Back Across America

After making our last publication of our blog, it was load up and head down the road yet again. I-40 called to us and we headed East into Arkansas. The trip was uneventful, although filling with gas was a bit annoying as we encountered the potbellied pump island hog yet again. I cannot stress this enough people, when you go to the gas station, fill your vehicle and if you want to shop for sundries, move your frickin’ car, then shop til you drop for the quality items found in a gas station convenience store. You’ll find so many things worth your money and probably at a much lower price than anywhere else on the planet. (Note the sarcasm)

We made it about 20 miles east of Ft Smith to a wonderful 8 site campground in Altus AR. Do have to give a shout out to Brandon, the repair guy, of Oklahoma City. With the generator repair the coach was a comfortable 73 degrees while outside the temp was 90 with 85% humidity. He saved us from becoming 2 old, hot, cranky travelers and spending two hours at the campgound trying to cool their home with shore power. We arrived cool and comfortable with a choir of angels singing Hallelujah. We head for West Memphis tomorrow for three days of relaxing on the Mississippi River. Need I say more. Still loving retirement.

Sunday morning came early as we were both up at 4:30 unable to sleep, so woke the dogs and Vicki walked them while I made coffee. Have a relatively long drive, over 240 miles to West Memphis AR to stay at familiar campsite, Tom Sawyer’s. We are in spot 109 and are inverted to the direction of flow so our utilities are on the wrong side, but the windshield is facing the river. Such a pleasure to watch the river tugs push their barges. However the Mississippi is way down. When we were here last year, the river was bank to bank. Now there is a sandbar that is probably the width of two football fields and limits the size of tugs and the number of barges they can push.

No issues with the drive, but we yet again ran into the pump idiots. This time they were from Maryland. I should call my senator and recommend that this type of blocking be a clasa A felony. Oh, wait, my senator is Ted Cruz, and he’s an idiot! Sigh. We did stop at an Arkansas rest stop around 11 and had a 30 minute power nap as 4:30 am is just too damn early.

After we stay three nights here in West Memphis, we will be turning southward toward Helena AL where will spend the night after a huge push of 266 miles enroute to our final destination of Florida where we’ll enjoy watching our Grandson Emmett continue his quest for baseball greatness. Does it get better than this? I think not! Still loving retirement.

Monday did not live up to the Tracy Ulman hit, Manic Monday, however it did take a few unexpected twists and turns. The weather is certainly hot here in the south with now the added humidity makes the misery index just that much higher. Woke at our usual 5 am for a dog walk and then enjoyed the river with our coffee as we slowly moved forward with our day. We then decided that we needed to mail Frank’s 91st birthday card, so we had to print some pictures to put in with it. Thought we were out of ink, but luckily discovered we had a couple of more ink cartridges, so saved a trip to Office Depot.

Vicki has be battling Bronchitis for the past 2 weeks since our visit to Vegas, so I put my foot down and said you need to see a Docter. (Actually she asked me if she should go to the walkin clinic which I readily agreed to.) So off to the post office we went to deliver Frank’s card and find a walkin clinic. West Memphis is basically the step child of Memphis so finding a clinic was a bit of a challenge. So when all else fails, jump on the phone and call Marcus our friendly neighborhood insurance agent for Medicare. He found us a Clinic in downtown Memphis and we were over the river into Tennessee.

It only took two hours to get throught he clinic and get the necessary prescriptions to enable Vicki to begin the pathway to good health again. Had to stop in downtown to fill with gas and there was a man with a mental health crisis yelling at the gas station attendant through the window. He left, as I went into the store to pay, Vicki, needless to say, locked herself in the car until the guy moved on down the road. We went back to West Memphis to the Walmart where the prescriptions were called in.

Finally it was back home and I fixed us apple sausages and roasted peppers and onions. We were able to have an outdoor coffee cocktail and enjoy the river traffic for a good hour before supper. Life on the Mississippi is certainly relaxing. Still loving retirement.

Wednesday found us back on the road enroute to Florida. We left West Memphis around 8 am and headed down the road. Some interesting occurrences have landed at our doorstep, so let me mansplain them to you. While outside of Memphis, we chased a huge thunderstorm and finally caught up to it around Birmingham AL. That made the trip a bit breezy, but not unmanageable. Our last night in Memphis we also had a big wind and thunder and lightning. We actually had a lightning strike less than 1/2 mile away which not only scared the dogs, but it didn’t do wonders for us either. We actually had to use our windshield wipers in the rig which was a first time in a long time.

We arrived at Cherokee Campground after a bit of a troubling drive as the generator was acting a bit finicky. We shut everything down, restarted, and then were able to travel in comfort as we used only one AC. As we got further through Mississippi and then into Alabama the humidity was reaching the 70% level so we then turned on the second AC and the coach finally cooled down to a bearable level. When we stopped for lunch, it looked like we had our own personal water fall with all the condensation coming off the roof from the dehumidifier portion of the AC.

Also, we got a call from the salesman in Las Vegas who thought he had found our unicorn. A Phaeton 36gh. A very nice coach, however it only had the one bathroom. Niches that. So that set Vicki into the Unicorn hunt. And lo and behold, she may have found our Unicorn. It’s 2014 Newmar Dutch Star 4369. with all the bells and whistles. It checks off every box on our list and is incredibly nice. This would certainly be our forever home. The thing is ginormous at 44′ long and would limit some of the locations we could stay in, but ooohhhh baby, what a rig! Vicki is scheming on how to work the financing and we’ll look at it while we are in Florida. We’ll let you know how it goes. Other than that, the furr babies are doing fine and we are still loving retirement.

Thursday turned out to be another scorcher here in the south. And to add insult to injury, the humidity was off the chart! While the temperature was only 95 degrees, (OMG only 95!!!) the humidity was in the 70% range, making the misery index or feels like temperature almost 120 degrees! How on earth do people survive this? But survive we do going from air conditioned coach to air conditioned building. Drinking morning coffee or evening coffee cocktails is nye on impossible. At least its not real buggy so far because I think they’ve been cooked by the heat. We had breakfast in an abandoned parking lot just outside of Montgomery Alabama as it was just off the highway 231 and relatively level. It lacked any shade, but fortunately the generator was working so we had AC. Vicki fixed a delicious breakfast of pancakes and we indulged in the real maple syrup we got from Vicki’s Aunt Teresa via her cousin JoAnna from Vermont. Wow does real maple syrup taste delicious, and a tiny bit goes a long way.

We did have a bit of a challenge as we arrived in northern Florida and Southern Georgia. We had planned on staying at the YaYa’s Lake Seminole RV Park but on arrival, we immediately kept on driving. Yikes would be the best description. The photos on RV Trip Wizard were total propaganda and looked nothing like the actual park. And I use the term park in the most derogatory way possible. There was no way I was going to be able to get our rig into the place and all that was missing was the banjo music. I now know why Deliverance was filmed in Georgia.

So now we had to find our way back to civilization as we were out in a forest on the border of Florida and Georgia on an unmarked, unpainted, two lane road with no place to turn around and retrace our steps. Add to the fact that we had no cell service to use the Google machine or Siri and our adventure began. After about 10 minutes of driving, the road finally became a bit wider and there were finally lane strips down the middle. We finally got cell service and Vicki routed us to a Piggly Wiggly where we stopped, had lunch, walked the dogs, and purchased a few things to justify stopping and using their parking lot. We used RV trip wizard at the Piggly Wiggly that was back in Florida and we found an RV campground a mere 3.1 miles away. We called the number and it was the City Hall number for Chattahoochee Florida. But after chatting with the secretary she told me to call the campground host Billy. So we called the infamous Billy as asked if they had availability. They did and he said he would give us a pull through for the night.

Upon arrival, sure enough, Billy was every stereotype of what you’d expect from a rural north Florida campground. Just as nice and friendly as can be, dirty t-shirt, big belly, oily old ball cap, suspenders holding up pants three sizes too big, and missing a few teeth, Billy greeted us at the entrance and after filling out the paperwork, escorted us to our site with his pick-up truck and water hauling trailor. Past a few long term residents and into an unmowed field with 6 vacant pull throughs. Not the most level of sites, but for one night we made do. It is always an adventure for sure.

We also came to a conclusion that we are going to stick with this RV rather than pursue our Unicorn. The numbers just don’t work out for us and we’d rather modify this rig than to be house poor in a newer rig. Sigh. We are off tomorrow to travel deeper into Florida with our final destination near Coco Beach to watch Emmett. Although with this heat dome, I hope that it will still happen, or at least it will happen indoors and not out. It’s still too hot!!! So looking forward to seeing him play in person. And did I mention? We’re still loving retirement.

Saturday has us in the Eastern Time zone and northern Florida where it is still incredibly hot and even more humid. The misery index is off the charts with no real relief in sight until December. Global warming is real folks. We had no issues driving from Chattahoochee other than a wrong turn to Casey Jones Campground. I turned too early and ended up in a parking lot that was too small and we had to disconnect and do a three point turn. Not a major issue, but still a pain in the butt.

It is so hot here that we literally had to drive in the car for a bit to cool off as the AC in the coach wasn’t keeping up. Later I discovered that we were only running on one AC and that the other AC had tripped its breaker. Resetting the breaker meant that both AC’s were fully functional and the coach immediately cooled down to bearable temperatures.

I’m going on a bit of a rant here, so please bear with me. Florida has passed a law that makes it mandatory to teach middle schoolers that slavery was beneficial to black people because it take them skills that they didn’t all ready have. RUFKM!!!!! Slavery as a teaching tool? That is the most asinine thing I have ever heard. And to top it off, in the AP level, they say that the Tulsa Wall Street riots was caused by black people. WTF? Florida has definitely jumped off the rails. How on earth can this crap even be considered as our history? These examples so how a small group is trying to rewrite history to make themselves more important somehow. We have to look at and teach our history as the facts associated with it. So much of our history is very dark and very sickening by today’s standards. We need to look at the biased issues, (The Civil War comes to mind) and reexamine what and how we learned. With the availability of countless sources of information, we need to teach our kids to be able to distinguish what is fact and what is pablum. That means we cannot white wash history and tell it from the perspective of those who lived it. (African Americans, Native Americans, etc) Rather than just look at the European point of view. We will be so much better as a country and while I get people want to believe what they want to believe, the facts are irrefutable.

Florida is definitely conservative and still think Trump is president. Lots of mullets and Trump flags. Lots of people in the park we are staying in, still think Hillary should be in jail, Joe Biden stole the election, by wrapping themselves in the flag makes them a patriot, and liberals are the worst thing in the world. I get that they are disappointed but their inability to move on amazes me.

But enough of this rant, I need to get this published. We are off tomorrow to Coco beach to watch Emmett and see Annalise for the week. We are so excited. Hope that the heat dome dissipates so the boys won’t be in danger. Other that that, we are still loving retirement.