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
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We arrived at Mill Creek Campground Monday around 2pm to find our mini-reunion group had just pulled in as well. Mill Creek is a wonderful Corp of Engineers park on Table Rock Lake near Branson, MO. We had planned this trip with friends way back last year and booked our sites just as the window opened to make sure we had sites together. Little did we know, we booked the most coveted sites in the park out at the end of the peninsula. We were surrounded by water on 3 sides and had great views of the lake activity. The sunsets were also pretty amazing and each evening offered a different palate to photograph. This park is was quiet and well kept. Bathrooms and showers were always clean and the sites were well cared for. We even spent some time talking to the hosts and restroom attendants about bidding for COE positions. They were a wealth of knowledge and we feel more confident on accurately bidding on those in the future. One thing we did not like however is that they said the park here requires a three year commitment. At this time, that is not something we are looking to commit to as we want to get out and travel. We know many other COE parks do not require this long of a committment so a COE workcamping position is not out of the question. We spent alot of time relaxing with friends enjoying the view. We did not have set agendas and had a very relaxed timeline. Our boys took their first road trip and came down Thursday evening to Tuesday morning. It was great to have them join us and the group was happy to see them again. The main focus of this visit was a mini-reunion of sorts for Rick and his Army buddies, Kirk and Bill. They were stationed together in West Germany (Fulda, Germany) in the mid 80's as part of the 11th Armored Calvary, "The Guardians of the Frontiers of Freedom". This was the time just prior to the wall coming down between East and West Germany. Every year their entire unit has a reunion in June and we have attended many in the past years. This year the reunion was in Boston, and unfortunately our travels and timeline would not lend to us being out east so we decided to plan a mini-reunion in a central location for the small group. Bill and Denise hailing from Texas, Kirk & Betsy from Northern Missouri and us from Wisconsin, Kirk and Betsy scouted locations and found this gem of a park in southern MO near Branson. We hoped to have a couple other troopers join us but plans did not line up. Hopefully we will see them next year at the reunion in Las Vegas. As you can see by the pictures, good times were had by all and some of the ol' libations from the years in Germany flowed freely. Outside of relaxing and reminiscing, we did plan a couple excursions. Some successful, some not. On Wednesday we ventured to Top of the Rock Ozark Heritage Preserve. This is an amazing location perched above Table Rock Lake. It was developed by Bass Pro Shops Johnny Moris and has an Arnold Palmer golf course and driving range, a golf cart tour of the area and caves, a Ozarks Natural History museum, as well as Big Cedar Lodge and amazing restaurants and shops. We took the Cave and Nature Trail golf cart tour and were able to get a military discount. They do charge $10 for parking but you can then use the $10 coupon they give you to apply it to any purchase, including the golf cart tour. They offer 2 and 4 seat golf carts , so our group of 6 took one of each. The views were amazing and the property was a very natural, but beautifully manicured setting. The bridges were Amish built and it looked as if they were going to be building another one over a ravine. This was a self guided tour and you could take as long as you wanted and had plenty of pull off parking spots to take in the scenery. Several of the waterfalls pooled and flowed over the golf cart path, making it more adventurous but never compromising safety. The paths were paved and roped to ensure there was no off-roading, much to the chagrin of the guys. The tour also had a cave that you drove through and had a drive up "Bat Bar" that served beverages. Of course, we couldn't pass that up! After the tour, we took the shuttle to the other end of the preserve to see the golf course, restaurants, shops and sink hole. Yep, you read that right, they discovered a sink hole in 2015 after some heavy rains, right next to the driving range. The Cathedral of Nature sink hole started out as 70 feet wide and 40 feet deep and is now 350 wide and 200 feet deep. There is some great footage here and more information on the journey of this amazing discovery. There is also a beautiful chapel, perched on a cliff, overlooking the lake that no doubt hosts amazing weddings. The entire property is amazing, thoughtfully done and a beautiful tribute to the area and its ancestors. We loved it soo much that we went back on Friday with the boys and took the nature trail tour again and also went thru the natural history museum. We were all amazed at the extensive collection amassed in this one location and how well the history of the Ozarks was told throughout. Thursday, before the boys arrived, we went out to check out one of the oldest icons in Branson, Dick's 5 and 10 in downtown Branson. It reminded us of the old Woolworth's, minus a malt & ice cream counter. They had everything in there and more. After everyone purchased their mementos, we headed over to The Farmhouse restaurant for some good ole home cooking. On Sunday, the group decided to head up to Springfield to check out the worlds largest Bass Pro Shop, Museum and Aquarium. Since I was a bit under the weather, I stayed back to keep an eye on the homestead. Everyone had a great time and there was soo much to see. It was a day of lots of walking and seeing some amazing things. Here is just a few of the pictures from the museum and aquarium. Since the boys and Denise and Bill were heading out Tuesday morning, we decided to do a jet boat ride in Branson on Monday. Since none of us were really fond of doing the Branson strip and battling the crowds and traffic, we were excited to see that the jet boat took off from Branson Landing, which is on the "quieter" side of Branson or what they also call Old Branson. I had called ahead to make sure they had room for us and was assured there was plenty of seats on the 4:45pm ride and to come on down. Well due to the curvy roads and traffic, that is a 30 to 40 minute journey. Once there, I called again to confirm their kiosk location as Branson Landing is an open air shopping and dining district. They gave us directions and again, said to come on down. Once we got to the kiosk, we were told that they cancelled the 4:45pm ride as they did not have enough people to go out and the next ride would be the following day. It seems they need at least 20 people and we only had 8. Interestingly enough though, several other groups came and inquired as well and were told the same thing. Doing the simple math, with those other inquiries we probably would have had enough people. We figured they really just did not want to go out again and turned everyone away. WOW, that was a disappointment! Not wanting it to be a wasted trip, we decided to drown our sorrows in some chocolate and ice cream! We then went back to the campground and enjoyed a wonderful steak and corn dinner and then smore's later around the fire. To cap off a wonderful evening, we were treated to fireworks across the the lake at a local resort. Tuesday was an early morning with a 6am departure for the boys and a 9:30 departure for Denise and Bill. They each have a long way to travel and the boys are doing another one day roadtrip back home to WI, which takes about 10-11 hours. They took a different route back to see some new scenery and avoid St Louis. Can't wait to hear about their adventures when they get home. As for the rest of our time here, we will be doing some more serious R&R! Tuesday afternoon we are going to a local farmers market and then a quiet dinner back at the campground. Wednesday we will be doing some laundry and other household chores to ready for our trip to St. Louis to visit with family. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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