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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