Living the nomadic life traveling the U.S.

Okay, yes I know.  We have not added anything to our blog in quite a long time.  We got distracted with putting our travels on Facebook, and kind of forgot about our friends who track our blog (even though there aren't that many of you tracking us - lol).

We are currently in Island Park, Idaho, which is about 20 minutes to the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park.  A wonderful RV Park, and all around beautiful area.  Slightly technology challenged.  I get a Verizon 3G signal here but it is poor.  I am trying a cradle type amplifier, and it should get here later in the week.  Hopefully it will help.  The wi-fi in the park is pretty good, and I have been using it for Internet access for work, but if I can get the 3G working here, I would prefer that arrangement.  We are in a valley surrounded by mountains, so the signal gets bounced around a bit.  Ten minutes down the road is a strong 4G signal.

So far we have been to Yellowstone and have seen Bison, and other animals.  We saw the famous 'old faithful' along with some other volcanic related wonders. We visited Mesa Falls with our friends Kim & Christi, and saw a moose along the way.

Our western pass of the United States started in the fall of 2012, and took us through South Dakota's badlands and Mt. Rushmore, to Montana and Glacier National Park, to Bend Oregon, and then a few months to work our way down the California coast to settle in the south west for the winter.  We have been to so many places and visited with so many friends and relatives, and it has been a blast.  I will try to catch everyone up in future posts, but mostly I will try to keep a little more current than I have been, on our travels.

Hopefully we didn't loose all of our followers, and we will try harder going forward to keep the truly loyal, and get others back.

Let me leave you with a picture of the Delicate Arch in Arches National Park earlier this month.

Where have we been?

It has been almost a year since our last post.  How do you recover from a year of not posting?  So much has happened, and we have been to so many places since October 2011. As I sit here in the coach at the Polson RV Resort in Polson Montana on a rainy day, it seems like a good day to reflect on our travels so far.

Our first mission was to get an address. You must realize that once we rented out our house we immediately had no actual place to say "we live at ...".  So after much research, we decided on getting an address from South Dakota. A place friendly to RV full-timers, good mail forwarding services, and no state income tax.

Kathy & Gus in Minnesota travelling to Florida

After getting our address set up in  Madison South Dakota, we thought that it might be nice to visit the west side of the state, home of the badlands and Mt. Rushmore.  We quickly decided against this when we found out our KOA was closing the weekend we were leaving, and they were preparing for winter. So we headed straight for our winter destination, or at least the first half of our winter destination at a place called Florida Grande in Webster Florida.  We thought it would be nice to stay in a place that was consistently 10 degrees warmer in the winter than Gulf Shores Alabama.  On our way down to Florida we stopped for two weeks in Memphis Tennessee.  We ate at a number of triple D establishments, as well as other well known restaurants. I can still remember those wonderful ribs. Yum.

In the next post I will talk about staying at Florida Grande, having our 2012 New Year disrupted with an unplanned trip back and forth to New Jersey, with the sad task of finding Gus a new home.
LAB

The new South Dakotans!

By popular demand (of two people!) I am catching up our blog. After our "moving experience", our next order of business was to change our residence address to escape New Jersey income taxes.  This is possible because our primary residence is now a "rental" and "home" is now the Gus Bus.   After a lot of research, we decided on South Dakota for a number of reasons.  We liked the mail-forwarding service in Madison (they email us every day about what has arrived and will send only what we want to receive.).  So,  we liked the idea that our mailing address would match our actual residence. The main reason, though, was that becoming a South Dakota resident is easy; there is no special licensing for RV drivers and no prolonged actual residency in the State, only proof that we spent at least one night in a campground.


Easterners with new "soy" friends

To reach South Dakota, we devised a travel plan that satisfied Larry's need to work.  We decided to travel on Saturdays and Sundays, then camp during the weekdays before moving on.  Using our mostly accurate, Micorsoft "Streets and Trips"  navigation software, we could plan on arriving at the KOA in Sioux Falls, SD in two weekends and a week.  I call it "mostly accurate" because, being a computer, it doesn't account for the human/canine factors that chronically  make us two hours behind schedule.

Can we eat this stuff?

Our trip was wonderful...the midwest and grain belt are a mystery to us Easterners.  It was vast and lush with the fall harvest of corn and soybeans.  And once again we were awed by windmill farms and passed, on the highway, trucks bearing huge blades.  Our "layover work week" was at a Jellystone park in Minnesota.  It was there (and later at other campgrounds) that we discovered that the week days are quiet and therefore conducive to work and playing with an anti-social dog.  On  Fridays, as we were packing to leave for our weekend drive, these parks started to fill up.  And by Saturday morning when we left, they were packed --awning touching the neighbor's slideout--with noisy kids, loose dogs,  and rowdy adults.  Looks like our schedules was working.

The official changing of the plates!

After all of the traveling and the reshifting of our basement load several times...yes, it did all fit!  We settled in a KOA in Souix Falls, South Dakota.

KB

Getting to full-time...a moving experience!

Most of you have heard that we ARE full-timers!  This happily occurred about a month ago, but like most good things, it came with its own unanticipated growing pains.  As Summer peaked and we had to think about making our Winter escape plans, we fully expected to be leaving our house in Bloomsbury unoccupied again.    It didn't sell after several gut-wrenching price reductions. So, after agonizing over the decision,  we decided to try to ride out the horrible real estate market by renting  it.  And in two weeks,  we had wonderful tenants!  The next five weeks were a moving experience!  Normally,  you pack everything and move it to a new place to unpack.  This time, we had to evaluate each possession and make a five-way decision:  trash, auction, donation, storage or the bus! And in the middle of packing, Larry had to go to Red Bay, Alabama to have our bus served at Tiffin; it was an appointment that we made in March and could not miss. He did get to take a side trip to visit with Elvis while he was there.   It was exhaustive and exhausting!  But, we made it out and were happy to recuperate at a lovely campground in Pine Grove, PA.



Larry and Elvis



After the auction check arrived and we tallied up the donations for the tax folder, we realized that all of those "valuable" possessions were worth very little in the eyes of the world.  And now that they are gone, we don't miss them.   Our advice to you is:  clean out your closets, attics and basements NOW!  We did keep some of our favorite things in a storage unit in Phillipsburg.  Someday we might have a little cabin where they could be resurrected.  It is amazing how quickly those things are forgotten.  We have even reduced what we took on the bus and have a strict policy of discarding something if it is replaced by something new.  There is a limit to how many tee shirts one really needs!

One sad note...in case you didn't know...we are travelling without our dear Vada.  She left us in May after valiantly enduring the progressive paralysis that has crippled her this last year.  We miss her dearly and are happy to have the distraction of Gus, who WILL learn to become a camping dog.

So, where do you go when you can go anywhere...we have been so busy that we have not been able to keep up this blog...The itinerary just keeps filling up, but first there was the mandate to change our residency now that we are no longer tied to New Jersey.  After evaluating the options, we decided on South Dakota as our new income-tax free home.

Birthplace of the Gus Bus!



Freightliner chassis backing into Tiffin plant.

 It's a rainy day in Gaffney, South Carolina.  We got up very early (realize that we lost an hour Saturday when we changed from Central Time to Eastern; then on Sunday we lost another hour to Daylight Savings!) The clock said 7:30, but it felt like 5:30!  The gradual change didn't help, but we were thinking of friends from BT who left Sunday and lost the two hours immediately.  Oh well, that is why they invented naps!
We got up early to tour the Freightliner Custom Chassis Factory here in Gaffney, South Carolina.  Couldn't take any of our own pictures, so here's one we borrowed from Tiffin.  We missed our chassis coming into the Tiffin factory when we went to Red Bay last Fall to see the Gus Bus assembled, so it was our chance to see the first stages.  They also build school buses and delivery (like FedEx) trucks at this plant.  It was really interesting, but we didn't get as close and interact with the workers like at Tiffin.  We did decide to come back sometime for "Camp Freightliner" and learn about maintenance.  Our tour guide gave us some tips we didn't know, so there's a lot more to learn.

We are camped ( I use the term loosely) at the KOA in Gaffney.  It's fairly standard for KOA's which is why we like them...they are predictably average.  But, of course, IT IS NOT BELLA TERRA!  In fact, we thought we would be overlooking a pond, but it is empty.  Again we have a roomy site, with good hook-ups.  Our parking space is not level so our automatic levelers have us jacked up on the front passenger's side making the first step in our entry almost impossible for Vada and me...we must get a stepping stool to assist the aged midgets!  I have been managing and Larry hauls Vada up the steps using her new harness with handles.  We will manage and move on tomorrow to Chapel Hill North Carolina.  We had planned to visit another "Diner, Drive-ins, and Dives" location here in Gaffney, but we are so stuffed from overeating shrimp that we are staying in to eat lighter tonight.  But we heard about an outstanding ribs place for our next visit.  Our plan to eat our way across America, needs some dieting interludes.   KB

Too-Early Spring in Pine Mountain, GA

We found a few flowers blooming!

We were hoping to see the azaleas blooming at Callaway Gardens, but it was just a little too early.  Luckily, we were there on a beautiful, warm day and we enjoyed an exciting raptor demonstration where owls and vultures flew over our heads.  The butterfly house was also a delight.  We could tell that the gardens would be gorgeous in a few weeks and just the drive around the grounds was relaxing and a treat.  We had lunch next to a pretty lake and agreed that we would come back when we could see some blooms.  While at Bella Terra, we met some folks who are members of Larry's favorite online friends the Tiffin RV Network (TRVN.)  They told us about a rally they are planning in Pine Mountain in the Fall.  We will be there!

Speaking of Bella Terra...we stayed at a nice campground in Pine Mountain.  We were in a new section built for big rigs.  We had a nice roomy pull-thru site with good wi-fi and satelitte reception, and a nice place for Gus to play,  but  IT WASN'T BELLA TERRA!  We have made this a joke now...finding something that's slightly disappointing and labelling it "not Bella Terra."  Even Vada has been affected; she comes out of the coach in the morning and looks around for the lake.  You can see her thinking "it's not Bella Terra."  But, of course that doesn't stop her from sniffing around!   We have been spoiled...but, we will get over it!  And we are on a mission to find more Bella Terra's!  KB

Leaving Bella Terra



Sunset over the driver's side and Bella Terra fountain. 

 Last Friday night, as the sun set over the driver's side, we packed our gear and prepared to leave our winter home.  It has been glorious and we had a taste of Spring in the last few weeks.  The grass was green and the magnolias were blooming.  Hard to believe that in a few days we will be back in Winter.  We had one last shrimp feast at Mikee's on Thursday with some of our favorite BT friends.  Will we come back next year...hard to tell.  We have so many places to see!  Of course, we will be comparing every campsite to Bella Terra.

We plan to take our time getting back to New Jersey.  To try to wean ourselves away from Bella Terra, we promised ourselves a fun trip back.  We'll be stopping in Pine Mountain Georgia to visit Callaway Gardens and our next stop will be in Gaffney, South Carolina where we will tour the Freightliner plant.  That's where it all began for our Gus Bus.  Then on to North Carolina where we will stay for two days in Chapel Hill to visit Carrie (Karuna) in Cary; then to Rocky Mount to visit Elise, Kevin and the Webb Boyz.

Will we be glad to be back at our house...probably not. Our good friend Barbara sent pictures of the damage to our screen room caused by ice and snow.  Definitely, not a pretty picture.  There will be a lot of work to be done, but it will be good to see our friends and neighbors!  KB