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