Turning North

We sure enjoyed our time in Murphy, the Peachtree Cove campground is one of our favorites, so peaceful, quiet, and dark, and a pretty little stream right through the park!  But we didn't only spend our time chilling, we did quite a bit of exploring, walking, and of course eating:-)

A couple more pics right in the campground.

 And a lot of the eating was prepared by us.

Baked cod with veg

Murphy has a network of trails along the river, some paved and some more rustic, we did several and the paved one twice, about a mile each way, with some gorgeous weather.

Part of the paved path

Along the way

Although we had been to many of the towns around, we were getting confused as to which was which and what we remembered about each so we took off one day up the Nantahala River to the Nantahala Outdoor Center for lunch and then over to Bryson City, and back through Robbinsville to prompt our memory then back to the campground, beautiful ride.

Another day we wanted to go into Dahlonega, one of our favorite little towns to walk around and have lunch, ha!  We should have done some homework first, we noticed an inordinate amount of traffic several miles out.  Turned out they were having a huge event in town, and there was NO parking anywhere nearby, so we punted and headed over to Cleveland for a BBQ lunch and back, ended up being over 140 miles after the detours.

Then our last day there we decided to go back up to the little Nantahala to see if the water came down, but it was still up, purposely, for a major kayaking event.  We watched for awhile and headed back.  

We had all of 28 miles to go to our next stop, Blue Ridge, GA to a nice KOA there, and Peachtree Cove was nice enough to let us stay past normal checkout time so we didn't have to cool our jets somewhere along the way to keep us from arriving too far ahead of check in time at the KOA.  We made the grueling drive and got set up in our site.

Good friends, John and Diane came up the next day for a nice visit, we met for a good lunch in Ellijay, at River Street Tavern, walked around a bit, then went to a cool brewery in Blue Ridge for a mid afternoon stout, porter, and ale, nice place, Grumpy Old Men Brewery.  Then back to the motorhome for a fire, happy hour, dinner, and cigars, solved many of the world's problems.  Then we met the next day at Rocco's Pub in Jasper for a great lunch and an adios as they headed back home and we went back to the motorhome after a great scenic ride.

That left us with a project that has been taunting us for quite awhile, our failing indicator light for the truck's braking system that I have mentioned numerous times.  It has been intermittent for a long time and we have replaced fuses, fuse block, air powered switch, rewired everything up to the switch, and then from the switch forward.  I have checked connections at the light and even provided a new dedicated ground for the light.  Yes this is all been done so I can see while driving to be sure the truck's brakes are on when I apply the brakes on the coach.  A good thing to know, and also even better to see if the truck's brakes are on when they shouldn't be.  Through all of this, I would put in a new fuse and it would work for 10 minutes or a day and a half until the fuse blew again.  We decided that the final item would be running an entirely new wire from the rear of the coach to the light at the driver's seat.  This meant a diesel mechanic, Jan project, one she was not looking forward to.  Well we are parked on a nice concrete pad here and the weather was perfect so the day arrived.

I rigged up a spool so it would be easier for Jan to pull the wire.

And off she went!

Now I can tell you there is nothing worse than working on something and getting it fixed, but not being sure what caused the problem, because until you do it is apt to happen again and again.  Happily Jan found the issue that has been plaguing us all this time.  The original wire had chaffed and every once in awhile it must have touched the metal chassis, shorted and blew out the fuse.  She put anti chaffing on the new wire to prevent this from happening again.

The culprit 

Started with a tube taped on and then she covered this with conduit

We are extremely confident we have fixed this issue that has been bugging us off and on for almost a year!

So yesterday we did something a lot of you would truly wonder about, especially if you aren't bourbon drinkers:-)  Twice a year Total Wine has a bourbon lottery, if you are in their points program and have accumulated enough points, you get invited to a lottery for as many as 10 different high end bourbons, essentially unavailable in normal places.  From Pappy Van Winkle to Weller to Blanton's, you list in order which ones you are interested in, and willing to pay for, some are very expensive, and then if you "win" you are notified you have a week or so to come in and pick up the one bottle you have "won".  Well I won a bottle of Blanton's, one of my favorites that is all but unavailable normally, so the fact it would require a 72 mile drive one way was no problem:-)

We took advantage of the trip and had a delicious chicken soup lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, went to Whole Foods because Jan and I wanted make cioppino again, and of course picked up my bottle.  But it was a beautiful day for a drive!  And talk about serendipity, as we were going down a road in Kennesaw, GA, Jan looked up and said OMG, there's Karen and Tom!  Karen is Jan's sister and they are moving north in their motorhome as well to meet us outside of Portland, ME in May, to think they went by us and we were both there in a place neither one thought we'd be, to run by each other was amazing.

This was seriously delicious!

Then back for our last evening before heading north, beautiful weather, a little Blanton's, a good cigar, wonderful company, what could be better?