Blogger stuff

I may be inspired to start using this blog again. I am taking the course given by Geeks On Tour.

Las Vegas with friends

Spending the month of November 2018 at Oasis Las Vegas RV Resort. We are joined for the entire month with Kim and Christi as well as Dave and Nancy. Paula and J flew in for a week to spend time with all of us. We are in spot 322.  We have seen Santana, Cirque du Soleil The Beatles LOVE and gone to many food establishments.

Preparing to head West again

It has been a colder winter than we expected. After staying in Key West, we headed to Bella Terra near Gulf Shores Alabama where we have a lot. While we were there we had an ice storm, that left icicles all over the coach, and two inches of ice on the steps. It warmed up a bit, but then in January we spent three weeks in Red Bay to get some new coach maintenance items taken care of. We got to spend some time with Kim and Christie which was fun, and also catching up with Bob and Jan, during the St. Patrick day holiday was a real treat. We showed them some of our favorite eating spots. It was just starting to get nice when we headed for River Plantation RV Resort in Sevierville Tennessee to attend a TRVN SouthEastern area rally.  It was a blast, and the food was great.  We made a lot of new friends, some of which we met first when we were in Red Bay. We visited another National Park while we were here. We drove through part of Smoky National Park, and did the ride on Cades Cove. Beautiful scenery.  Click here to see our route from Bella Terra to Sevierville.  After this we head west.  First stop will be near Little Rock Arkansas for a couple of weeks, and then on to Hill Country in Texas.  We are looking forward to catching up with friends we haven't seen for many years in the San Antonio area.  Then on to New Mexico where we plan on stopping in Santa Fe, and Taos.  On the way to Southern Colorado where we plan on spending a couple of months, we may stop in Bryce and Zion to see the National Parks there.

Tour of our new home - a 2014 Tiffin Allegro Bus 45LP

This post will be mostly pictures, and are of the place we are staying and the inside of the new coach.

Taken from the rear of the coach

The rear of our coach. You can see a little of the water from here, if you look really hard.

From our Tiki Hut

Front of coach (see Tiki Hut
reflection)

Kathy on the dock

Office area with Dakota

Dakota on the 'L' shaped couch

Dakota relaxing at the fireplace on his bed and his snakey

Kitchen from living area

Kitchen

my office area

Dining room

Master bedroom

Master bathroom

View to the ocean

Full-timing in the new coach

Hi everyone.  It's been a while since we have posted, so let's see if I can catch you up. We had a fantastic time exploring out west, but had to start heading east because there were a number of things going on that way that demanded our presence.  Starting with a wedding in Pittsburgh in September.  We visited with friends and relatives that we haven't seen in a while.  It was nice to see, Dick and Lorri, Clark and Sandy, and what a blast to see the boys and the whole Eygabroad clan. The wedding of Beatrix and Dave was beautiful. It was held at the conservatory downtown, and we had a wonderful time.

During our travels our house sold.  Our wonderful tenants decided not to renew their lease for another year, so we took a chance and placed it on the market.  The market is still soft in that part of New Jersey, but we had some good timing, and it sold. We had to take care of some last minute details, but luckily we have good friends at home that helped with house items, and real estate issues and we gave our lawyer power of attorney to take care of settlement on our behalf.  We did come back to the area to go through our storage bin and ended up collecting important papers, or stuff we needed to shred, and gave the rest to charity.  Our position was if we hadn't needed anything there for two years, we don't need it.

Since we have been full-timing now for two years, and the house was now gone, we decided to trade-in our old coach and get one that was more designed for the needs of full-timers.  We got a 2014 Tiffin Allegro Bus 45-LP and it has a bath and a half, dishwasher, washer/dryer, walk-in closet, and lots more.  It is also considered an all electric, so no more propane to worry about.  The heat and instant hot water is Aqua-Hot and powered by electric or diesel. We spent time in Red Bay, Alabama to watch the coach being built, and it was a blast.

We are spending the early part of our winter down in the Keys.  We are staying at a place called Bluewater Keys RV Resort, near Key West, Florida. The temperature here is a comfortable high 70s during the day, and high 60s, low 70s at night. Very relaxing.  Too bad I have to work while we are down here. We have been eating well.  The seafood is fresh and delicious. We had Thanksgiving dinner on the Bus, and of course, it was wonderful.  All my favorites.

Kathy made her oyster stuffing, and we had Turkey, mashed potatoes, brussel sproats with panchetta, fresh made rolls, and cranberry sauce. Dakota loves his bed next to the fireplace, plus he is near me in my office setup when I am working.

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

Whale Watching at Bella Terra



Big Newell rig towing...

 I hate to sound like a snob, but it has been wonderful staying at an all-Class A resort. Watching these big beauties maneuver around the roads of Bella Terra is like whale-watching...everyone stops to look and you hear "wow, look at that!" as the huge, beautifully-painted body passes.   We are in Tiffin heaven and have not seen this many of our favorite brand since we were in Red Bay watching the Gus Bus being born. And we were happy to give rave reviews about ours when asked...a lady traded in her old rig for a new Allegro after talking to us. A favorite pastime is an evening stroll to see what new rigs have arrived.  Whale watching is a favorite topic of discussion at Club House cocktail hours.  Everyone has stories about motorhomes past and present.  And we have gotten a lot of valuable advice at parties!

While some of the older coaches don't have the flashy paint jobs, they have well-planned and cozy-looking interiors.  Many people are like us...we can't imagine ever trading in our coach; it fits our lifestyle perfectly.  But, there seems to be a bug that bites after a few years and the itch to trade for something newer and better seems to be almost inevitable.
At BT, we have had the privilege of seeing some of the most beautiful high-end, custom-built coaches on the road.  During our stay, we were parked next to a gorgeous Foretravel from Maryland.  And a local FMCA rally brought in more million-dollar-plus Prevost's than we will probably ever see again.   Being immersed in this Class A environment has been a delight and an education.



...a Porsche with  red "trike"  above on lift!

 But, the star of the season was not a coach, but what it was towing.  For my brother Jim, this is how a Class A becomes a "toy hauler".  One morning we noticed a huge trailer in the storage area...what was it?  It was so tall that we couldn't imagine what had towed it...it was Mardi Gras...maybe a float was in it!  But, being the curious small community that is Bella Terra, we quickly learned that it had come in with a big Newell and was transporting a Porsche and two "trike" motorcycles.   The unusual height accommodated a lift that raised the trikes over the car for transport.  Now we have seen it all!  I happened to catch a few shots of the trailer being loaded near our site...they left just before us...making it an extraordinary whale watching event!  KB