Category: 2019

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2019 Road Trip – Cabela’s – Hamburg, PA

We had a short drive today (168 miles) to the HUGE Cabela’s in Hamburg, PA. Cabela’s has an RV section in their parking lot and allows overnight stays. They even have a free dump station. We are parked here in in the back of the parking lot. It’s warm enough that we are running our generator (for air conditioning) so for safety I hooked up our exhaust Gen-Turi which has only been used once. I brought it along in case we get to do some serious boondocking out west.

Once we got setup and waited for a heavy rainstorm to pass through we headed into the store to see if we could contribute to the local economy. Unfortunately, most of the things we wanted to purchase were big enough that we didn’t want to haul them across the country for 4 months. So we bought a moon pie and a small pack of red licorice (big spenders). We’ll make a bigger contribution on some future shorter trip.

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2019 Road Trip – Candy Hill Campground – Winchester, VA

We traveled 237 miles today and are staying here at Candy Hill Campground. This is a very nice, clean, well manicured campground. There is decent space between each site. The only potential negative is that we are located right next to VA-37 which is a 4 lane limited access highway (speed limit 65 MPH), so there’s a bit of traffic noise, but that’s not going to bother someone who grew up on US-20.

Winchester is a very historic town, so after we parked the camper, we unhooked the Tahoe and headed into town (approximately 2 miles) and toured the George Washington Office Museum. He served here for the Virginia regiment during the French and Indian War planning Fort Loudoun and supervising it’s construction (1755 – 1756).

Old Town Winchester, a restaurant and shopping district, was only a block away, so we walked through it and stopped at Brewbakers Restaurant for dinner. Beth had a Roast Beef sandwich smothered in beer cheese and I had a Philly Cheesesteak that was delicious.

  • Candy Hill Campground – Site H3
  • Candy Hill Campground – Site H3
  • Old Town Winchester
  • George Washington’s Office Museum
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2019 Road Trip – Ft Chiswell RV Park – Max Meadows, VA

We knocked out another 230 miles today and are staying here at Ft Chiswell RV Park. I can certainly get used to this retirement 250 mile 9AM to 2PM driving. We had originally planned to stay at Pioneer Village RV Park just up the road, but we decided to see what spontaneity is like and refused to commit to reservations on the home to Albany leg of our trip. Depending on how you look at it, that backfired today and tomorrow as neither today’s planned campground nor tomorrow’s has any sites available. On the positive side, this campground is very nice, only a few miles from our original destination, surrounded by cows and sheep, and large enough for us to sneak in a 2 mile walk by doing several laps up and down each lane just prior to the heavy rains arriving in the late afternoon.

The rain has stopped and we are now enjoying mid 60’s temperatures with our windows open and sheep baa’ing in the background. The cats are excited!

Phoebe Posing on the Dash – Site #30
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2019 Road Trip – Barnyard RV Park – Lexington, SC

We departed this morning from Country Oaks Campground in Kingsland, GA around 9:30 AM. We had a good drive although I-95 started getting rough as soon as we crossed the South Carolina state line and I-26 was no better. We hit enough rough road that the audio on our TV wasn’t working when we parked. One of the wires attached to the switch that determines whether the stereo plays music from the car stereo or audio from the TV had disconnected.

We are staying at Barnyard RV Park in Lexington, SC. It’s a nice park that’s not far from I-77, I-26, or I-20. Our site (A-2) is a pull through site with full hookups that is 100′ long. The trees here are fairly young and we had no problem picking up the Dish Western Arc satellites from our roof mounted satellite antenna.

It was very hot today (mid to upper 90’s), but the nice, clean bathroom and shower facilities here are air conditioned, so our showers “took”.

Once again, Beth was excited because they have varmints. They have a private pond with ducks and turtles to feed. The ducks apparently weren’t hungry, but the turtles were happy to eat the 25 cent duck food.

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2019 Road Trip – Country Oaks Campground – Kingsland, GA

We started our big road trip today by heading out for Albany, NY to visit Beth’s family. Now that we’re retired we are trying to limit our daily travel to 250 miles (or 5 hours) per day. So far, this is a nice comfortable pace. We pulled into Country Oaks Campground and RV Park just prior to 2PM. It’s located just across the Georgia state line from Jacksonville, FL (close to I-95, but not too close). There are a lot of oak trees providing great shade but obstructing the satellite reception. Fortunately, we were placed in Site #11 which has a clear view of the Dish Eastern Arc satellites from the back of the site. We had to break out our portable satellite receiver (R2D2), but we are now relaxing to the final round of this year’s US Open golf tournament.

The Verizon cell phone and data coverage is excellent and the Jacksonville TV channels are easily picked up on antenna. The campground WiFi is excellent. Not only are we able to connect to it (although we are fairly close to the office), but it has good bandwidth.

The owners of the campground must be animal lovers because they have a campground cat that greeted us at the office and a miniature horse named Flash that lives underneath the office building.

  • Site #11
  • Site #11
  • Kitty
  • Flash
  • Flash
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Alafia River State Park – 2/25/2019 – 3/1/2019

We camped here Monday to Friday and enjoyed perfect weather. During our stay we managed to hike all of the trails designated for hiking (as opposed to bike or horse). We also spent time with some close friends who experienced a loss during the week.

  • Beth’s New Friend
  • Beth & Phoebe Relaxing
  • Visitors

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Ft Desoto – 1/5/2019 – 1/11/2019

The park reserves 15% the sites for “walk-ups” which are released on Fridays. We managed to get one of these sites stayed Monday to Friday. The site (#150) was a bit tight and includes a couple of trees that forced us to park at an angle, but we were right on the water. Beth got to kayak a couple of days and we got some nice sunset photos while we cooked some meals on the fire. We also enjoyed a few meals out at some of our favorite beach restaurants including a meal with close friends who live on the island leading out to the park.