A Lucky Break

February 28, 2011 ~ Wanderlets ~ Leave a comment

Tulip has owned us for just over five years and thus far we have received five windshield chips. Today we pulled into a campground and two sites away from us was an RV with a pickup truck advertising professional windshield repair. And now we’re getting all fixed up by Andrew:

Andrew and his wife are full time RV’ers and in addition to this little business they also work for Trailer Life Directory inspecting RV parks. There are only 30 teams that do this job around the U.S. and this past summer they were assigned to cover Alaska and the Yukon. They work hard about 4 months of the year. Needless to say, he is a happy camper!

Florida Panhandle

February 27, 2011 ~ Wanderlets ~ Leave a comment

We are near Ft. Walton Beach for a couple of days visiting a friend that I worked with in Germany. Carol was single then and used to stay in my apartment and watch my young daughter while I often had to fly back to the U.S. for my job. It has been a long time and there is a lot of news to catch up on.

There will be a Winnebago View/Navion rally quite close to here beginning March 10th that we had planned to go to but our routing just isn’t going to work without a lot of back tracking. Too bad because we were looking forward to meeting other View owners. Monday we are driving to northwest S. Carolina and then hopefully over to Charleston and Savannah.

I thought every detail of our travel plans was settled since all reservations have been made and paid for. Now comes another dilemma. A cousin contacted me who heard from another cousin that we would be in Florida. He has generously offered us the use of his vacation home that is on the coast 1/2 way between Jacksonville and Miami (how perfect). However, we would lose what we paid for the plane tickets to and from Colorado. Plus we would need to rent a car. I see another coin toss coming up!

Houston to Natchez

February 26, 2011 ~ Wanderlets ~ 5 Comments

Our time with Tessa and her family was fantastic! And we got more done thanks to Tessa. Steve steam cleaned the carpeting and Tessa made a warning board to put on the back of the RV, evidently a law in Europe if bikes are being carried.

We have too many books and gave some fat ones to Tessa, one of which was hers anyway. So what does she do? She takes the spines off and scans all the Europe pages! If we had known about the itty bitty Scan Snap before we bought our combo printer/scanner, we would have invested in one. It has a feeder, scans both sides at the same time and is maybe 12” wide by about 6” deep. Having a printer/copier/scanner with us is an absolute must and does get a lot of use.
A month ago I wrote about the cost of toothpaste in Europe and so dear Tessa gave us 8 tubes. Plus 6 deodorants and several bottles of body wash. Maybe she was telling us something? Tessa is an “Extreme Couponer” and gets super excited to see how much she can buy for free. I’ve never seen such a stockpile of goods and learned that couponing in this big way is also very complicated.
Yesterday we went to Natchez, a beautiful town on the Mississippi River. Our time there was too short. Steve is having a hard time enjoying himself knowing we have at least five days of work to be done on Tulip. I can’t blame him. I really want to see more of Mississippi someday and especially the plantations. The weather is perfect this time of year.

The only cathedral built in Mississippi – St. Mary’s