The end of October brought us to 4 months living full time in the motor home. At times, it feels like we like we started an eternity ago but other times it's like we started only yesterday. Since neither is true, maybe that's just old age catching up? Here are the facts about those 4 months:
- We have been in the rig 123 nights.
- We have stayed at 16 campgrounds for multiple nights and had 9 overnight stays at places like Walmart and Cabela's as we travel longer distances between destinations.
- We have done 3744 miles with the motorhome.
- The diesel fuel motor home is costing us $0.25 per mile.
- We are averaging $27 per day in camping fees.
- On the days we drive the motor home, we have averaged 150 miles per day.
- We have put just about 6000 miles on the Jeep doing all our sightseeing trips.
The difference from the two month update to now doesn't show any unexpected differences. We have increased our travelling just a bit the last two months but since the goal after Washington DC was to head to Florida and not take forever doing it, that makes sense.
One interesting thing we have discovered - when the weather is nice out, we feel obligated to go out and explore. Sometimes that means a bike ride, a hike or a game of disc golf. Other times it is visit some nearby town and check out the sights or take a tour of something. When the weather is bad, we are more inclined to stay in and watch a movie, read a book or just play a game on the iPad. For much of this trip so far, we have had some remarkably nice weather. Most of it is likely luck, although some of it is just common sense. When your home has wheels under it, you can avoid driving into the path of a hurricane for instance. With so many back to back days of nice weather, we don't seem to slow down. Maybe the law of averages will come into play and in some future update, I will be dreading the fact that the weather is preventing us from exploring.
There have been many memorable sites (and sights) along the way. It was nice to have an extended stay in Cincinnati to see family. The week in DC was hectic and tiring but very fun and worthwhile. But even though it might look like an extended vacation to most folks, there are plenty of days where our goal is much more mundane. Chris spent a lot of time investigating what is required to become Florida residents. And based on how smoothly the transition went, it would appear to be time well spent.
There are even the occasional days where we need to do some sort of work on the rig. Sometimes trivial things like cleaning windows and screens. It shouldn't be too surprising how dusty things get when you spend so much time in campgrounds.
Other times, the work is a bit more involved. We had started having water leaking from beneath the refrigerator a couple months ago. The water would pool in the bottom of the freezer and freeze and when the volume got greater than the lip, the water would run out before freezing. Where it would run was highly dependent on how level the rig was. For the longest time, the "fix" was to check the ice level and every week or so, use a spatula to loosen the ice and remove it before the water would leak. Another blogger with a rig similar to our was having the same problem and posted about his fix. I watched the same youtube videos and discovered the fix was not too bad.
All the contents of the freezer were placed in the fridge, the bottom freezer drawer and slides were removed allowing access to the drain hole that had become clogged. Initially the blocked line was just general crud, but once blocked, it was just a mass of ice. A hair dryer, some warm water, a bit of cleaning and about 90 minutes of taking things apart and putting them back together, the blocked drain was fixed. For how long? Who knows, but it has been a couple weeks so far without issue.
 |
| Back of Fridge After Clearing Drain! |
Once we had dealt with Florida residency, we really had no other travel plans on the table. We had told people we were thinking of heading to Arizona for the winter, but we had done NO planning or even thinking about it. We agreed it would not make sense to only have "head west" as our travel guide. We know of others that let serendipity be their guide - we aren't there yet! So we sat down and at least came up with a bit of a plan.
Every year there is a huge RV show in Quartzsite Arizona in January. Apparently over half a million people show up. It is one of those events that other RVers say you MUST do at least once in your life. Quartzsite is on I-10 just a few miles east of the California state line. It's about 2200 miles from where we are in Florida and just over 11 weeks out. Since we try to keep our travel days to under 200 miles, we come up with the "plan" to head to Quartzsite driving about 200 miles at a time and spending a week at the location.
When I map it out, there are some places that would be nice to explore like Pensacola, Baton Rouge, Houston. But there are a few others stops in western Texas that we might be willing to do an overnight while passing through, but would be hard pressed to want to spend much time there. Maybe we head a bit south of the route there and check out Big Bend National Park since that is a known snow bird destination for many travellers.
No comments:
Post a Comment