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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We had a surprisingly quiet night at the Georgia State Welcome Center, and were on the road by 8:30 a.m., which is probably a new record for us, but we had a lot of miles to cover.

We had a little technical issue I wanted to have looked at, so I called the Camping World in Pooler, near Savannah, and the service manager said to come right in and they’d see what they could do. It was only nine miles to Camping World, so we were there in just a few minutes. I checked in and was told there was one rig ahead of us, and it would probably be about an hour before they could get us into the shop.

Since we didn’t have an appointment, I figured that was pretty good. But an hour later, they still had not pulled that motorhome into the service bay, so I asked again about the time frame. Then I was told it would be about 1 p.m. before they could get to us. We decided that we’d deal with it when we got to Florida.

We got back on the highway and had a quick trip south to the Florida state line, even though we drove through a 20 mile long construction zone north of Brunswick. Regular readers Lucille and Larry Tillotson had e-mailed to advise us to take the I-295 bypass around Jacksonville rather than stay on the more challenging I-95 through town, and we found it to be an excellent road.

We knew that the space shuttle Atlantis was supposed to be launched at 2:28 p.m., and I told Terry we might get lucky and see it. She got her Olympus digital camera out, just in case, and sure enough, right on schedule, we saw it streaking toward outer space.

We were going down the highway at 60 miles per hour, but Terry managed to get a couple of photos through the side window of our Winnebago before it sped out of sight, leaving a thick contrail in the blue sky.

Earlier Terry and I had been talking about the space program, and I questioned whether it was worth all the money we had poured into it. She pointed out that it has brought us all kinds of things we take for granted today, such as satellite TV programming and GPS systems. Okay, that’s a good deal I guess. We spend billions of dollars, and in return we get perpetual reruns of Roseanne and The Beverly Hillbillies, more home shopping channels than I will ever have time to skip with my remote control, and an electronic backseat driver nagging me to turn left.

We left the highway in Titusville and pulled into The Great Outdoors, one of the premier RV resorts in the country. When we said we were headed to Florida, our longtime friends Pete and Connie Bradish had generously invited us to be their guests for a few days, which we very much appreciate.

This place is really impressive. They have two swimming pools, hot tubs, an eighteen hole championship golf course, fitness center, stocked fishing lake, recreation hall, as well as an on-site post office, bank, hair salon, bank, and RV service facility.

There are hundreds of full hookup 50 amp RV sites, as well as RV ports, chalets, and upscale homes, some of which sell for over $600,000. Lots here rent for over $1,100 a month during peak season, and the resort’s newsletter listed RV lots for sale by private owners for as much as $115,000. That’s a bit out of our price range, but we sure are going to enjoy experiencing the lifestyle of the rich and famous for a while! I think I just heard Robin Leach talking about champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Thought For The Day – The heart that loves is always young.

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We got a slow start yesterday morning and it was a little after noon when we pulled out of the Moose lodge in Myrtle Beach. I immediately set the theme for the day by turning north instead of south on U.S. Highway 501, and it took three miles to find a shopping center where we could turn around and get headed back in the right direction.

Once on U.S. Highway 17, the first order of business was to find someplace to take on some fuel. I had been looking all the way from Morehead City, North Carolina the day before, but didn’t find any place I felt comfortable trying to navigate our big motorhome into and out of. We were not at the critical stage, but we were getting lower than I like to be.

It was 100 miles to Charleston, all of it four lane road, with a lot of traffic and a lot of traffic lights along the way, so we didn’t make very good time. We kept looking for a gas station that sold diesel and looked big enough to accommodate us, but the few we saw were either on the other side of the road, or we saw them too late to stop.

As we neared Charleston, I got on the CB radio and asked a truck driver where we could find a truck stop, and he recommended a Hess on the south side of Charleston. He also recommended that we take the Interstate 526 loop around the city instead of staying on U.S. 17, which would add a few miles but be much quicker and easier driving.

By then I was tired of stop and go driving, so we did just that, and I was proud of myself as we drove over two high bridges, first over the Wando, and then the Cooper River. I didn’t snivel once! If I keep this up, Miss Terry may let me start wearing big boy pants!

By the time we got off the bypass and back onto U.S. 17, I was starting to get uncomfortable with our fuel situation. The Silverleaf engine monitoring system said I still had a range of just over 100 miles before empty, but judging by what I had seen in the last 300 miles since we left Morehead City, I didn’t want to press my luck much further. We didn’t see the truck stop, but after another fifteen miles or so, we did spot a station with separate diesel pumps on the side. It was a tight squeeze, but we managed to get in and fill the tank. If my calculator is right, we got 7.8 miles per gallon on this tank, which is just what the Silverleaf shows.

Another 60 miles, most of which was slow going, brought us to Interstate 95. Usually I like traveling on the back roads, but U.S.17 isn’t a route I’ll be taking anytime again soon. Yesterday, driving it was more work than fun.

The sun was getting low in the sky, making it hard to drive with the glare, and the truckers on the CB were complaining about it. Since we’re not truck drivers and don’t have a schedule to keep, we don’t have to drive in conditions like that. We had covered 206 miles since leaving Myrtle Beach, and that was enough for me.

We pulled into the Georgia State Welcome Center, where signs were posted that said no overnight parking. I went inside to ask the attendant on duty if there was a truck stop or RV friendly WalMart nearby, and she said “Just stay out there overnight, nobody will bother you. Our state troopers who work this area know you’re not sleeping, you’re just resting. That’s what rest areas are for, right?” I like Georgia!

Thought For The Day – Ignore the overwhelming size of the task; just take the first step. The rest will follow, one step at a time.

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I met a man at Elkhart Campground a few years ago who told me he was unhappy in the RV lifestyle because he was bored. I suggested several things he might do to keep himself busy, and he pooh poohed every one of them; visit the RV Museum? No thanks, he wasn’t interested in looking at a bunch of old junk. Play golf? Nope, that was a rich man’s sport, not for him. Go fishing? Why go to all that trouble when you can buy a nice fish dinner in a restaurant? Build houses for Habitat for Humanity? Nobody ever built him a house, so why should he build someone else one?

It didn’t take long before a light bulb went off in my head and I asked him if he had been bored before he became an RVer. He told me yes, that was why he bought the motorhome in the first place.

In talking to him, I learned that he spent part of the summer and early fall parked at his brother’s farm in Pennsylvania; then he went to the same site, which he had reserved, at the same RV park in Florida for the winter. Then in the spring he drove to Elkhart for a few days before continuing on to his niece’s home in Wisconsin, where he stayed until it was time to go to Pennsylvania again. “I tell you, I know every inch of Interstate 95 between Pennsylvania and Florida, and Interstate 65 back up to Indiana,” he told me.  

“How about just for the hell of it, you take I-75 north or south this year,” I suggested. “You could stop in Clinton, Tennessee and check out the Museum of Appalachia. It’s really cool.”

He was shaking his head before I was halfway through my sentence. “Nope, that’s not on my route,” he said stubbornly. If I go off on a different route then what I’m used to, who knows what could happen?”

I wanted to tell him that one thing that might happen was he’d see some new country. Heck, he might even make a new memory or two! But I knew I was defeated, so I just gave up, told him to have a good life, and went on about my business, leaving him to his misery.

I’ve met a lot of RVers who, while they may not be as extreme as this fellow, are still stuck in a rut. They spend their summers in the same place and their winters at the same RV park in Florida, Texas, or Arizona. They tell me they have friends in their favorite campground in the Rio Grande Valley, or wherever they hang out, and they want to get back and spend time with them. I guess that’s okay if it works for them, but that’s just too much of the same old thing for me!

It’s an easy rut to fall into. We have our favorite places we enjoy returning to again and again, but we also go out of our way to visit new places too. Or at least to take a different route to wherever we’re going. And when a place gets too comfortable, we start asking ourselves if we need to look elsewhere.

We absolutely love the area around Aransas Pass and Rockport, on the Texas Gulf Coast, and last year we came across a good deal on a couple of RV lots down there that we seriously considered. But then we realized that buying them would be the first string that would tie us down. Why have the lots if we were not going to go there? But if we went there, what were we missing someplace else?

We didn’t get into the fulltime RV lifestyle to remain static. We wanted to see and do different things, new things. The familiar is comfortable, but it can also become suffocating if you allow it to be. We’re always looking for that new route we haven’t traveled yet, that new place we haven’t seen yet, and that new adventure we haven’t experienced yet.

Remember that the only difference between a rut and a grave is the length and depth.

Thought For The Day – Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

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