Visiting Homosassa, FL

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Visiting Homosassa, FL

After leaving Montgomery, we decided to try another Harvest Host location for a night on our drive to our next location. I chose the Tallahassee Automobile Museum for our overnight stop since it was along the route and pretty much right off of I-10. It was definitely a good choice. They directed us to a large grassy area lined with trees in front of the museum to park for the night. It was easy to find a level spot which made it easy to park and put out our slides. The only drawback was that it was a very warm day and even though we were under trees, it was pretty hot. Definitely a drawback when we didn’t have enough power to run the air conditioner.

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Second Pass (Re-exploring Montgomery, AL)

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Second Pass (Re-exploring Montgomery, AL)

Our route south this year brought us back through Montgomery, AL so we decided to spend two weeks in the area this time. Montgomery was one of my favorite stops last year because of its historical significance, especially for the Civil Rights Movement in 1965. Both Tim and I are history buffs so we like touring historical sites and museums. Since we are avoiding indoor activities this year, I knew we would not want to visit the museums again but felt we could still find enough to do outside.

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Visiting Northern Alabama

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Visiting Northern Alabama

Alabama is home to Tim and my favorite stops during our first year on the road. Tim’s favorite was Noccalula Falls in Gadsden, AL and mine was Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, AL. Since we enjoyed Alabama so much last year, we decided to spend 4 weeks here this year. I picked two different spots so we could visit different parts of the state to see if we liked them as much.

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Checking the Rear View: Lessons Learned in Our First Year of Full Time RV Living

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Checking the Rear View: Lessons Learned in Our First Year of Full Time RV Living

Well it is official! We have been full time RVers for one year. It seems like just yesterday I was still working and going to an office every day. Now we are living the life that we planned and enjoy traveling the country. Tim and I talked about what date we should use as our full time anniversary date. My last official work day was September 20, 2019, and technically I was working from the RV for the last two weeks. Since we stayed in Pittsburgh for some of those two weeks and were still moving some of our stuff from there to the camper, we decided to use my last work day as our official full time anniversary date. We stayed in that campground until October 8, 2019, then we started traveling, so Pennsylvania was the first state that I put on our map.

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Exploring Tupelo, MS and the Natchez Trace Parkway

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Exploring Tupelo, MS and the Natchez Trace Parkway

Planning our RV travel route at times can be challenging especially since there are so many choices of wonderful places to visit. As I planned our route south to Florida for the winter, I set a few goals for the trip. My first goal was to reduce costs by staying at Thousand Trails parks so that we could take full advantage of our membership. This made goal two, to visit new states, more difficult to accomplish since the Thousand Trails campgrounds are clustered on the coasts. After leaving Indiana, I had to plan stops in states we had already visited, like Tennessee and Alabama to be able to stay in a Thousand Trails campground.

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Visiting West Tennessee

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Visiting West Tennessee

For the past two weeks, we have been staying at our second Thousand Trails campground, Cherokee Landing, located in West Tennessee. From the Thousand Trails website, I thought the campground was a bit closer to Memphis than it actually is but that has worked out fine for us. When I initially booked, I was planning a visit to Graceland and a few other Memphis landmarks. Since Covid 19 is still happening and case numbers were up a little in Tennessee, we weren’t sure about visiting a popular tourist site.

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Enjoying Nature in Kentucky and Tennessee

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Enjoying Nature in Kentucky and Tennessee

After the busy campground in Indiana, we wanted some peace and quiet in smaller campgrounds which is exactly what we found as we drove south through Kentucky and Tennessee. Our first stop was for two nights at Cave Country RV Campground in Cave City, KY. I chose this campground because it was close to the interstate and Mammoth Cave National Park. This park was quite a contrast to the last one with only having 50 sites compared to 800. Less than half the sites were occupied which was wonderful It is a very well maintained and quiet park located in town.

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Visiting Indiana and Experiencing Thousand Trails

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Visiting Indiana and Experiencing Thousand Trails

Tim and I decided to join Thousand Trails in January, 2020 mainly for a discount on a seasonal site for January through March, 2021. The annual camping pass membership cost us $499 plus tax and with it we got a $500 discount on our 2021 seasonal reservation. If you aren’t familiar with Thousand Trails, it is a membership organization for campgrounds where you can camp for specific periods of time with your membership with no additional cost. There are levels of memberships with different purchase prices and rules. It is almost like buying into a time share.

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First Time Experiencing Harvest Host

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First Time Experiencing Harvest Host

Last August, Tim and I were making decisions on what organizations to join to help us save on camping fees. One that we chose was Harvest Hosts. This membership program provides a list of wineries, breweries, farms, and museums across the country that allow members to park overnight for free on their property. All they ask is that you support the host’s business with a purchase during your stay. I didn’t think supporting wineries and breweries would be difficult for us.

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Home Sweet Home

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Home Sweet Home

For the past two months, Tim and I have been back home in Pittsburgh and now it is time to pack up the RV to get on the road again. It is hard to believe that this is our last week in the “Burgh”. Where did the time go? These past 2 months have really flown by. We were very busy while we were here, mainly filling our time getting in our annual doctor appointments, dentist, eye doctor, etc. and visiting our family and friends. With this new normal, we weren’t able to go out and enjoy our hometown as much as we would have liked, so we didn’t visit restaurants, bars, theaters, or museums. We had to find other ways to enjoy our favorite city.

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Nostalgia

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Nostalgia

We arrived at Mountaintop Campground near Pittsburgh, PA on June 1st and quickly settled into life back at home. Our goal is to spend two months here visiting family and friends as well as getting in our annual doctor and dentist appointments. With Allegheny County just reopening to the green phase after we got here, we are only visiting a couple people at a time. We are trying to have those visits outside to the extent that we can. If you are familiar with Southwestern Pennsylvania, you know that we have frequent rain and storms, especially in June so outside visits are challenging. Since we still aren’t going out too much, I found myself with time to reminisce our years of camping. Hope you enjoy this post that covers camping over the past 45 years.

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On the road again

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On the road again

We finally left Florida after 5 months on Memorial Day in a downpour. I couldn’t believe our luck. The rain that morning started lightly and turned into heavy blowing rain that just didn’t stop. For 5 months in Florida, we had very little rain and only one all day rain so we did not expect that when we were leaving. Good thing we had packed our outdoor chairs and mat the night before so that stuff didn’t get wet. We still had to be outside to dump the tanks and disconnect our water, electric and sewer; then bring in the slides and hook up. By the time we finished hooking up, we were soaked so we climbed over the bed to the closet to find dry clothes to change before traveling. What a mess! I had planned to get a picture of us pulling out but didn’t bother in the rain.

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Deja Vu

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Deja Vu

As we started traveling again, I thought I should write a post about our last few weeks in Zephyrhills, FL. I was beginning to wonder if we would ever be able to leave Florida, first and foremost due to Coronavirus keeping us sheltered for the last few months. The second concern was RV repairs and waiting for parts to come in. Does that sound familiar?

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Just Hanging Out

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Just Hanging Out

Here we are still hanging out in Zephyrhills; so different from what we thought we would be doing in our first year of full time RV life. We started this journey to travel and see the country. Since our plan was to go slowly, we anticipated staying in each place for a period of time. 5 months in one place is more than we expected but overall it is still good and we are enjoying living in our small home on wheels. Since it is getting warmer and the sun can be brutal midday, we moved sites to get a little shade.

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Twiddling My Thumbs!

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Twiddling My Thumbs!

Twiddling my thumbs! Yeah, you are right, too hard to do when you are short on thumbs! I told Deb I would write a blog. When your life is in a holding pattern, finding topics is not so easy. We have been spending a considerable amount of time together. Trying to “social distance” ourselves from others, to protect both ourselves and them.

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Enjoying life in Zephyrhills

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Enjoying life in Zephyrhills

Like everyone else, Tim and I have been following the news closely and monitoring the Corona virus situation and recommendations. We have decided for now to stay put where we are in Zephyrhills, FL. We were already booked to be here through April and even though many others are leaving early, we felt it was better to stay. Since the RV is our home, we can easily stock up on enough food for the next month and implement social distancing here. If we decided to leave, we would be on the road with many others and probably have more close exposures while traveling back north.

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Visiting Family and Friends

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Visiting Family and Friends

Over the past few weeks, Tim and I had the opportunity to visit with quite a few friends and family here in Florida. Between a little travel and joining many of the activities here at the RV Resort, we have been pretty busy. Time has just flown by and we are just about finished with our second month in Florida. So hard to believe It is almost March. I am glad that we decided to stay through April; we will need it to see and do everything we wanted to do here.

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2020 Planning

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2020 Planning

We have now been in Zephyrhills for a month and it has started to feel like home and less like we are tourists. To be honest, we haven’t been touring much at all the last 3 weeks. First I was down with a head cold, then when I was getting better, Tim came down with it. For him, it has now lingered for over 2 weeks and his cough was not getting better. We finally decided to contact his doctor and he is now on antibiotics. I am hoping that does the trick and he will be feeling better very soon.

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