As the end point gets closer and closer, we have been working steadily on reaching some goals. One has to do with our storage unit as I've mentioned a few times. We have come to the conclusion, we will need a storage unit of some kind as far into the future as we can see. The question is, how big and where should it be? We are burning up way too much money with our present 10x20 unit so yesterday we hit it hard and decided we can get down to a 10x7.5 and maybe a 10x5. And it will save us 50%! We thought for awhile it might make sense to have it in Texas near our daughter, but we can't think of anything we'll need out of there at the last moment, and we will be passing through Atlanta at least yearly so we decided to keep the unit here. We are getting rid of, giving away, donating, and selling most everything we can. We are moving all the spare parts for the motorhome we have accumulated over the years into the motorhome, so no one needs to go into the storage unit when we need something. I'm not taking any credit here, Jan has been doing 95% of all the work with questionable input from me. We are waiting on some good warm weather to tear apart the basement in the motorhome so we can rearrange, reorganize, and get rid of things we haven't used or thought about in the last year or so. We have to take care of all this by mid-March, as we don't think we will be back in the Atlanta area before the end of November.
I am waffling back and forth at work. We picked the end of Feb to retire, than after our meeting with our finance person, decided to bite the bullet til the end of March, BUT another option has popped up. My airline occasionally offers a program when they are overmanned for a short term, they allow you to volunteer to take a month off, with no pay of course, but will pay your medical insurance. And they are offering leaves in March! Seems nuts that this is a hard decision, but it's causing quite a bit of turmoil in my mind. Jan just tells me whatever I want is fine with her, that's awful nice, but no help right now. Have to make up my mind by Feb 1st, so the time is running out. Funny that the closer I get the harder it is to continue! We'll let you know.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Still counting down
I'm sitting here in Minneapolis, waiting to fly the last leg of this trip back to Atlanta. One more trip to go this month with a friend of mine, so I'm looking forward to that. Another month done in the countdown. I had mentioned that on speaking with our financial person I would plan to go past our original date of the end of Feb. Well, we've decided the end of March is the time to go. I'm working on Feb's schedule now and then one more bid and it will be done! This month has been quite good, flew with great guys which makes all the difference.
The extra month will give us some time to deal further with our storage unit. Jan has been making a lot of progress on it while I've been working. We also want to go through the basement, repack it and pull out anything we haven't used in the past year. We both work hard not to accumulate "stuff", but it still seems to happen. We've reached a point in our lives, reinforced by living in a very limited space, that we don't need "stuff" anymore. We have a friend who quite a few years ago, when we still had a house, said he wasn't interested in accumulating anything anymore and we really didn't understand, well, now we do!
The leak around the vent is confirmed to be fixed. It has been raining a lot this week and is expected to continue for a few more days. Nice and dry. The WiFi Ranger seems to be working well. We almost want to move just so we can see how it does further away from the antennas :) We will move at the end of March, we'll have to wait til then.
We have reached 62,000 miles on our motorhome and need to plan to have a service done on the engine, a Detroit Diesel. We asked Brett at Alliance Coach for a recommendation, so I talked to the dealer he told us about in Ocala, FL. He indicated we should wait until closer to 80,000 miles to have the valve lash adjusted, so we plan to do it next winter as we make our circuit around the US back to Florida. We are losing about a cup of coolant every 3-5000 miles, I asked if that was normal. After all, the coolant system holds about 30 quarts, unfortunately, the dealer said no, so we are going to stop and have it looked at when we head south at the end of March. We have our fingers crossed it is something simple and inexpensive to fix!
The extra month will give us some time to deal further with our storage unit. Jan has been making a lot of progress on it while I've been working. We also want to go through the basement, repack it and pull out anything we haven't used in the past year. We both work hard not to accumulate "stuff", but it still seems to happen. We've reached a point in our lives, reinforced by living in a very limited space, that we don't need "stuff" anymore. We have a friend who quite a few years ago, when we still had a house, said he wasn't interested in accumulating anything anymore and we really didn't understand, well, now we do!
The leak around the vent is confirmed to be fixed. It has been raining a lot this week and is expected to continue for a few more days. Nice and dry. The WiFi Ranger seems to be working well. We almost want to move just so we can see how it does further away from the antennas :) We will move at the end of March, we'll have to wait til then.
We have reached 62,000 miles on our motorhome and need to plan to have a service done on the engine, a Detroit Diesel. We asked Brett at Alliance Coach for a recommendation, so I talked to the dealer he told us about in Ocala, FL. He indicated we should wait until closer to 80,000 miles to have the valve lash adjusted, so we plan to do it next winter as we make our circuit around the US back to Florida. We are losing about a cup of coolant every 3-5000 miles, I asked if that was normal. After all, the coolant system holds about 30 quarts, unfortunately, the dealer said no, so we are going to stop and have it looked at when we head south at the end of March. We have our fingers crossed it is something simple and inexpensive to fix!
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Leak fixed and Ranger installed
Since we couldn't find a likely culprit causing our leak around the vent, we decided to cut out a lot of the caulk and Eternabond tape around the vent and completely reseal. It looks good now, but a rain storm will be the real test.
We got the Ranger installed and it works great. Our site at the Allatoona campground is pretty close to the WiFi antennas so the real evaluation will come when we are farther away and need to work with a weak signal. The install went quite well. We mounted the Boost antenna to the strut on the Batwing, ran the wire down and across the roof to the refrigerator vent. We used small pieces of Eternabond to hold the wire in place. We managed to run the wire down through the same hole that the solar wire goes through right down behind the refrigerator. The hardest part of the deal was moving the refrigerator out of it's cubby. But that accomplished two things, it gave us an easy way to run the Wifi wire to the adjacent cabinet where the Ranger(router) will live, and gave us a chance to clean behind and under the frig. We had readily available power in the cabinet as it's where the plug for the washer/dryer is located. Got it all hooked up and with just a little confusion got it up and running. Hope it solves the biggest part of our challenges with internet connection.
We are still working hard to deal with our storage unit. We moved, actually had moved, our very large, heavy desk to a consignment shop yesterday, so hope that will sell soon. Gave a lot more stuff to Goodwill and will try to sell off some more. Who knows we may actually gain on this.
Sitting in Denver now as I keep counting down the trips I have to do until retirement.
We got the Ranger installed and it works great. Our site at the Allatoona campground is pretty close to the WiFi antennas so the real evaluation will come when we are farther away and need to work with a weak signal. The install went quite well. We mounted the Boost antenna to the strut on the Batwing, ran the wire down and across the roof to the refrigerator vent. We used small pieces of Eternabond to hold the wire in place. We managed to run the wire down through the same hole that the solar wire goes through right down behind the refrigerator. The hardest part of the deal was moving the refrigerator out of it's cubby. But that accomplished two things, it gave us an easy way to run the Wifi wire to the adjacent cabinet where the Ranger(router) will live, and gave us a chance to clean behind and under the frig. We had readily available power in the cabinet as it's where the plug for the washer/dryer is located. Got it all hooked up and with just a little confusion got it up and running. Hope it solves the biggest part of our challenges with internet connection.
We are still working hard to deal with our storage unit. We moved, actually had moved, our very large, heavy desk to a consignment shop yesterday, so hope that will sell soon. Gave a lot more stuff to Goodwill and will try to sell off some more. Who knows we may actually gain on this.
Sitting in Denver now as I keep counting down the trips I have to do until retirement.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Odd, isn't it?
A lot of people ask me about the maintenance required by our motorhome. I've always answered that it's not bad, really similar to owning a house, albeit one that rocks and rolls down the road. But now and then something happens that's hard to comprehend.
As I mentioned, while we were in Summerdale, AL we had gone up to clean the roof. We scrubbed and scrubbed and sprayed high pressure water all over the roof for hours, then over the last few days we've had torrential rains and nary a leak..........until yesterday afternoon! Out of nowhere with just a drizzle I went into the bathroom to find a leak dripping in alongside the Fantastic Fan vent in the roof. I went up on the roof to check it out and since I couldn't find anything amiss, I asked the real professional, Jan to go up and take a look(amazing what she can see as compared to me), and she couldn't find anything either. So today we are going up to completely reseal and recaulk the vent.
We received our WiFI Ranger yesterday, and had planned to install it today, but the weather report has changed from sunny and windy to rainy and windy so we will hold off a couple days. We are planning to do a temporary install just to see how it works. The permanent install will involve mounting the exterior antenna to our "Batwing" antenna. The Batwing is an antenna found on most every RV to receive TV signal. They fold down on the roof for travel and extend up and can rotate when in use. Few people actually use them since most of us use satellite or cable available in the majority of the campgrounds. The wire then needs to be run into the motorhome, and my plan is to run it down into the rooftop refrigerator vent into an unused cabinet where the wireless router will live. It used to be all RV's of all kinds had RV refrigerators, that work with no moving parts, just an application of heat, by either propane or electric, to cause an ammonia mixture inside to evaporate and condense causing cooling. Well, the frigs required either a roof vent or a side vent to dissipate the heat. We have a residential refrigerator in our motorhome, but it was an option so the roof vent is still there. It makes a readily accessible area to run wires down into the coach, in fact the wires from our solar panel gain access there now.
We'll let you all know how well the WiFi Ranger works as we go along.
As I mentioned, while we were in Summerdale, AL we had gone up to clean the roof. We scrubbed and scrubbed and sprayed high pressure water all over the roof for hours, then over the last few days we've had torrential rains and nary a leak..........until yesterday afternoon! Out of nowhere with just a drizzle I went into the bathroom to find a leak dripping in alongside the Fantastic Fan vent in the roof. I went up on the roof to check it out and since I couldn't find anything amiss, I asked the real professional, Jan to go up and take a look(amazing what she can see as compared to me), and she couldn't find anything either. So today we are going up to completely reseal and recaulk the vent.
We received our WiFI Ranger yesterday, and had planned to install it today, but the weather report has changed from sunny and windy to rainy and windy so we will hold off a couple days. We are planning to do a temporary install just to see how it works. The permanent install will involve mounting the exterior antenna to our "Batwing" antenna. The Batwing is an antenna found on most every RV to receive TV signal. They fold down on the roof for travel and extend up and can rotate when in use. Few people actually use them since most of us use satellite or cable available in the majority of the campgrounds. The wire then needs to be run into the motorhome, and my plan is to run it down into the rooftop refrigerator vent into an unused cabinet where the wireless router will live. It used to be all RV's of all kinds had RV refrigerators, that work with no moving parts, just an application of heat, by either propane or electric, to cause an ammonia mixture inside to evaporate and condense causing cooling. Well, the frigs required either a roof vent or a side vent to dissipate the heat. We have a residential refrigerator in our motorhome, but it was an option so the roof vent is still there. It makes a readily accessible area to run wires down into the coach, in fact the wires from our solar panel gain access there now.
We'll let you all know how well the WiFi Ranger works as we go along.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Back in Atlanta
Since my last post we made our way back stopping in a campground in Talladega, AL, Logan Lake. Pretty old and tight, and pretty expensive, so I don't think we'll be going back there. Funny as we drove to Kelly and Todd's this time we were remarking how it was probably the last time we would drive that particular route. We couldn't conceive why we would be in Atlanta heading for Longview again. We've been in the Atlanta area so long, basically since 1998, it's hard, but pleasant, to think of it not being a base of operations as we go forward.
Also after Jan picked me up from my trip yesterday, she commented that we would miss driving the GTI. That is VERY true, as it is a fantastically fun car, but it occurred to us we wouldn't be doing that kind of driving anymore. When I think of the tons of miles I've stacked up driving to and from work, 50 miles each way, it will be very pleasurable to not do it anymore, not to mention the huge savings in gas!
As I've mentioned I'm pretty frustrated working right now. It seems the closer I get to the end point the more frustrated I get. So I've been pretty negative lately and kind of feeling sorry for myself. Got quite a wakeup call this trip. The captain I started my trip with explained that his wife, 53 years old, was just diagnosed with cancer over the holidays. She was to start chemo the next day. We arrived in Orlando and he called to see how things were going and was told she only had a month to live. Sure puts things into perspective. It's easy for me to feel sorry for myself, but I better wise up and be thankful for all that I have rather than all I have lost.
The WiFi ranger is supposed to be here on the 11th. We are very anxious to get it installed and see if it works as advertised. I will let you know.
We want to deal with the storage unit before we leave. We are still trying to resolve little things like; do we keep our doctors here or elsewhere, Texas or Florida, if we have to keep a storage unit should we move things to Texas, etc?
Still counting down.
Also after Jan picked me up from my trip yesterday, she commented that we would miss driving the GTI. That is VERY true, as it is a fantastically fun car, but it occurred to us we wouldn't be doing that kind of driving anymore. When I think of the tons of miles I've stacked up driving to and from work, 50 miles each way, it will be very pleasurable to not do it anymore, not to mention the huge savings in gas!
As I've mentioned I'm pretty frustrated working right now. It seems the closer I get to the end point the more frustrated I get. So I've been pretty negative lately and kind of feeling sorry for myself. Got quite a wakeup call this trip. The captain I started my trip with explained that his wife, 53 years old, was just diagnosed with cancer over the holidays. She was to start chemo the next day. We arrived in Orlando and he called to see how things were going and was told she only had a month to live. Sure puts things into perspective. It's easy for me to feel sorry for myself, but I better wise up and be thankful for all that I have rather than all I have lost.
The WiFi ranger is supposed to be here on the 11th. We are very anxious to get it installed and see if it works as advertised. I will let you know.
We want to deal with the storage unit before we leave. We are still trying to resolve little things like; do we keep our doctors here or elsewhere, Texas or Florida, if we have to keep a storage unit should we move things to Texas, etc?
Still counting down.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Heading back
Our couple of holiday weeks off is winding down. We are leaving this morning to work our way back to Allatoona. We'll probably stop somewhere near Talledega for the night.
We've enjoyed our time here in Summerdale, AL, near Gulf Shores, the weather was spectacular up until yesterday when the temps dropped into the 20's at night and only into the low 50's during the day. Glad to have gotten our filthy motorhome washed, so at least for a while it is gleaming. We went back to the Fish River Grill and had another OMG shrimp poboy for lunch, just as yummy! Also stopped at Billy's Seafood and bought 5 pounds of fresh shrimp to freeze. The shrimp ARE really better here!
We've been battling Tengo for our internet here. Tengo is a internet provider that used to be good years ago, but as they have grown, their speed and reliability have gone downhill. I know I've been talking and talking about this internet deal for us, but we did make a decision yesterday to order a WiFi Ranger as the first step in our hopeful solution. The Ranger has an exterior antenna and amplifier to boost wifi signals. It is connected to a wireless router in the motorhome to provide a wireless LAN, local network, that will allow both Jan and I to connect our computers. If no wifi is available, the router has a provision to plug in an air card to use cellular data. We also have found Millenicom, a company that sells air cards and service without a contract. So, as I said, step one is to get the Ranger installed, use it's wifi capability until we are in a situation where we need to go to a data provider, then go with Millenicom. One of Millenicom's air cards uses the Verizon system, so we will be able to take advantage of their better coverage out west.
We are still working on a date for retirement, and the market certainly helped yesterday, so we hope it will still be very close to the end of Feb, although it is not written in stone. We have our fingers crossed!
We've enjoyed our time here in Summerdale, AL, near Gulf Shores, the weather was spectacular up until yesterday when the temps dropped into the 20's at night and only into the low 50's during the day. Glad to have gotten our filthy motorhome washed, so at least for a while it is gleaming. We went back to the Fish River Grill and had another OMG shrimp poboy for lunch, just as yummy! Also stopped at Billy's Seafood and bought 5 pounds of fresh shrimp to freeze. The shrimp ARE really better here!
We've been battling Tengo for our internet here. Tengo is a internet provider that used to be good years ago, but as they have grown, their speed and reliability have gone downhill. I know I've been talking and talking about this internet deal for us, but we did make a decision yesterday to order a WiFi Ranger as the first step in our hopeful solution. The Ranger has an exterior antenna and amplifier to boost wifi signals. It is connected to a wireless router in the motorhome to provide a wireless LAN, local network, that will allow both Jan and I to connect our computers. If no wifi is available, the router has a provision to plug in an air card to use cellular data. We also have found Millenicom, a company that sells air cards and service without a contract. So, as I said, step one is to get the Ranger installed, use it's wifi capability until we are in a situation where we need to go to a data provider, then go with Millenicom. One of Millenicom's air cards uses the Verizon system, so we will be able to take advantage of their better coverage out west.
We are still working on a date for retirement, and the market certainly helped yesterday, so we hope it will still be very close to the end of Feb, although it is not written in stone. We have our fingers crossed!
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Happy New Year!
We are parked at the Escapee park in Summerdale, AL right now enjoying some excellent weather. The Escapees is a club primarily for full-timers that has RV parks all around the country, and has their headquarters in Livingston, TX. Since you can make your residence anywhere you want when you full-time, they have made it very easy and seamless to establish residency in Texas. The leading states for full-timers are Texas, Florida, and South Dakota, obviously all without state income tax! They also have an excellent mail forwarding service and a long term care facility for people who can no longer live in their RV's. It's a very nice campground, large full hookup sites. They don't accept reservations, but will never turn away a member, and it's quite inexpensive.
We discovered a little "hole in the wall" restaurant driving into the park called the Fish River Grill, a tiny place along the road that had a packed parking lot at 3pm when we drove by. Well, we went there yesterday and had the best Poboy we have ever had! It was a shrimp poboy with OMG sauce. The OMG sauce is a creamy, spicy, full of crawfish sauce they put over the top of the sandwich, OMG is right!
After that we decided to do some work, we spent several hours on the roof of the motorhome trying to wash off the black mildew that had accumulated unknown to us while we were parked under the pines in Allatoona. What a mess. We really need to get a power washer up there to completely deal with it. Today we'll wash the rest of the motorhome, have our New Year's dinner with black eyed peas and greens and see if we can add a little luck and good fortune to the upcoming year.
Oh yeah, we had a meeting in Dallas with our financial person, and we may end up putting off the Feb retirement date a month or so. Boohoo. Hopefully the market will cooperate with our plans and surprise us. We'll see.
We discovered a little "hole in the wall" restaurant driving into the park called the Fish River Grill, a tiny place along the road that had a packed parking lot at 3pm when we drove by. Well, we went there yesterday and had the best Poboy we have ever had! It was a shrimp poboy with OMG sauce. The OMG sauce is a creamy, spicy, full of crawfish sauce they put over the top of the sandwich, OMG is right!
After that we decided to do some work, we spent several hours on the roof of the motorhome trying to wash off the black mildew that had accumulated unknown to us while we were parked under the pines in Allatoona. What a mess. We really need to get a power washer up there to completely deal with it. Today we'll wash the rest of the motorhome, have our New Year's dinner with black eyed peas and greens and see if we can add a little luck and good fortune to the upcoming year.
Oh yeah, we had a meeting in Dallas with our financial person, and we may end up putting off the Feb retirement date a month or so. Boohoo. Hopefully the market will cooperate with our plans and surprise us. We'll see.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)