Merry Christmas!

We worked our way to Florida a little slower as to make it work for our appointments for the motorhome and try to hit our reserved time at Royal Coachman RV Resort.  And it worked out fairly well.  We went to 3 places we had never been, hit both appointments perfectly, and ended up coming into RCR 2 days ahead of schedule, woohoo!

First to get the big stuff out of the way.  Several weeks, months? ago we learned of a few suspension failures on our type of chassis.  The finding was on a few of the chassis built between 2002 and 2007, that cracks were appearing on a vertical strut in the rear suspension.  Very unsettling and as I mentioned very hard to see without either taking the wheels off or looking up from a pit or lift.  

This picture shows one of the cracks on another coach

So I called and set up an appointment at Josam's in Orlando to have our coach inspected, and was able to go down in the pit to see for myself.  It looked great, and it even has a reinforcing gusset applied that was added later in subsequent chassis.  I guess I was so excited I forgot to take a picture.  So we were in and out in less than an hour!  Then over to Creative Coach about 50 miles down the road, we got there at about 11am, and we had a guy removing our faulty piece of film immediately.  

Pulling the bad film off

He even got the new film almost on before lunchtime.  Bottom line we were done by 1:30pm!  It went amazingly well, we actually had planned to spend up to 2 nights there getting the film repaired.  So we called RCR to see if we could arrive 2 days early, well yes and no.  Yes we could arrive early, but no we wouldn't be able to stay on our site.  Seems the folks that had it before us had paid for it through the 14th, so we had to go to a different site and look at our site completely empty for 2 days before we could get into it.  Worked out fine and the park was able to get it all mowed for us.

So back to our journey south, first we had to get our cat Bert to the vet in the motorhome and that was about 70 miles from our campground in Atlanta and get there by 10am.  We did our best and those of you that know about Atlanta traffic know that that was almost impossible, but we did get there by 10:30am, not bad.  What was even better the vet was ready for him immediately, so in and out he went, got flying colors, we ate lunch and then headed more south to spend the night at one of our regular north-south campgrounds, Twin Oaks in Elko, GA, near Perry.  It's a great overnight spot with large pull throughs and right off I-75.  Then we cut south-southwest to Topsail Hill Preserve SP near Destin, FL.  It is an older park fairly tight to get around in, with very narrow sites although it has a lot of trails and the beach not far away, we walked down several times while we were there although the cool weather caught up to us, a bit brisk.

The boardwalk across the dunes

Looking north

It was pretty nice walking

This was where we made those killer crab cakes :-)

Then we moved just a little more down the coast to Presnell's RV Resort and Marina in Port St Joe, FL.  This was very nice, particularly since there were very few other people there and we were right on the water!  Big sites, nice facility, and they are doing a lot of work to include putting in a pool and rec hall.

Our site

Our view

And we had these and a couple dozen oysters
just down the road at Indian Pass Raw Bar

Then we had to get closer to Orlando for our appointments so we went to Wiersdale, FL to Grand Oaks Resort which is a 400 acre equestrian resort with about 20 RV sites, huge private pull throughs with beautiful views across the resort.

Our site

Another view

Looking back up towards the RV sites

So we have been busy, busy getting our site ready, over 40 bags of mulch, and plants and our rugs down, and our lights up, we're getting there.

Almost done

So we will be busy with this, and having our son, Jason come down for the Christmas weekend, so we will be having a good time.

MERRY CHRISTMAS !!!