Saturday, May 11, 2013

Farewell Fox Valley

At 4:30pm we finally began the 2013 installment of our Summer Adventure. We’ve been preparing for 2 weeks now. Our first estimated departure date was May 2nd, which slid to May 9, and then 2 more days to May 11.
Even though it was late in the day and rain was looming on the horizon, we pulled a away from Fox Valley and gave two air horn blasts to say goodbye to everyone.
Jeanne and John helped to give our day a good start by inviting us over for “poor man’s blintzes” at 8:30 this morning. We had a great visit and the blintzes were terrific.
Unfortunately, we encountered a couple of problems in “Big Guy” and had to run around Orange Park looking for replacement parts. The cabinet door to the cat food (very important) had to be repaired and the door handle to the  bathroom decided to freeze up. These two critical items had to be repaired before we could depart.
Trips to General RV, Lowes and Home Depot only yielded enough parts to fix the cabinet door so we had to cobble together a repair for the bathroom door handle.  We hope it holds and that one of us doesn’t get locked in there. (Or out!)
Right after our departure, we encountered an accident that had 3 lanes of traffic backed up for a half mile. Finally we reached I-10 and EJ checked the radar to find we were headed right into a thunderstorm. During the storm, the windshield wipers decided to act up. What a grand departure we were having. But if you own an RV or a boat and go adventuring, you’ve got to be part mechanic too.
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After a total of 87 miles, we decided to call it done for the day and stopped in Live Oak.  By the time we had settled in at the local Walmart parking lot, the rain had stopped and the temperatures had dropped into the high 60’s. Air conditioning won’t be required tonight.
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All in all, a good end to an eventful day.
And we weren’t alone….
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Thursday, May 9, 2013

The Final Countdown is on

Our departure date was highly optimistic but I think this picture sums it up nicely.