Back on the Road Again

On Sunday, May 4th, we resumed our life on the road. After spending three days of schlepping stuff from the vacation home to the RV (my Fitbit says I did over 15 miles of walking and the rig was only 35 yards away), we pulled out of Sun’N’Fun and headed up I-75. Although our destination list was a bit unplanned, we did have an arrival date of Thursday, May 8th in mind because we wanted to attend the last two days of the AARP Convention in Boston.

After a couple of days of rain while we were trying to load up, the weather turned very nice for Sunday. Day one took us over to I-95 on US 301 and I-10 and into Georgia. We decided to cut the first day short and so were in the campground by 5:00. Along the way we made the obligatory stop at a Florida Citrus store.

Day two saw very nice weather again and took us into South Carolina and toward the coast when we decided to make a stop in Myrtle Beach. We stopped at Apache Family Campground and Pier and parked just a few yards from the beach. Late in the day, Geoff was reading on Facebook when he found a post and a picture from some fellow RVers and he recognized that the picture was of a rig just two spots away from us. He went over and talked with them and found out they were new to full-time RVing and the stop at Myrtle Beach was the first of many. They were actually in the process of helping the neighbor between us bring in one of their slides.

The next morning, Ellyn discovered that we could take Jordy out on the beach until 10:00, so we took a nice long walk along the surf and Jordy got nice and wet and sandy before we headed off on the road again. It was another nice day for driving and we made our way slowly Northwest until we got back onto I-95. Before we left the Carolinas, we wanted to get some BBQ for lunch. We pulled off at one place Ellyn saw and thought it would be promising, but it turned out the BBQ places she had seen on the web were only open on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Drat! So instead we visited a place that had a Southern Cooking Buffett. Fried chicken, but no BBQ. That evening found us at the Pohick Bay Regional Park just south of Washington DC.

Day four was a long one as we were starting to come into the more densely populated areas of the Northeast. We skirted the DC area pretty well and looped around Baltimore, across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and up the New Jersey Turnpike. We had some options in the NY area but most everything was bottle-necked coming through on a work evening so we just took the path of easiest negotiation and crossed the GW Bridge and on up I-95 and I-87. Our target was Croton-on-the-Hudson and Croton Point Park, where our friend, Peggy, was already camped and had gotten us a reservation for the night. We had been to this park before for the Clearwater Folk Festival but never before in the RV. The campground is a little funky but we had a nice evening having a picnic dinner with Peggy and then sitting around the campfire until it got uncomfortable to sit outside any longer. The day had been a bit rainy but the weather was good to us while we ate and visited. We finished the evening off with dessert in or RV.

It was good that we were not going anywhere in the car because the battery died. It is generally a problem if we tow for several days without driving the car anywhere because starting the car several times to get it ready for towing and then running the Brake Buddy from the car’s electrical system without getting the battery recharged will drain it. Geoff had added a wire to the cabling between the RV and the car to allow the RV to supply power to trickle charge the battery and keep the Brake Buddy running while towing, but something had gone wrong with this system. (As it turned out later, the connector at the car end had gotten rusty and the wire for the 12V supply had broken. A new part was acquired in Boston and some liquid electrical tape was applied to hopefully help alleviate this problem in the future.) A battery trickle charger was applied overnight and the car was ready to go the next morning.

Another rainy day took us to see another set of friends from Sun’N’Fun, Myra and David, at their home in Trumble, CT. We had a nice lunch with them and David and Geoff took the dogs for a nice long walk. They are planning to go see their kids for Memorial Day but we are going to their place again while we are visiting in CT right after Memorial Day.

Our last stop was Normandy Farms Campground in Foxboro, MA. We will be here for two weeks while we catch up with our kids and do some other fun things around Boston. The AARP Convention was the first order of business and it had us up earlier for the first two days and running coming in exhausted at the end of the day. The second day, we met with Logan, Brian, Katherine and Oliver at a restaurant for dinner near the convention center. The rest of the time here we hope to see our Grandson, Oliver, a lot and we will be going to a Red Sox game with everyone on Geoff’s Birthday. Then it will be off to the Danbury, CT area for Memorial Day week and then up to Winter Island Park in Salem, MA for the rest of our time in the Boston area before we head off on our next journey.