October 31, 2006 (Happy Halloween!) - Lovers Key State Park, FL
As you probably guessed, our mail came in and I was able to take care of the "fried wiring" so we could take off. Turned out the melted wires were because the dash air-conditioner air cooler fan (the part under the coach) had frozen, causing the wires to melt. It's actually called the condenser fan, and blows air out the side of the coach through a radiator kind of thing. But more about that later.
This is kind of a trip report without pictures. We took a bunch as we went along, but there's just too many to sort and it's been so long since an update, that I'm beginning to get hate mail. Not really, but several people have inquired as to the cause of the delay.
We left on Sept. 14 on a bee line (that means "hurry") for Seattle from Clermont, FL. And that took us through St. Louis, where we have a son and his family of musicians. And they have a 2 1/2-yr old son who is a kick to be with as well. You'll see pictures of the little guy with his tiny violin later. We spent two nights in House Springs, a small community outside St. Louis where they live.
The next two nights stop was near Rapid City, SD, at the Hart Ranch RV Resort. And we love that place. It's really not a misnomer when they call it a Resort. To make the visit fun, of course, we hooked up with Elmer and Ann who work there during the summer. You may remember them from last year when we "worked" with them at Lovers Key.
Then on to Colville, WA, where we had dinner (and they bought it!) with my older brother Ken and his wife Nancy. Just stopped for a single night there. They're both retired -- sort of. Very busy and happy as real estate agents for Century 21 in Colville.
From Colville we made it to Black Diamond, WA, (in the Seattle area) where we stayed for two weeks. A very hectic two weeks, I might add. Not that the time since leaving Clermont wasn't hectic, but this was worse because we had so many good, long-time friends we wanted to see before we left as we looked for and packed a cargo trailer to haul our storage stuff back to Florida. Spent three days looking for a used cargo trailer--came to the conclusion that they are practically nonexistent. It appears that when people are finished using their cargo trailers, they put them in the back yard and use them for storage. We only found two used ones that were the right size. One was in such terrible shape I wouldn't let a dog go in it, the other was only about $200 less than a new one. So we shot the budget full of holes and bought a new one. OUCH!! Loading didn't take long, less than a day (what took the longest was not moving the boxes, but disassembling the metal racks we had everything setting on--sooo many screws! Friend Bill helped with this part--thanks Bill!). Kathy at the licensing place in Clermont told us which documents to fax to her on Thursday, on Monday we had our Florida plates. How good is that, eh? She's earned an ice cream for sure. Not sure when she'll get it, but we'll get to the reasons why later.
Finally we headed out from Black Diamond, and made it to Shelton, WA. Short trip, but good trial run for us. I was driving the Road Abode pulling the trailer (a 6X12 box trailer, single axle) and Barb was driving the Jeep. My nephew Maury and his wife Linda live in Shelton, and Maury is the Pastor of a small church there. What a joy it was to visit them! And their mostly black lab young dog. Those two are really happy doing what they were cut out for, in our opinion.
Next stop was to visit son Rick and his family in Sacramento. Been a while since we'd seen them, and Rick took a Thursday off, already having Friday's off, for a four-day weekend. They're redoing some of their house, and we'd talked about tearing off the old patio roof and replacing it with one of those plastic ones. Only when we met for breakfast, Lynn, his wife, suggested maybe we could paint the spare bathroom and replace the faucets in the sink and tub/shower instead. No big deal to me, having done that kind of thing quite often in the past. Well, let me tell you, it was a disaster, at least from my perspective. Started out just fine with a trip to the local Home Depot where we innocently picked up the paint and hardware, including towel racks, etc. The painting wasn't any big deal either. The blue was for the walls, and the cupboards and ceiling were to be white. Rick had washed the walls and ceiling with something to make sure they were "clean". Blue went on first. But when we pulled the protective masking tape off, the paint came with it. Long story short...... apparently some paints are incompatible with others. And the whole thing had to be redone. And then the hardware exchange was anything but simple as well. The sink faucets (which Rick did by himself) were slick and easy. Didn't even need my old-fashioned fancy-dancy wrench to take the water lines off the faucets either. But the tub/shower was another story. To begin with, I couldn't get the pipe for the shower head to come out. There was another pipe it was inside of to boot, and I'd never seen anything like that before. A trip to a "real" plumbing store didn't solve the mystery either, as the 20-yr plumber who was almost as old as me had never seen anything like that either. Back home I squirted some WD40 on everything (RV'ers law -- if it won't move and should, use WD40; if it moves and shouldn't, use duct tape!) and then just put lots more pressure than I wanted to, and it finally loosened. The faucet was a totally different story. They bought this nice one that will adjust the hot & cold and turn on all at the same time with a simple twist. Only the old one was a pull on, push off, turn to adjust one. Couldn't return the set they'd bought because we'd already used some parts, so they had to buy a partial set. And I won't bore you with the rest of the story, but Lynn (she's such a sweetie) said that next time we come to visit, she's going to give us each a nice big stick and sharp knife, and we're to sit in the back yard and make little sticks. Several calls later, I'm certain I've been forgiven for being such a klutz.
A quick trip to Morgan Hill to visit Frank and Susie was next, and that included a trip to Monterey for the "Ultimate Hamburger" (Barb and I split one and had trouble eating it all!), followed by a tour of Carmel By The Sea--wow!. A fellow I knew as a kid (friend of the family) had designed some of the homes overlooking the ocean, but I didn't know which ones of course. What beautiful settings with such unique homes. Thanks again to Frank & Susie for that fabulous tour!
From Morgan Hill our next stop was Las Vegas where we got new cell phones. We'd been paying CA taxes and fees, which are among the highest in the nation, and by switching to a NV number and paying the NV fees and taxes, we'd have the lowest in the nation. The difference almost offsetting the price of having Barb have her own phone. So now it's 702-556-2244 for Dave and 702-343-0223 for Barb. Since we pulled in late in the evening and needed to re-stock the refer, we spent two nights there before leaving for Kerrville, TX.
The Buckhorn Resort in Kerrville is right up there on a par with the Hart Ranch in our opinion. Beautiful place and, of course, who doesn't like the Hill Country of Texas besides. Friend John was putting on a Datastorm rally with some other folks, and we had the good fortune of catching him two days before the rally actually started. On the first evening there we went to a restaurant featuring catfish, and not only did we have the best catfish we'd ever eaten, we ran into Dean and Bettye Kennedy! Dean and Bettye are my Alaskan niece Amelia's grandparents, and great friends besides. They live in San Antonio and both Barb and I were upset about being that close and not have time to stop by for even a quick hello. They were attending a different rally not far away, had some spare time on Saturday afternoon, came over to Buckhorn where they'd stayed before, and the five of us had a great time catching up over lunch.
Sunday found us parked at Nacogdoches, TX, in the Foretravel factory parking lot. We needed the normal maintenance work as well as that burned up fan replaced. And after all that was taken care of, I took the coach for a ride around "the loop" and it blew anti-freeze all over the engine compartment. Next day they found the expansion tank had rusted out and was leaking. Took most the day for that to be re-built so we hit the road on Thursday (two days later than anticipated), arriving back in Clermont on Friday the 27th. Since we'd left on Thursday the 14th of Sept., that made it six weeks and a day for a round-trip. We left Clermont on Saturday after a fun breakfast with friends Jim and Dayna who'd been kind enough to pick up a cross-stitch nativity scene Barb had made that we'd dropped off for framing. How could we ever get along without friends, eh?
Someplace in TX or maybe MS, I got a call from son Doug who asked where we were. He was on his way to Ft. Myers to drop off a customers car, and then to Sarasota to pick one up and take back to his shop. Since neither of us had hard plans to be anyplace, we decided to stay in touch to see where and if we could hook up. Turned out that he'd be in Ft. Myers the same day we'd be parking at Lovers Key, about 20 miles away. We got there at about 4 or so, and he pulled in about an hour or so later. Gave him a quick tour of the place (so he could get a better picture of why we'd repeat something we'd already done), then it was off for tacos for dinner. He then hit the road so he could spend the night close to his 8 AM appointment on Sunday.
This was a 7,881-mile side trip on our way from Clermont to Lovers Key. How fun is that, eh? Now we're sitting in our space (on the canal--full of fish laughing at me because I'm in here at the computer and not trying to catch them) with the little cargo trailer parked next to us, getting ready to do our volunteer stuff for the winter. Is this a great lifestyle or what? Whew! Sure glad we're going to stay parked for a while.