Loose Summer plans, not!

We've been here in Florida now for just over 2 months, and our traveling juices are beginning to flow.  A lot of people prefer to sit in one place for a long time, but Jan and I long to travel.  Not that we aren't having a good time here, and after a couple of weather reports from the north country it reinforces we are in the right place at the right time.  So this is the time we try to sketch out our upcoming plans.

So how do we do it?  Well, the first thing we do is get out a US map, spread it out and then we bounce ideas off one another, just general destinations, east or west, how far, etc, and so on.  We have a start place this year and that is Lubbock, TX, where our daughter, Kelly and her family live.  We plan to stop there over the Memorial Day holiday, visit with them and then take our granddaughter, Faith with us to Albuquerque to visit with her Great Grandmother Viv, Jan's mom, her Great Aunt and Uncle, Nancy and CT, Jan's sister and BIL, her Aunt and Uncle Megan and Chip, and her cousins, Riley, Caleb, Jackson, and Charlotte.  Then we will go north with Faith to Pagosa Springs, CO to enjoy the mountains, and will be joined by Kelly and our other grandchild, Christian who will spend a few days with us there, and hopefully Jan's sister Karen can meet us there as well.

Then we have another hard destination and that is Durango, CO where we had already made reservations for a month starting Sep 10th.  So what will we do in between?  We wanted to visit the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest area in Oregon just to the west of the Snake River that we had read about in another blog, Wheelin It, that we enjoy reading, and we wanted to get to Vancouver Island, a place we have never been.  So we started to figure out a rough circle up and around including Eagle, ID, where Jan's cousin Kris and her family live, then the Wallowa's, up to Coeur d"Alene, across the Cascades, up into the Olympic Peninsula, down the coast to Portland, OR, where hopefully we will meet Karen, Jan's sister, then down through NV and Utah to Bryce Canyon, one of our favorites, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and then Montrose/Ridgway area of CO, then back to Durango for our month, than on to Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally back to Lubbock for Thanksgiving.  Now this we hoped was going to stay jelly like, easy and open to change, but not so fast!

Once we have our general route penciled in, we together have a routine to find campgrounds along the way.  I use Delorme's Street Atlas on my computer to figure the route and reference RV Park Reviews, Jan consults our campground "bible", the 1560 page Good Sam Campground Guide, and Google Earth.  We put all that together with our desire to stay at more and more State Parks, National Parks, and Forests.  

We have been noticing two somewhat recent phenomenons; more people are "living full time" in campgrounds, and more and more people are RVing and reserving public and private campgrounds way, way in advance.  Which makes it hard for us to just go to and fro and find places to stay, especially for our size.  One example, in the Wallowa area where we have never been, we wanted to stay at the Wallowa Lake State Park which we had heard good things about, well, even slipping our dates all around there is NO vacancy anywhere around the time we wanted to be there!  So that prompts trying to find some suitable alternative in the general area.  Now a lot of these remote areas have a very finite number of campgrounds so it becomes difficult, then after contacting several only to find out they are fully booked, adds a bit more challenge to the exercise.  Now through all of this, I still love this part of trip planning, messing with maps, altering routes, finding good places to stay and where to visit, it gets my head on the road where I prefer to be.

So bottom line to all this, is we have had to make reservations at fully 90% of our stops, definitely not what we set out to do.  I do have to add though, most of this is our choice, we are not Walmart, Cracker Barrel, Lowes, Home Depot, truck stop, rest area people, we prefer to be either in a campground or an accepted boon dock spot.  Lots of folks use Walmart like a hotel chain, nothing wrong with that, but it just isn't what we like to do.

So now we have a big loop starting and ending in Lubbock, but actually there are extensions on the front and the back which have it actually beginning and ending right here in Florida, as we have already booked our time back here for next winter.  That's another phenomenon as well, if you don't book in the early spring down here, you will have NO chance of finding a spot for the prime months of Jan, Feb, and March.  So that coupled with our initial visit leaving Florida and returning to Florida through Atlanta, where our son Jason lives, for a couple Docs and our dentist, and several dear friends, there is only about 3 weeks of open and fancy free traveling ahead of us this summer.  But that's okay, we will be traveling, visiting, and enjoying a big chunk of this beautiful country.

Another quick update

We got the wires run for the second electric element for the Aqua-Hot, a little challenging finding and then making a lighted switch work.  And it still doesn't work exactly as I had hoped.  I wanted it to light anytime we turned on the second element as to remind us that we had it on, but unfortunately the way the circuit works, there is only power through the switch, allowing it to light, when the element is on, but way better than nothing.  Also we can report the second element works very well down to around 45 degrees which we've been having bit too often for our tastes here in Florida:)

There was a bit of a snafu with our windshield repair.  Seems the communication between the installer and inspector here in Florida broke down to the original installer in Colorado so we lost about 3 weeks.  Now the process is working through, but the windshield had to be ordered so we are expecting another maybe 3 weeks until we have the new one installed.  Oh well, we aren't going anywhere right now anyway.

Jan almost got picked for jury duty, came down to the wire, but ultimately she was let go to come home.  Could have been several days.  

Short update

Yeah, we're still here.  Not too much blogworthy stuff going on.  We have been staying busy with friends.  Lots of lunches, dinners, and fires, and of course since it's election time a lot of interesting discussions.

Jan and I tried pickle ball.  It's a lot of fun, Jan is going to continue and even get her own paddle.  Me, I don't know.  We've even gotten in a couple of bike rides.

Koni made good on our 4 leaking shock absorbers and has refunded our money, a long process, but they stood by their warranty.  Our windshield is still not fixed, but since we aren't planning to go anywhere for awhile I guess it doesn't really matter.   I will be reminding them this week.

I got the motorhome all washed and looking pretty while Jan spent the day in jury duty.

We are tackling a couple small projects.  When we installed our new Aqua-Hot last year we found out it has two electric elements instead of just one in the unit we took out.  Since we were only interested in getting the new one in and working, I didn't go any further to try and hook up a second element.  I've been thinking about it for some time and now plan to do it.  We have a separate small AC electrical box that is only powered from shore power or the generator, not the inverter.  It was installed specifically for the stacked washer and dryer that was in the coach when we bought it.  We pulled out the stacked unit and installed the combination washer/dryer unit so we have a 20 amp leg of power available not being used for the second electric element.  Then in discussions with Aqua-Hot, they told me that all the units are wired for the second element and if I pried open a wire loom, I would be able to find two wires that control the relay for the second element.  Good deal, it should be an easy project to run a romex wire from the box to the Aqua-Hot, and a wire connected to a separate lighted switch to the two switch wires and voila, we have a second electrical element available to us when we are on shore or generator power.  Sometimes we need a bit more heat than the one electric element can produce, and don't want to run the diesel burner, and if the electric is free in the campground even more incentive to use that instead of diesel.

We'll get this out of the way, then we'll share our remaining small project next time.