Today’s travel was more interesting than usual thanks to Tropical Storm Ophelia. Last night we knew we would be packing up to leave Twin Grove RV Resort in the rain today, so we decided to get as close to traveling mode as we could. We showered and dumped our tanks so that we could put the water and sewer hoses away and also disconnected from the campground power (technically we were Boondocking at that point). We were also able to hook the truck to the camper and install the Weight Distribution Bars while keeping the camper level. We watched last night’s Ray’s loss (whah!) on ROKU powering the TV with our new little inverter that Dad helped us run 12V power to from our breaker panel (successful test). We used our gas furnace over night and it ran a few times. We woke up this morning with 70% battery remaining (which pleases me). So today all we had to do was lift our front jack and stabilizer jacks, and roll the camper off the leveling blocks we had to place under the driver side wheels. We got the cats loaded in the truck and all was going well until Beth got sick and tossed her cookies (she woke up with a scratchy throat not feeling well). We don’t know if it was food poisoning or a stomach virus, but we nearly ate the exact same foods yesterday (except for her having green beans for dinner) and I feel fine (fingers crossed). She felt better afterwards and seems to be fine now. We were on the road just before 10AM EDT.
It rained our entire drive. It was never very heavy rain, but I never turned the wipers off. We had planned to stop for fuel at a Walmart in Winchester, VA, but Beth didn’t want to eat anything but soup after her incident so we stopped at a Flying J that had a Denny’s restaurant. She went in to Denny’s and purchased some potato soup which she successfully kept down. Meanwhile, thanks to Murphy’s Law I was outside fighting the gas pump in the “RV Lane” in the heaviest rain of the day. For some reason, they chose not to put a cover over the RV pumps. I would have pulled up to a covered auto pump, but the lanes were all full and it was only sprinkling when we arrived. I kept putting my credit card in and the pump would say “processing” and never released it. It was raining so hard I kept getting back in the truck and waiting several minutes for it to finally fail and release my card. After two tries I went inside to be told, “oh, no, you can’t use your credit card at those pumps”. I bit my tongue and just let myself drip water all over their counter while they processed my credit card. Once I was done pumping I went into the camper and changed into dry clothes. We had a nice lunch in the parking lot while listening to college football on Sirius Radio.
We arrived at Shenandoah Valley Campground in Verona, VA just after 2PM EDT. This is a huge campground but the sites are fairly close together. We splurged for a full hookup, 50Amp, pull thru site which seem to be slightly larger. The site is long enough that we had room for truck and camper if we had chosen to keep the truck hooked up, but we felt we were sticking out too far, so we unhooked the truck and parked it diagonally.
We have full hookups and a fairly decent selection of cable channels. Our AT&T hotspot connection is so weak that I broke out an antenna which, for the first time ever, actually seems to be helping. After connecting the antenna we went from less than 1/1 Mbps download/upload speeds to just over 2/2 Mbps which allowed us to stream the Rays walk-off victory against Toronto once the 4PM football games got boring.
