We pulled out of the Camping World in Robertsdale just after 9 a.m. yesterday morning, took State Route 59 north through Loxley to Interstate 10, and turned west. A few minutes later we were crossing Mobile Bay on the causeway, past the impressive bulk of the battleship U.S.S. Alabama, her big guns looking mighty intimidating.

On the west side of the bay we entered the George C. Wallace tunnel, and came out the other end, with the downtown area behind us. Every time we drive through here, I think every American city should be laid out the same way. No traffic hassles, just drive under the darn town!

Traffic was light, and we scooted across the lower edge of Alabama and crossed into Mississippi with no delays. We stopped at the Flying J in Gulfport, and I wanted to get propane while we were there, but the way the RV island is laid out, we had to stop just inside the RV entrance to the parking lot at the propane station, and as I was waiting for the attendant to come out and fill our propane tank, a big motorhome towing a car tried to pull in and was left hanging halfway out into the road because we were blocking the way. An eighteen wheeler was right behind them, so I pulled forward to the fuel pumps so we didn’t have a huge traffic jam. We have enough in our tank to last a while, so we’ll wait until we’re somewhere more convenient to get propane.

Back on the highway, we rolled past miles of flooded countryside, with a long line of billboards sticking up out of the water, advertising one headliner after another who will be appearing at the local casinos. We entered Louisiana, and took the Interstate 12 route around the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, avoiding the traffic in the New Orleans area.

We ran into a traffic slowdown in Baton Rouge, and managed to thread our way through to come back out on Interstate 10, where we crossed the Horace Wilkinson cantilever bridge over the Mississippi River. This is the highest bridge on the Mississippi, and Miss Terry commented that I really seem to be handling bridges much better, because I didn’t snivel. I told her I was too busy trying not to run over four wheelers and hoping an eighteen wheeler wouldn’t run over us to have time to snivel!

We made good time all the way across Louisiana, and the promised stormy weather held off, although we did get some stiff wind around Lafayette, and just a sprinkle or two of raindrops. The Atchafalaya Swamp Freeway is an eighteen mile long elevated stretch of Interstate 10 that bridges the Atchafalaya River and its accompanying swamp, where trees stuck out of the water for as far as the eye could see. The roadway is narrow, and about as bumpy a stretch of pavement as you’ll find anywhere in North America. We shook, rattled, and bounced our way along, and I commented to Miss Terry that as nice as our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage is, our old MCI bus conversion handled this rough piece of highway a lot better. Interstate 10 across Louisiana has a reputation as a terrible roadway, and it is much deserved. More than one RVer we know has had things shake off their walls and out of cabinets as they bounced along.

Eventually the road smoothed out, and at Exit 36, on the east side of Lake Charles, we turned north for three miles on Pujol Road, a good two lane that passed a couple of RV parks. The road ends at a T intersection, and we turned right and went another mile to White Oak Park, a nice little Calcasieu Parish park on the bank of the Calcasieu River. The park has eight pull- through concrete RV sites with good 50 amp electric, water, and a dump station. At $12/night, or half price if you have a National Parks senior or handicapped pass, the park is a heck of a deal.

There was one fifth wheel trailer, which is unoccupied, and the beautiful Tiffin Phaeton motorhome of our friends Mark and Sue Didelot. We unhooked the van and pulled into the site next to theirs. Mark greeted us, and a few minutes later Sue returned from town and came over, and then she excused herself to go back to their coach, where she prepared us a wonderful dinner of salmon from their summer trip to Alaska, along with shrimp, and all the trimmings. Yummy! Thanks for the great welcome and the delicious dinner, Mark and Sue!

We had originally planned to push on to the Thousand Trails in Columbus, Texas today, but we can’t pick up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal until Monday. So we decided to stay here two nights, and drive through Houston on Christmas morning, when hopefully, there won’t be as much traffic.

We have three bars of EVDO on our Verizon cell phones, no problem getting a signal on our TV dish, and it’s not cold. Life is good.

Thought For The Day – A friend is someone you can see through and still enjoy the show.

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We had hoped to get the work done on our coach early enough yesterday to be able to get on the road and put some miles behind us by dark. True to their word, the folks at Camping World in Robertsdale were finished by noon, and true to their record thus far, the folks at National Interstate insurance dropped the ball again.

They had promised to overnight a check to us at Rainbow Plantation RV Park to cover the costs of the repairs, and the staff at the campground told us they would call us as soon as it arrived. So we left early enough to be at Camping World for our 8 a.m. appointment, and they pulled the Winnebago right in. When the work was done, we still had not heard from the campground. I called our contact at National Interstate trying to get a tracking number for FedEx, and got his voice mail.

An hour went by, I called back, and he was out to lunch, so I left another voice mail. And then another. Finally, sometime around 3 p.m., I got a call from FedEx, asking just where the heck we were. It seems that instead of sending the check to us, care of the Escapees campground at 14301 County Road 28, Summerdale, Alabama, as I had instructed, and as the insurance company rep repeated to me twice, instead they addressed it to 14301 County Road 2828, Sommerville, Alabama! Big surprise, right?

So, by the time we got the check, it was too late to hit the road. We switched to Plan B. Camping World has a half dozen or so pull through RV sites with 30 amp electric and water, free for customer use, so we decided to spend the night there and take off today. This isn’t a campground by any means, but it sure beats the heck out of dry camping, or driving ten miles back to Rainbow Plantation, only to retrace the same route today as we leave town.

I’m pleased with the job the RV tech at Camping World did, installing a new Winegard Traveler automatic TV dish to replace the older Winegard unit we had on our roof. During the burglary and vandalism, they trashed our Dish Network receiver and the control box for the Winegard. Since they don’t make that unit any more, it was not possible to just replace the control box, the entire unit needed to be replaced.

Here is a picture of it mounted on our rig. It’s bigger and heavier than the older dish was, and it seems to take about twice as long to lock onto the satellites. But with triple LNBs, it gets all three Dish satellites, 110, 119, and 129, at the same time, without having to reposition itself when we change channels, like our single LNB dish did.

We had visitors while we were at Camping World! Our friends Paul and Sally Wagner, who are our neighbors at Elkhart Campground in the summer, are staying at Coastal Haven RV Park in nearby Fairhope, and when they read in the blog that we were leaving the area, they came over to say goodbye. We always enjoy visiting with Paul and Sally, I just wish we had more time this trip to do so.

Joe and Marcia Jones are good friends who have the Chasing The Seventies RV blog. We have crossed paths with them many times in our travels, and they arrived at Rainbow Plantation yesterday afternoon, hoping to catch up with us. When they realized we had already left, they came up to Camping World to say hello. We always enjoy these two, and though our visit was brief, we appreciated them taking the time to come all the way back up from the campground to see us.

Terry and I love seafood, and since we are going to be leaving the coastal area today, once we had settled our bill with Camping World and our company had left, we went back to Big Daddy’s Grill for our last fresh seafood dinner. It was just as delicious as last time, and this is one restaurant we’ll be coming back to anytime we’re in the area.

From the weather reports, we may run into some stormy weather as we travel toward Texas, but we’ll just head out and see what happens. If it gets ugly we’ll pull off the road and wait it out. Our goal for today is Lake Charles, Louisiana, a distance of 350 miles.

We had planned to spend the night boondocking at the Isle of Capri Casino, where we’ve stayed before, but Gypsy Journal reader Mark Didelot called last night to tell us about a parish park where he and his wife Sue are parked in Lake Charles, which is just a couple of miles off Interstate 10. The cost is just $12 a night for 50 amp electric, water, and a dump station, with parking on concrete pads. If you have a Golden Age or Golden Access pass, which is now called the National Access pass, the cost is only $6/night. So we will shoot for that instead. Here’s hoping for a good travel day!    

Bad Nick wanted you to have something to do while we’re traveling, so he wrote another Bad Nick Blog post titled Cheaper To Keep Her. Check it out and leave a comment. 

Thought For The Day – Drive like your life depends on it, because it does!

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I don’t know why I even try to give our readers an idea of our travel plans, because the minute I do, everything changes. I reported in yesterday’s blog that we would send the CD with the new issue to our printer, and hopefully head west by way of Livingston, Texas and across the central part of the Lone Star State. What a difference a day makes! 

When I called the printer we normally use here in this part of the country, they didn’t have us on the schedule as promised, our contact person was unavailable, and it was obvious they were neck deep in chaos due to internal problems. Now what? We’re already running late and we don’t have time to wait for them to resolve their personnel issues.

I called another newspaper printer we have used in Victoria, Texas, explained our problem, and the customer service rep we work with there promised that if I could overnight the CD to her, she’d make getting us printed a priority. So it looks like we’ll be driving across Interstate 10 counting the road kill after all.

Publishing a newspaper on the road presents these kinds of challenges all the time. It would be great to have one newspaper do all of our printing, but the cost of having them ship the finished issue to us wherever we happen to be would be prohibitive, and timing would become a real issue. Most newspapers could actually handle the mailing for us as well, but besides the papers for our subscribers, we also print several thousand extra copies of each issue to pass out at RV parks, rallies, etc, and those would have to be shipped to us, with the inherent costs mentioned above.

Anyway, with all of that worked out yesterday morning, we drove about 35 miles to Pensacola, Florida to take care of some business, and made the mistake of stopping at a couple of stores. I was quickly reminded of why I try to avoid stores from Thanksgiving until New Years Day. Crowds of shoppers, everybody in a hurry, screaming kids, and frazzled store employees are about as far from the spirit of Christmas as you can get. Bah humbug!

Today we have an appointment at Camping World in Robertsdale to get the last of the repairs done to our motorhome from our burglary and vandalism. Our appointment is for 8 a.m., and they say we’ll be out by noon.

We had expected to be here in Summerdale until after Christmas, and probably until right after New Years, but, with this change of plans in our printing schedule, we’ll be heading toward Texas no later than Wednesday morning. In fact, if they get the work finished at Camping World early enough in the day, we may even put a couple of hundred miles behind us yet today.

We know we are disappointing some folks who wanted to get together with us while we were here, but we really have no choice. Unfortunately, we are not retired and we don’t always have the luxury of the relaxed schedule we like to have. It’s a lot better than our old workaholic lifestyle, but sometimes when duty calls, we just have to answer.

Tune in tomorrow and find out where we are. And if you find out before I do, send me an e-mail and let me know!       

Thought For The Day – I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

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If you see Noah, tell him I’d like to swap a really nice Winnebago Ultimate Advantage motorhome for his ark!

It has been raining ever since we got back to Summerdale, and I’m starting to collect two of every critter I see, just in case. Here are a couple of photos of the puddles taken from in front of our motorhome yesterday morning. Everywhere we step, the ground is just saturated.

A lot of blog readers have e-mailed asking me how our insurance company is treating us since we were burglarized and vandalized the evening of December 4^th. I have held off on saying much, hoping to keep a spirit of cooperation going. But since that hasn’t done us any good, here is how the situation looks from my point of view. Please excuse the rant, but we feel like we are being victimized for a second time.

We have used PoliSeek (formerly AON) as our insurance agent for most of the ten years we have been on the road. First they placed us with Royal Sun Alliance, and when that company stopped covering RVs, they switched us to National Interstate. In all of that time, we have faithfully paid our premiums on time and have never had a claim.

We are supposed to have a disappearing deductible, which means that for every year that we don’t have a claim, our deductible goes down by 10%. We also pay extra for full replacement coverage of our RV and contents.

So far, I am very unhappy with the response from both PoliSeek and National Interstate. Our crime happened late on a Friday evening. We called the next morning (Saturday), and got a message to call back on Monday. So we were left to fend for ourselves all weekend in 12 degree weather in northern Indiana with an RV with a window busted out. We could not leave the RV parked and unsecured and stay in a motel or everything else in it could have been stolen. Fortunately, Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint opened her shop up for us so we could get in out of the cold over the weekend.

On Monday, three days after the incident, I talked to the first claims adjuster, and he e-mailed me a Vandalism Affidavit and requested that I fill it out, have it notarized, and return it to him by fax. He also said to send him a list of any items that were stolen. I did so, and called him back an hour or so later to tell him that they had been faxed, and got a message that he was out of the office. As it turns out, he was out of the office for the next week.

We managed to contact a different adjuster, who said she was filling in for him, and she asked me to mail her hard copies of the forms, which we did. When I asked her about specific repairs and what was covered and how to get the repairs done so we could get back on the road and to warmer weather to avoid an incoming blizzard, her answer to every question was “I don’t know, I’ll have to get back to you.” The shop that did the initial repairs so we could get out of cold, snowy Indiana is getting the same run around.

Once our motorhome was drivable again, the second adjuster said to go to Camping World in Robertsdale, Alabama to get an estimate for the repairs that are still needed. I did so and faxed National Interstate that information.

Monday, a week after I spoke to him, the first adjuster called back and wants to start from square one all over again, and when I asked about the repairs still needed, his answer was the standard “I don’t know, I’ll have to get back to you.”

I was told that our disappearing deductible does not apply, because we also kept our bus conversion insured with them until it was sold. As for our total replacement coverage, that apparently only applies to items not physically attached to the RV, and guess what, there’s another deductible that comes into play there too!  When I ask why, the answer is “I don’t know, I’ll have to get back to you.”

Yesterday I called PoliSeek, who is supposed to be my advocate, as I understand it. I was told that nobody there could help me, and was transferred to the original claims adjuster at National Interstate. He told me that “these things take time.”

How much time? It is now twelve days after we were victimized and we still do not know if we are on the hook for the repairs to our RV or if we will be reimbursed for our loss and damages. The shop in Indiana wants paid and has told us that if the insurance company does not pay them in a timely manner for the repairs, we are responsible.

The same claims adjuster called back later yesterday afternoon and told me the claim can take up to 180 days to settle. Then he e-mailed me more paperwork to fill out, more loss claims to have notarized and mailed in, and said he will turn it over to a field adjuster, who is supposed to contact us “soon” to make an appointment to come and talk to us.  

You can bet that I’ll be changing insurance companies and agents very soon! Some readers who use PoliSeek and National Interstate have reported good experiences with them, but they have totally dropped the ball on our claim, in my opinion.

Thought For The Day – Friendship isn’t a big thing. It’s a million little things.

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I feel like I’m wading in waist deep muck. I have so much I need to get done, but it’s like every step I try to take forward takes forever to accomplish, and I keep falling further and further behind.

Part of it is that I feel like I have hit an emotional and physical wall. I can’t concentrate, my brain feels fuzzy, I’m grouchy and irritable, and I’m worn out. All I want to do is lie down and take about a 36 hour nap. I know that it’s all a delayed stress reaction to recent events, and I’ll work through it. I just needed to snivel. Okay, enough of that.

Yesterday we had a lot of running around to get done. Our first stop was at the post office in Summerdale to mail off a bunch of orders, and then we went to Camping World in Robertsdale, where I picked up a written estimate to have our rooftop automatic TV dish replaced. Among the other things that happened during the burglary was that he (or they) ripped out the control box for the rooftop dish and the Dish Network receiver, threw them on the floor and stomped on them. Since Winegard no longer makes our model of dish or supports it and no replacement parts are available, we have to get a new one.

While we were at Camping World, we picked up a folding aluminum outside step with a 1,000 pound capacity for times when the distance between the ground and the step of the Winnebago is too much for our stubby little legs.

Terry also found a small oak  footstool to put under her feet when  we’re traveling to make it more comfortable for her. The top raises to give access to a small storage area for items like remote controls and such, Just what I need, one more place to lose my remote control!

We then had to run over to Daphne, on Mobile Bay, to pick up some items at Sam’s Club, and while we were in the area, we stopped at the Bass Pro Shop at Spanish Fort. Terry wants a pair of fuzzy moccasin style slippers from Minnetonka or TeePee for Christmas, and I was hoping we could find some there, but they didn’t have what she wanted.   

We also went to an Office Depot to make copies of paperwork for the insurance company and faxed that to them. If you have ever wanted to be a crook for a living but are to afraid of going to jail, I think you should just open an insurance company. It’s like a license to steal. We have paid thousands of dollars in premiums over the years and never had a claim, but now that we need them, we are getting one runaround after another. One person tells you one thing and the next person contradicts the first one, things one tells us are covered the next one says are not, and “total replacement coverage” and “disappearing deductibles” are all bull$&@! when it comes time to pay off.

By the time we got all of that done, it was after 4 p.m. and we were getting hungry. I had spotted a Chinese buffet in a shopping center across the street from the Office Depot, and asked the clerk who sent our faxes if it was any good. She said she didn’t like Chinese, so couldn’t tell me, but one of her co-workers spoke up and said it was her family’s favorite Chinese restaurant, and that her sister drove all the way to Daphne from the far west side of Mobile to go there at least twice a month, so that was good enough for me. We adjourned to the Grand Buffet for dinner, and while I wouldn’t put it up in my Top 5 list of Chinese buffets, it was pretty darned good.

Back at the campground, I answered some e-mails that came in during the day, fiddled with the satellite and Dish receiver hoping against hope I could get them to work, and finally gave up in frustration. I know a lot of folks say that they don’t care much for TV, but I do. There are a few regular programs we watch regularly, and I am a news hound so I miss the daily news broadcasts and a lot of good documentaries on A&E, the History Channel, and such. Tomorrow I may drag out my old tripod dish and see if I can get any kind of a signal off that.

Of course, nothing stops Bad Nick. He has a new blog post titled Welcome Home, Sisters. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – There is great need for a sarcasm font.

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