Where We’ve Been April 17, 2008
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Below is a map of where we’ve been since our initial break-in trip the middle of December. If you’re interested in creating a map like this go to http://www.epgsoft.com/index.html. In addition to being able to create a map like this that you can then insert into your blog, email, home page; there is also a rather nifty campground map that allows you to search for campgrounds. Thanks to Chris Guld of blog.rv.net for his post on this.
Travelling, Itunes, and Blogging April 12, 2008
Posted by jim in RV, Un-geeky stuff, music.add a comment
We’re on the road again — this time to Savannah, GA. Travel by itself will normally cut down on my blog entries, but I now have another issue. I installed the latest version of Itunes and it completely trashed my Itunes library. So for the second time in six months, I’ll have to completely rebuild the library. Yes, I know that I should have backed it up, but when you’ve got close to 10,000 tunes, backing up gets to be a pain. So, I’ll suffer doing the rebuild knowing that I could have avoided the problem. I hope to be back blogging in a couple of days.
Travel Time and My Sister; 2/2/08 February 5, 2008
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Last Saturday (2/2/08) was travel day or us as we left Crystal River or our next stop at Camp Florida in Lake Placid, Fl. Along the way in Tampa, I had arranged to met my sister who was in town. My baby sister Kay is a romance novelist (link to her web site). She lives in California and we see each other way too infrequently. Although we had just a little over an hour with each other, it was really good to see her again. Here’s a picture of the two of us in the motor home.
The rest of the day was spent traveling to our new home for the next month. We immediately started to notice how much warmer it was as we went south from Crystal River. I’ll update you later on my opinions on the rv park in Crystal River and my first impressions of our new home.
Continuing our adventure and hoping that you are enjoying your adventure as much as we’re enjoying ours.
State Parks near Crystal River, FL January 31, 2008
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As we get ready to leave Crystal River, I’d like to tell you about two rather unique state parks — Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park and the Crystal River Archaeological State Park.
The Wildlife Park is an interesting place originally a private wildlife park aimed at tourists in Florida. It now houses everything from injured bald eagles to manatees to a hippopotamus. During the winter, manatees stay here due to the warm spring in the park. My wife and I had a very enjoyable visit to this park. Here are some pictures we took.
Flamingos and an alligator
Manatees from above and underwater
Finally, Cindy as a manatee
The other state park, the Crystal River Archaeological State Park was disappointing. The park is on the site of a pre-Columbian ceremonial site. There is a small visitors center with some displays and some interpretive signs and audio in the park. Unfortunately, if you’ve seen other similar parks, especially Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, this park is very disappointing. Personally, I found the view of the Crystal River the best point of this park.
We’re enjoying our adventure — hope you are enjoying yours.
Medical Issues on the Road January 25, 2008
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One of the things we dreaded most given our ages and medical histories was medical care while we’re on our road adventure. Strangely, our first challenges came with our dog and with my wife’s teeth.
In our dog, Maggie’s, case, we had gotten her shot records and assumed that we could get her heartworm medicine online when we needed it. Wrong!! We quickly found that (1) heartworm medicine needs a written prescription and (2) our vet doesn’t work with the online services. The vet is sending Maggie’s compete records to us and we’re hopeful based upon what the vet’s assistant told us with we’ll be able to get heartworm medicine from a local vet with her records.
In Cindy’s case, she came up with a rather severe toothache that ended up requiring a root canal. We got the name of a local dentist from the RV camp’s manager who turned out to be very capable. After three visits (one to diagnose and two to do the work by a specialist) and approximately five hours in the dentist chair, we are hopefully past this. (There is still a chance that the affected tooth will need to be extracted, but as some one who only has eight teeth left, I have been assuring Cindy that it is really worth the effort to attempt to save a natural tooth.) Until Cindy recovers from all this work, we (Cindy, Maggie, and I) are dependent upon my skills in the kitchen or finding an appropriate place to eat.
Still enjoying the adventure. Until my next post, I hope all of you are enjoying your adventure!
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Now playing: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – A Fine Romance
via FoxyTunes
We’re Doing It!! January 20, 2008
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Finally, we’re on the road in our motor-home!! We purchased a Newmar Baystar 3202 in November and took a trial run to Lexington over Thanksgiving to celebrate the holiday with my daughter’s family.
We left our stick home on December 27 to begin our adventure. We (Cindy – my wife, Maggie — our miniature schnauzer, and myself – Jim, the retired geek) traveled first to the St.Louis area to visit friends, then proceeded down I-55 to the New Orleans area. We spent two nights in Picayune, MS in order to visit New Orleans on New Year’s Eve. We then headed to Florida ending up in Crystal River for a month.
I intend to post more on our travel later, but I just wanted to get my blog started again. We’re having so much fun on this adventure that we sincerely hope that our stick home gets sold soon and we can proceed upon this adventure.
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Now playing: Sia – Little Black Sandals
via FoxyTunes
November Update November 12, 2007
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We’re still working on the house — putting up a garage now since we’ve discovered that all houses for sale in our area in our asking price range have garages. We’ve had the house up for sale for two months with absolutely no one interested — looks like it’s might take some time to sell.
Nevertheless, we’re proceeding with our plans to buy an rv. First, we were convinced that we would be purchasing a fiver — a fifth wheel, but now we’ve decided to get a class A motor home. We’ve had a couple of missteps, but we’re currently in the process of purchasing one and hope to have it purchased within a week.
On the Yellow Brick Road — to being a fulltime RV’er July 9, 2007
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We continue down the yellow brick road to our Oz — becoming fulltime RV’ers.
We’re getting the house ready to put on the market. This has turned out to be a much bigger job than I first thought, but my wife really has been on top of this project. We’ve got one contractor working on the upstairs with a painter ready to go on working on the outside decks before coming inside. We’ve lined up another contractor to work on the downstairs. All told, it looks like we’re probably going to invest about $20,000 getting the house ready for sale. Since we purchased this house in 1984, we’ve been continually updating the house so that currently there is a mix of the old and the new with the old looking just almost awful. Cindy’s doing her usual great job with the house and making sure that it all looks great.
We also are going through all our accumulated “stuff” and are (1) throwing away stuff that needs to be tossed, (2) freecycling most of the good stuff that we won’t have room for in the fifth wheel, and minimizing the space required of anything we’re keeping. We tried a yard sale for the good stuff that we decided not to keep, but found that this was taking too much of our time with very limited benefit. Since our yard sale, we’ve been informally freecycling. We put up a table next to the road at the front of our property with a sign saying “free – take anything but the table and the sign”. As we decide that something is no longer needed but is not in bad enough shape to toss, we take it out to the free table. We’ve been extremely pleased with this solution. For stuff that we’re keeping, we’re working on minimizing the space needed such as putting our framed photographs into albums (with the frames then going to the free table). For myself, this has been at times a very painful process forcing me to really evaluate just how much of my stuff I really want to keep.post
One last note before signing off. In a previous post, I noted that due to my retirement, I was shifting the emphasis of this blog, but I would still be keeping it oriented towards computer related posts. I’d intended to keep this blog for my geeky side and to have another blog reveal the non-geeky side. This just has not worked out, so I’ve decided to post everything to this blog.
Garmin Nuvi 350 — Bad First Impression June 29, 2007
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One of many decisions my wife and I made when we decided to become fulltime RVers was to purchase a gps unit. I have been reading several blogs and made a decision to purchase a Garmin Nuvi 350 when the time was right. That time happened last week as we were getting ready to go to Chicago. After remembering our nightmare of getting around in Chicago during a trip last year, we decided to purchase the Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS at a local Wal-Mart. I had decided upon this unit based upon reviews of the Garmin unit that praised the superior windshield mount and best routing software.
All I can say is if this is the best the industry has, I’ll wait until Apple develops an iGPS unit before I buy another one. The windshield mount just isn’t going to work. I’m either going to superglue it to the windshield or find another mounting option. (BTW, the optional mounting disk is useless — it just won’t stick any where on my wife’s Dodge Ram truck’s dashboard.) The maps are so full of errors that I sincerely hope that no one has to use these for anything important. The maps had our hotel as well as two adjacent hotels and a shopping mall misplaced. It told us to take an Interstate North when the map directed us to the Interstate South. The maps had towns on the wrong side of the road and street names that did not correspond to actual signage (for example, Park Street on street signs showed up as 37th street on the map).
I do wish that the people doing the reviews would try out these units out in the wild – especially in smaller cities and in the countryside. I realize that keeping maps updated is a huge undertaking, but as GPS units proliferate, I’m certain that the units with the most accurate maps will seize the biggest market share. From what I’ve seen from my first trip with the Garmin Nuvi, Garmin will not be that market leader.
Another Day, Another Dealer June 13, 2007
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My wife and I have been kept busy over the last week with “stuff” – a yard sale to get rid stuff we don’t need as we downsize, finding a handyman to make some repairs to the house before we put it up for sale, getting a hvac service man in to find out why the ac fan was squealing, and visiting trunk and RV dealers. Yesterday, we went to a nearby Ford dealer because the dealer’s web site said it had two Ford F350’s in stock that looked interesting. When we went to the dealership, we found out that only one of the trucks was available – the other one having been sold several days ago. (Rant — when will car dealers ever learn to be good web site citizens and keep their sites up to date — end rant.) We decided to pass on the in stock F350 since it did not have a couple of features that we wanted. We also asked how long it would take to get a new truck if we ordered one and were told eight to twelve weeks. Truly amazing if one’s to believe the news stories (print and tv) about how truck sales are in decline.
Today, we went to a nearby RV dealer that we had not visited previously. I wanted to see several Heartland fifth wheels and according to Heartland’s site, this guy was the closest dealer to us. We also saw a really nice Grand Teton fifth wheel by Thor that was truly amazing and had a price tag to match. We’re still undecided about the exact fifth wheel we want, but at least the hvac repair guy showed up a day earlier that scheduled and fixed our ac fan’s problem.
