We usually leave our little ranch for the summer about mid-May to escape the Texas summer heat, but we had some medical issues arise which caused us to delay our departure (we’re doing fine now.) This was a considerable bonanza for our spring crop of thirsty hummingbirds as they got enjoy their daily gallon of sugar water for an extra month. Instead of using our usual 50 pounds of sugar, the spring total went to about 90 or 100 pounds!
Time to get ready! We moved on the coach Wednesday, June 17 and in spite of having most things we need already permanently stationed on the coach, many trips to the house were still necessary to load up for travel. This trip was going to be different. Our beloved friend and companion, Bosun the cat, was not going to make this trip. Bosun was on the last trip we made to the Bahamas in our sailboat and accompanied us on every trip in the motorhome. Sorry you couldn’t make it old friend. We did have a new companion, Sassy the Corgi. We had no idea how well Sassy would take to traveling (or no idea how we would take to having a doggie along), but we easily fell into the routine of doggie care and enjoy our new furry “kid.”
We are ready and leave our little ranch Saturday, June 20 and head to New York State to meet up with our travel friends Bob and Judy whom we haven’t seen in two years. We traveled for four days straight and had enough (we usually travel 300-400 miles a day), so we stopped for a couple of days, and then finally met up with our buds in Cortland, NY. We have read about the disintegration of bridges and our Interstate Highway system in general since the economy declined, but based on about 1500 miles of Interstate travel, we really don’t think it is better or worse than we have experienced over the last few years of travel. But we digress. This was among the worse campgrounds we have experienced. 30 years old, poor electric (as in low voltage due to inadequate wiring), non-level sites, poor maintenance, bad roads (ruts, potholes), and tree
limbs all over the place. You might ask, “why Cortland and this crummy campground?” It was because our RV friends Bob & Judy were there so that Judy can hike the Finger Lakes Trail which goes all over the place in that area. We were there for a couple of days and Jane and Judy enjoyed the fellowship and hiking. Bob and John were the support crew (dropped the gals off and picked them up usually a couple of hours later.) We all had a good time visiting and catching up on two years of news. We then moved to a campground about 30 miles to the west near Ithaca, NY. More hiking, more visiting, and we played a few games of Mexican Train (a domino game.) We had rain, rain, and more rain – we kept praying that we could have diverted the moisture to Texas since we are very dry at the ranch. (Now that we own animals, we worry about the availability of grass for grazing and it is turning brown at a fast rate.)
The peaceful and lightly-populated Ithaca campground turned into a noisy and busy place almost overnight over the July 4th holiday weekend with kids running around and dozens of families enjoying a respite from their daily routine. It was really special when we were awakened at 1:30 am with people talking loudly in spite of quiet hours – rarely have we encountered such rude behavior in over 40,000 miles of Rving.
Our home on wheels is generally a joy and we think a wonderful alternative to hotels/motels, but we have a few added responsibilities and even some headaches – it seems there is always something that is broken or needs attention on the coach. Our dash air conditioning (runs off the engine) quit about a week ago which isn’t a big deal because a) it’s cool up here (we’re currently in Vermont), and b) we can run the generator and our main house air conditioning. Also our in-motion satellite TV dome (we can watch DirecTV while running down the road) didn’t work quite right. We usually don’t watch TV while in-motion, but our recorder is always on-duty looking for our TV programs to record. John just diagnosed (with the help of the factory) the problem, so we have a part on order which hopefully relieve us of this current headache.
We have been watching the weather at our little ranch (thanks to our weather station that’s on-line) and noticed the high temperature recently was 100.0 F at 6:00 PM; every time we notice the triple-digit temperatures we are thankful and feel blessed that we can be somewhere else. It is wonderfully cool here in Vermont (60s during the day) as we write this and we even need to run the heat pump in the morning to take the chill out of the coach!
Our travel plans currently include visiting old sailing friends in Vermont, sightseeing in Maine, volunteering at a couple of state parks in Virginia, seeing some dear friends in the Oriental, North Carolina area, John’s nephews and their families in New York and Ohio and perhaps a visit to the Winnebago factory in Iowa for some service. We have already put about 1,500 miles on the coach and will probably cover another 5,000 miles before we return home sometime in October.
Thanks for riding along with us and we’ll post another installment in two or three weeks.
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