I think the old Willy Nelson song with the above title must be the theme song for fulltime RVers, and I bet a lot of us hum or sing it to ourselves when we pull out of a campground. It sure brought a smile to my face to do so yesterday morning!

It was 19 degrees at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington when I fired up the Winnebago and pulled out of our campsite. After a quick stop at the dump station to empty our holding tanks, we were on the road by 9:15 a.m. We usually wait until rush hour is over before we leave in the morning because we can’t see any reason to get out there with all the commuters on their way to work.

We took the Bluegrass Parkway southwest 90 miles to Elizabethtown, where we got onto Interstate 65. All along the way the rock faces, where the route was carved through the mountains, were covered with long icicles that looked like stalactites found in Kentucky’s many caves in this region. They call this area Cave Country, and it’s one of our favorite places, but not this time of year. We’ll be back sometime when it’s warm.

As we traveled south, eighteen wheelers and RVs going by us from places further north occasionally showered the highway with great sheets of snow and ice that slid off their roofs and exploded into white bursts as they hit the pavement. I guess we’re not the only ones in a hurry to get out of the cold!

I wrote about how much I hate driving through Nashville when I reported on our trip north, and several people suggested we take the State Route 155, known as the Briley Parkway, as a bypass. We had been on this stretch of road several years ago while it was under construction and were faced with long delays. This time around there was no construction, and though there was a lot of traffic, it moved along pretty well as we skirted the east side of Music City, passing by the Grand Ole Opry, where I imagine Willy Nelson has sung On The Road Again.

We made good time as we scooted across Tennessee, then crossed into Alabama. Rain had been predicted for much of our route south, and a few miles north of Birmingham it began to sprinkle, then picked up to a steady shower. Roadways are most dangerous just after it begins to rain, because all of the oil and road film gets wet and very slippery until it rains enough to wash it away. This is a very dangerous time to be using either a Jake brake or cruise control. We slowed down to a safe speed on the wet road and continued into Birmingham, another city I really don’t like driving through. There was a lot of road construction, with narrow twisting lanes, and the drivers all seemed to be in a hurry to be the first one to the accident.

The sky had been gloomy since we left Nashville, and as the afternoon wore on, it got darker and darker. By the time we were approaching Montgomery, it was pouring rain and visibility was dropping fast. Time to get off the highway. We pulled into the Prattville Moose Lodge, about ten miles north of Montgomery, and just a mile off the Interstate.

The lodge has a small campground for traveling Moose members, with a dozen sites with water and 30 amp electric hookups. We stayed here once before, in dry weather, but I wanted to test the dirt RV parking area before we pulled into it with our heavy motorhome. It was pretty saturated, and we decided instead to pull around behind the lodge and park on the edge of the driveway. There are no hookups back here, but that’s not a problem for us, with our Onan generator and fresh water holding tank.

We had covered 490 miles, and that was more than enough for one day. It’s chilly here, about 42 degrees overnight. But since that was about twice what we had the night before, and four times what we faced in Elkhart, nobody in our coach was complaining!

Today we have an easy run of about 185 miles to the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale. It will be nice to be back with our extended family of RVers for a while.

Thought For The Day – Love your neighbor, but do not pull down your fence.

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Terry and I can really feel the difference in comfort levels between our MCI bus conversion and our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage motorhome in this cold weather! The Winnebago is much colder inside than the bus.

When we built the bus, we added a lot of extra insulation to the floor, walls, and ceiling. We were in temperatures down to 10 degrees a couple of times and a couple of electric cube heaters kept us comfortable. Last night it was 16 degrees here in Lexington, Kentucky, we had both furnaces turned up, and we were still chilly! I think we need to look into a catalytic heater. We let our Olympian Wave 8 go with the bus, and now I’m wishing we had kept it! That thing sure put out a lot of heat, and used a lot less propane than the RV furnaces do.

My appointment at the VA hospital Friday went as well as could be expected, and we are leaving today, headed back to the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV park in Summerdale, Alabama. No place in the country seems to be warm right now, except for maybe the Florida Keys, but we have had to cancel our trip that far south this year. At least Summerdale will be a little warmer than it is here. We’re about 675 miles away, so we hope to be there sometime Sunday afternoon.

Then I have to chain myself to my desk and get the new issue of the Gypsy Journal ready for the printer. The unplanned trip back up to Elkhart to sell the bus, and the burglary that happened there, have put me way behind schedule. The paper should be printing right now, and all we would have to do is get the new issue ready to mail out. I hope our subscribers will understand about the delay. Most folks have been pretty easy going when we’re late, but as a lifelong newspaper publisher, it eats me alive to miss a deadline.

A lot of readers have been asking how we are making out with our insurance company after last week’s incident. One writer went so far as to say that the theft and vandalism were only the start of our misfortune, and the real violation would come from our insurance company. Things are not wrapped up yet, but so far, I get the feeling he was not far off the mark.

I won’t go into a lot of details yet, because I don’t know what the final outcome will be, but so far, it looks like our “disappearing deductible” sure had the right name, because when we needed it, it disappeared! All I will say right now is that I think we’ll definitely be shopping for a new insurance company once all is said and done. Of course, I’m sure that they will be just as bad. What’s that they say about a rose by any other name?  

Meanwhile, Bad Nick is staying inside close to the heater outlet, and he posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled Keep It In Your Pants. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – He who digs a pit for others will fall into it himself.

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After spending the night at the Flying J in Midway, Florida, we had an easy run west to the Alabama state line, and pulled into the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale about noon yesterday.

I have always said that coming into an Escapees park is like a homecoming, because there is always somebody we know from our extended family of RVers on hand to greet us. This time was no exception. The fellow in the Newmar Mountainair motorhome parked next to us, whose name unfortunately slips my mind, is a longtime blog reader.

Soon after we got settled in and hooked up, Darrell and Judy Patterson came by to say hello. They have a lot here, and when they learned that we were coming, they e-mailed and invited us to dinner, but we had to decline because we are already booked solid. We have a lot of friends at Rainbow Plantation, and more at other RV parks in the area, and when they heard that we were headed this way, we were flooded with invitations for dinner or a visit. It feels good to be so loved.

I went for a walk around the park and ran into even more folks, including Jack Mayer. Jack and I have only met once before, but we have exchanged e-mails and comments on the Escapees Forum for years. Howard and Linda Payne from RVDreams.com are also here. We met Howard and Linda at Life on Wheels several years ago, and have kept track of them through their blog ever since.

At the 4 p.m. social hour at the park’s Activity Center, we ran into even more people that we know, including Norm and Linda Payne. (Yes, there are two Linda Paynes here, and they’re both from Louisville!) They have the excellent See Ya Down The Road website, and after ten years of fulltime RVing, they have built a house here at Rainbow Plantation. Linda said that while they have a house now, they still have a lot of wanderlust left, and they keep their RV ready to hit the road at a moment’s notice.

There were lots of other folks who made us feel welcome, but these old gray cells aren’t what they used to be, and if I don’t write something down, I forget it pretty quick.

We have been living in our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage about three months now, and people keep asking how we like it, compared to our MCI bus conversion. The old bus was a great rig, and as strong as a tank, and there have been some tradeoffs we have had to adjust to.

Miss Terry misses her Avanti gas range and oven, her Whirlpool washer and dryer, and the full size Maytag house style refrigerator in the bus. But she is getting the hang of using the convection oven, the RV refrigerator, and the Splendide washer/dryer combo in the Winnebago. They are not as efficient as what we had in the bus, but the tradeoffs in space the Winnebago’s two slideouts give us, along with some nice creature comforts like cruise control and the automatic rooftop TV dish, make it worthwhile.  

I love the power the 350 Cummins diesel gives us. Yesterday, rolling across Interstate 10, we started up a hill and I swung into the left lane, zipped past a couple of slow moving semis, and back into the right lane. Miss Terry said “You like doing that, don’t you?” You bet, baby. After years of life in the slow lane, staring at the back doors of the big trucks, it’s payback time!

We have traveled 2100 miles since we left Elkhart, Indiana November 1, across the mountains of West Virginia, out to the coast of North Carolina, down to Titusville, Florida, and then across the top of Florida on I-10 to Summerdale.

The 2003 ¾ ton extended length Ford cargo van we tow, which carries two kayaks, two bicycles, bundles of the Gypsy Journal, and a lot of other stuff, weighs just at 7,000 pounds.

The Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitoring system keeps very accurate mileage data. Most of our driving has been on Interstate highways, at an average speed of 63 miles per hour. According to the Silverleaf, we have averaged 7.5 miles per gallon for the overall trip. On relatively flat terrain, at 55 miles per hour, I get an average of a shade over 8 miles per gallon. Of course, the faster I drive, the lower my miles per gallon. But sometimes a guy just has to sacrifice a little fuel economy in the name of horsepower.

Speaking of horsepower, Bad Nick burned some fuel writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Protecting Jobs Or Playing Bully?.  Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

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Fulltime RVers always say that their plans are written in Jell-O, and that’s a good thing, because it gives us the flexibility to go with the flow. Even when the flow is taking us where we don’t want to go!

I have bad news, and good news, and more bad news to share with you. The first bad news is that we have had a change of plans and had to cut our Florida visit short. The good news is that we have received a deposit on our MCI bus conversion and soon it will have a brand new owner. The second bad news is that we have to meet him December 4^th in Elkhart, Indiana. Yes, Indiana in December! Can you say cold?

So yesterday we were out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. and started preparing to leave The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida. I wanted to be on the road by 9 a.m., but we were low on propane, and nobody was going to be available at the resort’s propane station until 9. Okay, how long can it take to get propane? We’d be on the road by 9:15 at the latest. Yeah, right?

I unhooked our utilities while Miss Terry stowed things away inside the motorhome, plugged in our PressurePro tire monitoring system, and started to scan our tires when an alert started beeping, telling me that our right outside dual was low on air. How low, you ask? It was down to eighteen pounds pressure! That’s not a good thing!

Our Winnebago diesel motorhome has an onboard air compressor, and came with a coiled plastic air hose to fill tires and such. I had never used it, but I drug it out of one of our storage bays, only to discover that it was kinked and cracked in three or four places. Totally useless.

The Great Outdoors has its own RV service facility, Eagles Pride, which is conveniently located next door to the propane station. It was a short drive, and I knew I could get there okay with the second tire on that dual side carrying the weight. After taking on propane, which took longer than expected, I walked over to Eagles Pride and asked if they could air up the tire and take a look at it. They said no problem, pull it up in front of one of their service bays.

That’s when I discovered that I had locked the motorhome door and left the keys inside! This day was rapidly going downhill. Fortunately (for me, at least), I had left the sliding window open next to the driver’s seat. I boosted Miss Terry up, she slid the screen out of the way, and crawled inside to open the door.

Ever the optimist, I was hoping that I had burned up all my bad karma, and maybe the flat tire was because I had not screwed on the PressurePro sensor cap correctly and had accidentally allowed the air to seep  out.

No such luck, the tech at Eagles Pride found a bolt stuck in the tread of the tire. They are not set up to repair tires, so they recommended a shop in Cocoa, about twelve miles away. With the tire aired up, we drove to the shop and it took an hour or so for them to take off the tire, remove the bolt and make the repair.

Finally, we hit the road, and rolled north on Interstate 95. We pulled into the Flying J in Saint Augustine for fuel, and since it was almost 2 p.m., had a late lunch. We were back on the road by 2:30, continued north to Interstate 10, and turned west. We were so far behind schedule that I had given up any hope of putting too many miles behind us this driving day. But traffic was light and we scooted right along, making good time.

We don’t like to drive at night, but we pushed it as far as we could, and just as the last light was fading from the sky we pulled into the Flying J at Midway, Florida, just west of Tallahassee. They have several designated RV parking spaces in their parking lot, and we slid in between two other motorhomes and settled in for the night. Including our detour south to Cocoa to get the tire fixed, we had covered 330 miles, which was a good day of driving after all.

Today we’ll have an easy run of 225 miles to the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale, Alabama. We plan to stay there until after Thanksgiving, and then we’ll have a straight shot north up Interstate 65 all the way to Indiana.

That’s assuming, of course, that there are no other last minute changes of plans or problems to get us sidetracked.

Thought For The Day – Plant yourself in good soil if you want to bloom.

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