon affiliate program and we appreciate you using our Amazon link above to make your Amazon purchases. It does not cost you anything additional and helps us to support our blog. You can even save our link as a favorite and use that whenever you search Amazon and make a purchase. Thank you!!! Last week we were able to get more things accomplished at our workcamp location. We completed the door replacement on the bath house, which turned out to be a bit more involved, but turned out really nice in the end. We also were able to get some trees limbed up, other "weed" trees cut down, round up applied to areas and some hay wagon boards replaced. It was a productive week! We also were able to get some work done around the RV too. I took off all the screens and cleaned them and the windows, boy were they dirty! Rick also installed and tweaked an external antennae for better TV reception. He also further diagnosed an issue we are having with our electric hot water heater and we are waiting for the part to arrive. We then took some scenic drives to explore the area more. We are located along the Ohio River Bottom, so we took a lesser traveled narrow dirt road that skirted the river into town and found a great point to see the barges that travel the river. You can see on the other side of the river that the water is down from where it was just last week. We are currently in the midst of continual rain for several days, so I expect that level will rise again. Flooding in the area is a big concern and we have seen markings on buildings and pictures of just how high the water can get in the area and how devastating it can be. I also wanted to try and give an idea of what the narrow road is like that we travel to get to our location. The pictures don't do it justice because you can't really see the grade and continual curve of the road, but it still amazes me that we got a 42 ft RV with a dually truck down this road. To locals, I am sure this is nothing for them to zip up and down with their car, but even with just our big dually truck it is a hold the breathe sort of moment in hopes someone doesn't come down the hill, because there is nowhere to go on this one and a half lane road. One day when we were out on our adventures, and also completing some more of my WeGoLook work, we stumbled upon a great little Mexican place for lunch. From the outside, Diegos doesn't look like anything, but their food more than makes up for it! Each chair in the place is carved with the logo and they had cute little salt and pepper shakers to boot! The food was delicious! Rick had their signature enchiladas and some of their homemade pico de gallo. He loves his pico and this was really good. I had the polo locco which had a yummy cheese sauce. The portions were huge and we were more than full for the rest of the day! Hopefully the rain here will stop in the next couple days as we are planning a trip into Louisville to check out Churchill Downs museum and hopefully a horse race. SHOP AMAZON HERE
Have any Amazon shopping to do?? Do it from our Amazon link above! We participate in the Amazon affiliate program and we appreciate you using our Amazon link above to make your Amazon purchases. It does not cost you anything additional and helps us to support our blog. You can even save our link as a favorite and use that whenever you need to make an Amazon purchase. Thank you!!! We headed north Thursday to our first workamping experience. We left our moochdocking spot at my Dad's and headed 3 hours north to Peninsula State Park-Welckers campground. The journey was uneventful, except for a little rain, and we pulled in around 3pm. This state park is located in Door County, which swells with tourists in the summer from all over the world, but mostly from IL. LOL Fellow cheeseheads will get that reference! Peninsula State Park is one of the states largest and busiest state parks with over 3700 acres, with about ¾ undeveloped. It has really everything within the park. There are 5 different campgrounds, a full golf course and restaurant, a lighthouse to tour, a beach complete with store and all sorts of water rentals, lots of trails and a wonderful outdoor playhouse in the summer that has some great comedy musicals. When we arrived we checked in at the office and found that our contact had gone home sick. We met one of the rangers who gave us a bunch of keys, a Rubbermaid bin and manuals and said everything we need is in the bin and at the site, including the Gator that we are able to use for our duties. They were very nice to call one of the other seasoned hosts to come over to our site to answer any questions. I have to say, I was a bit nervous about being handed the materials and being let loose to figure it out. The questions were mounting as we drove to our site. Most of the park is wooded, as is our campground, Welcker's Point. I was nervous about getting down the roads with our tall, 42 ft 5th wheel, hoping we would not be scrapping too much on trees aside or above us. We did pretty good with just a brush of leaves here and there. Our site is quite wide and Rick was able to wiggle the 5th wheel in to fit lengthwise. Being the hosts, we do get a larger site and electric. Unfortunately, most WI state parks are set up the same way, with only electric. The good thing is, in talking to other hosts, we can get additional water from the water fountain in front of the bath house next to us and use our little wheely dump tank and dump in the man hole near the bathrooms. Not ideal, but we will make it work. Being next to the bath house helps in that we can use the showers and bathrooms there most of the time. Our campground consists of 81 non-electric sites in a large loop with another cutting through the middle and a small loop of 7 sites off to the side. We have 3 bath houses, one of which does not have showers. Dumpsters are at the entrance road to our campground. We also have responsibility for Welcker’s Point, the small day use area across the main road from our campground. What are our duties as camp hosts you ask??? Well that was sort of vague but we knew we had to check sites after campers left, making sure to empty trash and ash from the firepits and check sites for trash and take down the departure day tags. Ok cool, we got that. We do have a cleaning crew that comes through daily, in years past it used to be twice a day. They clean the bathrooms and stock them. We then check them periodically to make sure there is no issues and they have TP. After that it gets a bit fuzzy. In talking with a couple other hosts that have been here for years, it is very loosely managed. There is no micro-managing of campground hosts. We had another camp host come over and took us to show us where the maintenance shop is, supplies, where to gas up the gator, etc. You can imagine we had a ton of questions for him. He has been a campground host for over twenty years and was a wealth of knowledge. He introduced us to the lead maintenance man and gave us pointers as to how to write up maintenance tickets, etc. We also have responsibility for the day use area and our guess is that we check for trash there and empty the grills. We also set up a charging station at our site on the extra picnic table we have. That has become very popular and our campers, young and old appreciate the ability to charge phones, ipads and batteries. After that, we are just learning as we go as to what other “duties” are. SO far, we have checked some sites for the office when they called, helped campers with directions, posted the daily weather forecast on our information board, trimmed a branch for a camper concerned about it brushing his camper when he left and answering A LOT of questions about our RV and our full-time lifestyle. There has also been a change in who enforces and monitors the park. In years past it was the park rangers, this year it is the DNR wardens. We get the distinct feeling that some folks, including other hosts are still getting used to that idea and have not quite warmed up to it yet. We were given a flip phone with pre-programmed numbers for us to call, such as the office, multiple people’s names…not sure who they are or what they do and the rangers. Umm, no Wardens! So what happens if we need them??? We were fortunate to have the supervising warden on duty our second day and he was very nice and answered some questions for us and came back with a print out of the wardens schedules and all their phone numbers. I then promptly programmed them in to our phone. Scary thought was that we are not the first hosts this year using that phone and who would have had to contact a warden. Once we had the 5th wheel set up, we got our first host issue. We didn’t even have a chance to read all the manuals we were given. Geeesh. One of the three bath houses had both sinks in the women’s bathroom plugged and overflowing with water still running. We knew we needed to wear our safety vests when riding on the gator, so we grabbed those, found the gator key and drove down to see what we were dealing with. By the time we arrived, the water had stopped running and both sinks were full. Now what do we do??? Well that is up to you, there is no clear direction in all those manuals. We were told by another host to just use common sense. Ok then. Rick tried to take saran wrap and unplug them but that did not work. Most of the water on the floor had gone down the floor drain and there were no puddles. We then hung an out of order sign on that bathroom and locked the door. Getting back to the site we filled out a maintenance ticket we found in the bin with the manuals and looked through the manuals for what to do next. Do we call maintenance on a Thursday night? Do we call the office? Do we wait until the next day and give it to someone? How fast do they come out to fix it? Are we supposed to do more to fix it? All great questions with no answers in any of the manuals or bins. We decided to wait until the morning until the seasoned host was coming over to show us around. We had the bathroom out of order and locked so the issue couldn’t get worse, however it was an inconvenience to the campers on that end of the park. We still do not know how long it should take before something gets addressed from a ticket we write up, because there are some tickets already in and some other showers and toilets out of order. When we asked another host, he just said, it is not real speedy. I guess we will see. This is certainly a departure from our corporate lives where there were step by step action plans and set expectations. I have read from other full-timers blogs that this is an adjustment that will take time. I do however want to mention to the office staff who we have been communicating with prior to starting, that it would really be helpful for a new host to have some sort of “A day in the life of…” or one document that gives you and idea of what your daily duties would be and some examples of other tasks that could pop up AND what the maintenance ticket process should look like. I don’t think this has been too much of an issue with many of the folks being return hosts but it sure would help us newbies out! Ok, thanks for letting me rant for a minute. Don’t get me wrong, we like camp hosting and talking with folks. We even had one camper stop by while we were emptying trash and chat for just over an hour! Campers love the park and are happy to see a friendly face to answer questions and just say “Hi.” We love toddling around on the gator, checking sites, writing down the site #’s of those that will be leaving in the next day or two so we know how busy we will be on a given day. That really helps us to plan our personal stuff and sightseeing. So far we have only gotten out to do some laundry, visit a winery and orchard for some much needed “supplies”, visit the little local grocery store and a quick breakfast to use their wifi. That brings up another issue we ran into…cell and internet. Being the campground that is the furthest out from the entrance and the rest of the village of Fish Creek, our cell and internet is pretty much non-existent. Our Verizon phones may get 1 bar of 4G intermittently but my AT&T phone is non-existent. We recently switched to a unlimited plan for the AT&T phone and also received free TV (think mini-Directv Now plan) that did not count against our data or hotspot. Well, so much for using that while we are here. We did find out that if we go down to the concession store at the beach, they do have wifi, albeit a bit weak and VERY popular. We are managing and it has given us a bit of a break from being contantly “on”. Apologies to everyone if these posts are a bit further apart, but it is difficult to get down to the beach and we are a bit gun-shy after our first trip down to read a couple emails and check FB. We took a ride down on the gator and had our camp host vests on while we sat outside the store checking our phones. After about 10 minutes an older gentleman wandered over and began to tell us about how long he has been coming to this park and everything he felt was wrong with it, what is not working and just general complaining…over and over and over again. We listened, painfully and throughout the discussion we mentioned that the park really wanted visitor feedback and suggested he fill out one of the suggestion cards, saying that if they didn’t know about his concerns, they wouldn’t have a chance to address them. Little did we know, and we were told later by other camp hosts that he is very well known and this is his usual MO. They also mentioned that him and his wife go through all of the campgrounds looking at the campsites and complain when the camphosts take any wood left behind. We think they are looking for leftovers for themselves and sure enough, we saw his wife in sites at a campground they are not staying in. It certainly takes all kinds. I would say they are the exception and not the rule, as most campers are very friendly. Since that encounter we have not had a chance to get back to the beach for some wifi and we are very keen to watch for places that offer free wifi, like the cute little restaurant outside the park entrance, Julie’s Café, that offers it. We have already visited them for a breakfast to take advantage of that little luxury. As for TV, we have been fortunate to get several local channels, although at times they fade in and out. I also mentioned that they have a wonderful theater with 3 different shows during the summer season that are very popular throughout Door County. It is an open air theater and all shows are at night, under the stars. We have been to Peninsula State Park several times and unfortunately have never been to a show. However, yesterday, the marketing director for the theater stopped by to introduce herself and provide promotional materials to hand out to the campers. She also provided us with complimentary tickets to each of the three shows and then gave us a couple more for our visitors that will join us later in August. What a pleasant surprise!!! So overall, we really like being here and look forward to getting a routine going so that we can plan some outings and our routine trips to the grocery store and laundromat. More to come on our adventures here and how we manage some of our creature comforts that we have come to really appreciate here, like wifi, showers and empty RV tanks. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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