Our First Year on the Road in Review- Part 2

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.

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Very cool to see our first years journey on a map!

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!!!

My Dad's great pad!

Good friend Lauralie & family's beautiful homestead

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.

Grand Canyon-How can you pick just one picture???

Rick in the slot canyon at Tent Rocks National Monument

Old Salem, NC

All the forts on the SE coast in GA and FL

Top of the Rock Branson, MO

Brewers Spring Training in AZ

Pumpkin Spectacular in Louisville

Abraham Lincoln Museum and the Lincoln National Heritage Area

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.  

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