Standing on the Corner…

Since we were staying at the local RV park called Take it Easy we surely couldn’t leave the area without visiting downtown Winslow to of course stand on the corner in Winslow Arizona.

When the Eagles first decided to sing "Take it Easy" in a 1970’s rock song they probably had no idea this lyric snippet would launch a big tourism industry in sleepy Winslow Arizona. As a result the town created "Standin' on the Corner" Park where Eagles fans can stand beside a life-size statue of a cool dude with a guitar. Also parked  nearby is the iconic "flatbed Ford" along with an eagle perched in a windowsill. There are estimates that over 100,000 people stop by every year to stand on the corner.  We enjoyed the park and happily took several photos to commemorate our visit.

Besides standing on the corner in Winslow we also had some other sights to see. One was the Apache Death Cove. Back in 1878 Apache raiders attacked a Navajo encampment near the Little Colorado river where every Navajo man, woman, and child were killed in the raid except for three little girls whom they kidnapped.The story about the revenge visited upon the 42 Apache men can be found here. Chilling!

At the same location is Two Guns, originally known as Canyon Lodge, which began as a small trading post in the 1800’s. By the 1920’s this area became popular with those touring on Route 66 when the trading post became known as Two Guns. The history of Two Guns can be found here. The remnants of this once bustling tourist attraction were fun to poke around in.

We also drove out to see the miniature painted desert and if it hadn’t been so hot we would have enjoyed a short hike in amongst the eroded hills. One last spot we planned to stop at was the Arizona Meteor Crater. This sounded like an interesting place to check out but when I read it would be $22.00 per person to basically view a large indentation in the ground, I decided we could get about the same thrill looking through our binoculars at the full moon.

That wraps up our stay in WInslow as it became time to move on down the road…

NOTE:  We are currently in Mesa, Arizona until November 1st…

Westside Of Albuquerque and planning our trek north…

After our weeklong stay came to an end at Tierjas NM we thought it best to move on down the mountain to the Westside of Albuquerque NM. Why did we only drive 27 miles to our next location? Well on the Westside of town there is not only a Camping World located there where we needed a few things from , but also a Freightliner Shop. We needed to have our annual maintenance performed so we checked with the Freightliner Shop and they see people first come first served… perfect for us!

Since we have good friends here in Duke City we dropped off our motorhome at the Shop on Friday afternoon. They promised to have it all done by Sunday morning. In the meantime we will stay with Sharon’s best friend (they met in Austin Texas) and take in a minor league game while waiting for the oil change and maintenance.

The RV park we stayed at before dropping off our RV sure was a neat little spot. They have several vintage RV’s that they rent out on weekends. My favorite one by far is the one in the header picture of a 1950 Hudson Commodore car pulling a 1954 Vakashunette. Others ones I liked were a 1963 Winnebago Dot, a 1956 Yellowstone Geneva and a 1959 Spartan Flossie. There were several others as well all giving the entrance to Enchanted Trails RV Park a bit of a whimsical look.

Within the main office building the owners invited us to walk around and see their many vintage items displayed such as old washing machines,  pressers, tools, radios, beauty shop chairs with hair dryers attached, old TV's with rabbit ear antennas, telephones and a large old pipe organ.  What fun it was to browse this unique Passport America Park. Its proximity right next door to Camping Word and only 1.5 miles from Freightliner was the perfect stop. Add to the fact that they had a propane dealer on sight (we needed our propane filled) made  this stop a no brainer…

While our RV is is getting all primped up for our northward trek we are still struggling with which way to go through Colorado on our way to Montana. We are debating whether or not to go up Interstate 25 (I hate Interstates), take 285 north to Denver (I worry about some of the elevations on this road) or just go to Durango (even more elevation worries, especially up to Silverton). This is consuming a lot of time and as slow as we are trekking north we may just as well take the Interstate… Oh well, planning is both part of the fun of RV’ing as it is part of the pain of RV’ing…

Microsoft Streets and Trips…

I thought I had written a blog about Microsoft Streets and Trips before but after looking back at our past blogs I found that I had barely mentioned some of the virtues of using this mapping product. So this time I am going to devote a whole blog to one of the most useful mapping tools we use in our full timing adventures… Microsoft Streets and Trips!

When we first started full timing in an RV I was primarily using Google Maps as my our tool for travel planning. As useful as Google Maps is I was always looking for other products to assist us in ensuring that we wouldn’t encounter any travel hazards while hauling our 27,000 pound, 12 foot 8 inch tall rig along with our towed vehicle throughout this fine country of ours. Then one day I was offered a copy of a mapping tool for planning our future travels - Microsoft Streets and Trips! And since this discovery it has assisted us in travels from Texas to the Florida Keys all the way up to Maine and back again to Texas. It helped us again leaving Texas to the west through Las Vegas up to Washington State and then down the west coast to San Diego. And recently it helped us get from San Diego back to Texas and now to where we are in North Carolina. We love our Microsoft Streets and Trips!

What do we like most about Microsoft Streets and Trips?

• it is not a very complex software application so it is very easy to use
• it assists in our travels by the use of overlay files that point out such things as  bridges too low for our rig and other significant items of interest
• it has a USB plug-in GPS device that can be useful to verify routes and locations
• it is wonderful in travel planning by allowing a lot of “what if’s” – such as what if we stayed here what route would it take us to get to our next location…
• it can be kept private by the safeguards of our own computer unlike Google… but then of course we tell everyone where we are going in a blog anyhow :)
• one of the biggest plusses is that it works offline on a laptop when we are not near any cellular signals
• it provides us the opportunity to use a much larger screen than we would get on a smartphone GPS or Garmin GPS
• it provides free for the lifetime of the software updates on construction happenings which is very useful for our travels
• it is really good for planning day trips in showing us options available for driving loops to and from a destination

As mentioned above one of the big reason’s I love this program is with the addition of overlay files called POI’s. POI are files that overlay items such as state parks, low bridges, restaurants, banks or any other “Points of Interest” you can imagine as long as someone has taken the time to plot them all on a map. The very best POI is the POI Megafile. This continuously updated files provides overlays of a huge of assortment of POI’s including state parks, freightliner and caterpillar service centers, camping worlds and even the arbitrary POI’s such as In and Out Burgers and Trader Joe locations. Sweeeet!!!

Now don’t get me wrong we still use Google Maps but now we use it as a supplement with for us its most useful feature is the ability to put it on Satellite Mode to get down to the Street View and see what we might encounter in tight spots. Funny fact is when you go to street view of our old house in Google Maps and look real close at the front door you can see Sharon shaking out our carpets (look at above photo at front door - Hah! Google caught her…).

Also we use Google Maps street view to check out new campsites and if we can’t use street view (like where we are now) we use the Satellite Mode to get a feel for what we can expect at our next location see below:

Since it is great sharing information, do any of you use this software? What do you use if you don’t use it? If you do use it what do you like best about it?

Heritage Campground, Carthage, NC…

As Saturday morning rolled around we watched most of the other class participants of the Freightliner School take off and head back home. As the only full timers attending the class we took, we were, of course last to leave. Got to love this lifestyle as there is no real sense of time… of having to get somewhere fast or having to hurry up and leave. We made our coffee and had a nice breakfast before finally rolling out around 10:30 am.

From Gaffney, SC we made our way into North Carolina and traveled through Charlotte NC. Another 100 or so miles down the road and we came to the entrance of the Heritage Campground in Carthage, North Carolina. We found this campground two years ago while staying in the Southern Pines/Pinehurst area. Now we didn’t stay here last time because we were apprehensive driving our motorhome down the 6 tenths of a mile narrow dirt road that was lined with pine trees. Now that I have a couple of years of driving Abbey all over the USA I had no worries about getting us into our our site.

Heritage Campground is a privately owned park that is adjacent to a beautiful and scenic spring fed lake. Each site consists of a nicely appointed space covered with mature pine trees and has a foundation of hard packed sand – resembling concrete. Our site had been recently raked and thus free of pine needles and cones. We have a small fence on one side that gives us a sense of a “yard” and we have ample space between our rig and others.

There is a mix of transients such as us, permanent residents, and temporary residents who travel to this area frequently for work. The park has several nice amenities such as the nice little beach and swimming area in the spring fed lake. We came here for several reasons… one we to visit with our daughter who lives nearby. Another reason is that we really love this area in the spring time as there is plenty to do. And lastly we are here since we felt as if we may be far enough north for this time of year weather wise and thus, need to stay a south a while before heading any further north.

Therefore, since the Freightliner class brought us further north than we had originally planned to be in April we went ahead a booked a month long stay here at Heritage Campground. Although we actually might only stay 3 weeks or so it is much more economical to book a month-long stay so that's what we did. Four hundred dollars plus utilities will allow us to enjoy some upcoming spring festivals and fun little places we discovered last time we traveled through this area. This is the first time we have returned to a place we have been before not counting the Gaffney Service Center stay and our old home College Station, TX. We are interested to see if we like it as much as we did the first time we visited this area… stay tuned…

Jacksonville FL then off to Red Bay Alabama

We left Bushnell, Florida Monday mid morning as we tried to dodge the rains that are hitting the northern half of the state. We left in the drizzle and were on the road for about an hour when I could see some heavy rain ahead. We pulled into a rest stop and since it was close to lunch we fired up the generator ran the microwave and turned on the AC. About an hour later the rain had cleared and the weather web site showed a break in the rain so we headed back on to the highway.

Not only did we enjoy a leisurely lunch but we were able to avoid the rain and get in a good exercise for our generator (which was a bit overdue). Another two hours up the road and we covered the rest of the 159 miles to make it to a park we have been to before – Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park in Jacksonville Florida. We are here to finish off our visits to the Mayo clinic and to say goodbye to the Atlantic Ocean as we will then head west.

Where to? First priority is a stop in Red Bay, Alabama where we hope the Tiffins will assist in the cost of replacing four of our failed double-paned windows. After several calls the best offer we got was the windows at cost plus labor, not the best deal in the world. but we felt it was good enough to replace three of our windows,

We are watching the weather to best predict our departure as we are here till Friday with the option to stay through the weekend and leave Sunday or Monday. If the bad weather that is predicted pans out we will leave one of those later days. We will make a short stop at Tifton, GA or Auburn, AL before a final push to Red Bay, We should end up in the birthplace of our motorhome by mid to late next week.

I am not really happy about spending time in the southeastern USA during this time of the year so we will not spend too much time at each spot along the way…In the meantime we will be enjoying the beach and I will get in a bit more coastal fishing.

On a brighter note we found a little Irish Pub (nothing to wrote home about) and celebrated passing our Mayo tests again and yesterday was the one year anniversary of Sharon;s retirement, and today is the one year anniversary of my retirement. A few cold adult beverages last night and it was home for a nice celebratory dinner…