Fun Week in the Florida Keys

We have been on  our  RV Adventure for almost 2 years now, and that was our original timeline to live full time in our RV and find our next home. We quit looking for our next home after just a few months as we enjoyed the RV Lifestyle so much, we decided we were not ready to find a home. We also knew if we kept looking we would probably find something and purchase it before we were ready to settle down again.

Well, now that our two years is almost up, we are trying to decide what our next phase in life will be. We don't know the answer to that question and will try to figure it our as we drive to the west coast and finish our our two year adventure staying at Lake Tahoe for a month before heading up to Oregon to visit with some of the grandkids.

In the mean time, here is the  last Pre-Planned chapter in our Adventure and it was well worth the time and effort it took to get to the Keys as well as the expense. This has probably been the most fun we have had in quite a while and I hope you enjoy watching the  video.

Stay tuned to see just what happens next in  our  RV Adventure, will we end up purchasing a normal home again, or extend the RV Lifestyle for another year or  two. We dont have a clue, but we will figure it out before we get back  to the west coast.

RV Service and Repairs,

We have been in Florida for  several months now and it has been great. That being said, we did hit a snag with our RV and decided to put in a shop and have the repairs done professionally and timely by making  an appointment with the biggest RV repair facility in the country. Lazydays Sales & Service scheduled us right in and we expected to be there 3 or 4 days so we kept our reservations at Orlando RV Resort and left our camp chairs, and other outdoor items in our site knowing we would return in a couple  of days.

Well, that is where the story goes haywire, I won't spoil the suspense other than to say, we spent $10,000 spent 3 weeks in the service bay and still do not have all the repairs completed. Our RV is  in pretty good condition and the slides are working much better as well as the leveling  system but it was not an easy process to have items diagnosed and repaired.

More than anything, I hope  Lazydays has learned a little of a lesson and  makes some changes in their business model, as we feel there is a lot of room for improvements.

We have made it to our Winter Destination
SUNNY FLORIDA

We have been in Orlando Florida in the Thousand Trails park for almost a month now and it is a great RV Campground and we plan to return several times during this winter. We have quite a bit of drone footage to show the park and it's 850 sites that I think many of you will enjoy.

We have reservations for about 5 days in the Miami Everglades and another 5 days down in the Florida keys, all in March 2019 and that will be the highlight of our Winter stay.

We have both found doctors and are doing our annual physicals and blood work, It appears to all be pretty good information with the exception being, I need to start taking blood pressure medications again as my pressure has risen a little and it seems to be the surest and best solution. We will both be glad when all the test and appointments are over but now that we are 70 years old, it will probably a routine annual occurrence.

Here are a couple of videos that will catch you up on our recent travels and expenses and I hope you enjoy watching them. 

Looking Back at my GGGG Grandpa's trip to America in 1746

We have arrived in Virginia and according to our Caddel Family History, that is one of the three possible harbors that our GGGG Grandfather arrived in back in 1746 when he ran away from home in Scotland and stowed away on a ship headed to the British Colonies (America).

He was sold into a 7 year Indentured Servitude that he worked off and he eventually married Jean Henderson, the daughter of the man that had purchased his Indentured Contract from the Ships Captain. It is hard to understand how the world functioned back in these early days.

We spent almost 2 weeks here at the Thousand Trails Chesapeake Bay RV campground, and enjoyed the campground and local area very much. There is a Living Historical Museum in Yorktown Virginia which is about 30 miles away. They demonstrate the living conditions that the early Americans endured as well as the solders who fought and won the American Revolution.

We met several couples while here and even tried eating Oysters at the Oyster Festival held at a local town. I hope you enjoy the story of how our family arrived as well as the couples and activities highlighted in the video.

Is the Nomadic RV Lifestyle Conducive to Making Lasting Friendships?

Pearl and I were making a video today about our time in New England and while editing it, I noticed we were spending much more time talking about the people we had met instead of the things we had seen and done.

It caused me to ponder about the importance of friendships and how hard it was to nourish and maintain these nomadic friendships. It seems that we no sooner get to meet and know someone and then one or the other  of us is moving out to their next destination, potentially never to be seen again.

We have developed a couple of friendships that have withstood the distance of the nomadic lifestyle but they are few and far between. The first couple we met while RV'ing that we were able to overcome the nomadic distance with our friendship was a couple from Kingman Arizona (Pete & Debbie) . We met Debbie when she was walking their two dogs (CoCo & Buddy) and stopped in our camp to met our puppy Tinker, while we were camping in Watchman Campground in Zion National Park back in 2015 shortly after we had retired.

We got to know Pete & Debbie pretty well and although they were 20 years younger than us, and lived 100 miles away, we kept in contact and met at a couple of different campgrounds with them over the years and even stopped by their home in Kingman  AZ. a couple of times, where they have an RV Pad at their home and they let us park and spend the night when going through their area.

I think these friendships are fairly common within the RV community, but they don't happen by accident and take a lot of nourishment to keep them from evaporating into thin air once the two couples move on down the road. We have not duplicated this type of friendship with any other RVing couples we have met, but part of that is because we are constantly moving and haven't returned to the same area to revisit friends that have a fixed home to be able to meet up at.

Most of the couples we have met are also traveling and since we generally don't come back into contact with them in person, we have to keep the friendship alive and well through email and videos. This simply does not work as well as getting to see each other regularly by meeting at campgrounds or in hometowns.

So, with all of that said, here is a short update of our time in New England and most of the people we met while in this part of the country and with a little work and good luck we will get to met them all again in the not too distant future when and if our paths cross again.

Taking Advantage of the RV Lifestyle

We spent a week in New York to meet up with some RV Friends (Jeff & Laurie) at Rondout Valley RV Campground. We had a couple of our Youtube followers (Chuck & Cheryl) contact us that wanted to meet up somewhere and we decided Rondout Valley would be a great place to get together.We all got to get together a couple of times and shared lots of RV stories and laughs together.

Chuck and Cheryl have retired and plan to live full time in their RV starting in the spring of 2019, but have been traveling around the North East for several years. They love climbing the highest mountains and exploring deep down into old mines and caves just as much, as well as numerous other outdoor adventures.

They have videoed and posted all their adventures and you can watch them by clicking the link below
  Chuck & Cheryl's Adventures on Youtube

They are have also started a new channel documenting their transition into the RV Lifestyle
Chuck and Cheryl's transition to the RV Lifestyle

Once Pearl and I watch their videos, we knew we would want to do a video interview with them so we could share their adventures with all of you. We enjoyed spending several days with them and plan to see them again next year once they start their Full Time RV Adventures.

We think you will enjoy the interview with Chuck and Cheryl and maybe even more so, we are sure you will enjoy watching some of their adventure videos.

Visiting Maine and all of it's Beauty

We left Rondout Valley RV Campground September 9th and spent a month traveling up to Bar Harbor in Maine. This has been such a fun trip that we are even thinking about coming back in 2019 or 2020 depending on just how far away we stray to this summer.

We enjoyed Cape Cod and the Boston Freedom Trail for a couple of days before getting to Maine and found Cape Cod to be a great area with beautiful beaches, but unfortunately there was a very sad shark attack on a surfer the day after we left. We did not see any of the seals that apparently are living  in the area and have become  a food source for the sharks but we did not go back to the beach at Cape Cod after hearing of that attack.

Our original plans was to  travel up to and stay at Moody Beach RV Campground located in southern Maine, but we soon learned that much of the real beauty of Maine was further north, so we headed up to Bar Harbor and Arcadia National Park. That was a great decision and we would highly recommend the area to anyone wanting to see the beauty associated with New England.

With our Thousand Trails membership we can stay for Free at the Moody Beach and Narrows Too campgrounds but when we arrived in the Bar Harbor area, we found that the Narrows Too campground free sites were full so we had to rent a spot. We decided to step up and rent one of the sites right on the ocean so we could watch the tides come in and out and enjoy all that scenery. The site cost $107 per day (minus a 20% TT discount) so we only stayed in the site 4 days until we could get into one of the Free sites, but it was money well spent.

We got to eat lobster dinners and a variety of seafood and enjoyed most all of it, although not many items compared to Pearl's home cooking which is always awesome and usually pretty healthy.

Well it is now October 9th and the last month has flown by and we are back in Rondout Valley Campground meeting up with some friends and looking forward to meeting some new ones. The couple that does the youtube channel "Get Gone With Us" are planning to come to Rondout Valley campground this Sunday for a meet up. They have a great channel and provide a lot of useful information to their viewers so we are anxious to get to meet them. Check out their channel here.Get Gone With Us