First Full Month

We’ve now moved on past Labor Day, 2016, so we are starting our first full month being on the road as “full timers”.  It starts to get more interesting as I get further away from working full time.  That part of my life, which was important for 5 decades, now seems to recede a bit from memory and intensity.  I still miss it, but am starting to understand what friends have told me before:  Not sure how I ever had time to work full time, there is so much to be done now.

Not the least of which is trying to keep this blog up to date, more or less.  That’s not necessarily so much for you, dear reader, as it is for me to journal a more or less real time record of what is going on.  Hopefully, some of this will prove useful, or at least interesting, to someone reading it.

In any event, we are moving the base of operations from Iowa to Indiana.  We have strong family reasons to spend time there.  Our youngest and her family are there, and we have missed them.  We always keep in contact with phone calls, and the indispensible Facebook postings, but there is nothing like personal contact with those you love and miss.

We’ll be there almost a month in a campground that is also a local fishing lake.  It has a number of full time residents who have outfitted their RVs for living in a cold climate full time.  This includes some interesting modifications to add insulation of sorts around the base of the RV.  Some of that ends up looking a bit scary.  And they add large external propane tanks that are refilled by a truck coming by so they don’t have to move the RV at all. 

We end up in a full time slot but have issues with the sewer connection so get moved to one of their transient slots even though we’re there on a monthly rate.  That actually works out very well as it rains some and the campground has some issues with drainage and the lot gets muddy.  The new spot helps immensely as it is better gravelled for drainage and backs up to the dog walk.

We had a wonderful time seeing our daughter and her family and got to help the grandson paint a Halloween pumpkin at day care.  I’m not sure if the kid or grandma had the most paint on them, but it was one of those minor events that you miss when you are separated.

We had thought we might get to northern Indiana which is home to much of the RV industry and parts manufacturers, but that just never fit into our schedule, so we’ll add that to the list for the next time through.  And it was time to move on to the next stop:  my home territory of West Virginia.

We’ve now been on the road for a full 6 weeks, and are maybe settling into a new routine.  Or as routine as you can get living in a 400 square foot tin box on wheels.  We are having a good time, but there is also something almost surreal about not having a “sticks and bricks” place to call our own any more.  We have a mail service (Escapees) that forwards our mail but we have to have an address for them where we be while it catches up to us.  Makes for some intereting time delays on some items.  Maybe I’ll try to put something more together on some of these challenges and add it to the blog.

Somewhere in Indiana

October 2016