We don’t always make plans without consulting our calendar or a map first, but when we do, we end up having to drive from Maine to southern California!
Luckily, we had almost a month between events. And hey, maybe next year, we’ll try the Washington-Florida diagonal to make things even.
Here’s the summary of our 3rd quarter travels, mapped with a little help from Google.
RV miles traveled this quarter: about 5512
Erie, PA, June 30 – July 7: As I mentioned in our 2nd quarter wrap-up, we spent 4th of July week moochdocking in a cousin’s driveway, and hanging out with Tim’s cousins and auntie.
(She also taught me her method of hard boiling eggs, and I think I’ve finally got it now. Yes, I can make bread in the shape of a perfect frigging lobster, but I regularly fail at eggs.)
We also did some kayaking on Lake Erie, ate our weight in gyros at the Greek Festival, and just enjoyed a relaxing time with family.
Howe, IN, July 7-11: We went back to the DRV factory for Round 2 (ding ding!) of warranty repair work. The punch list had grown after our first visit in February, and since we were already in the general area, we had the repair team attack it.
We know that things go wrong with all RVs, even new ones, and ours has been no exception. That doesn’t make it any less disappointing, and we are both of the opinion that our unit must have missed Quality Control Check Day before it left the factory.
This article explains a lot of the weak points and outright failures in the RV industry, and provides ample evidence that we are not alone.
While in IN, we finally got to meet Andrea & Shawn of 40foothouse, and reconnected with friends Michael & Kelly of Performance Trailer Braking — all full-time RVers.
And speaking of performances, we watched some Amish mommies leave the park with their kiddos. They made it look just as easy as piling everyone into a minivan and backing out.
Massachusetts, July 12-30: We’ve been to Boston before, so this time we focused our sightseeing efforts on some of the outlying areas, like Bedford, Lexington, Concord, and Salem.
Oh, and I got a little witchy in Salem.
I bet brooms don’t break down nearly as often as RVs do. Hmmmm.
One of the stops on our honeymoon in 1992 was the historic carousel in Fall River, MA, so we recreated the photo 27 years later.
Grayer hair, wider ass, but by golly, that is the same horse.
Waterbury, VT, July 30 – Aug 1: Remember our partners in crime, Chip & Penni from our Amazon Camperforce days? We really have stayed friends! Waterbury is their home, and when we said we’d like to come visit, they offered up boondocking space at their summer location.
We went out for maple creemees, and of course made the pilgrimage to Ben & Jerry’s.
To Chip, it’s a former employer. To me? The holy land, and a visit I’ve been waiting to make for 30+ years!
Albany, NY, Aug 1-11: The good news is that my Auntie Judith turns 85 this year, and a big big surprise party was planned for her in her home town of Albany. The bad news is that I jumped the gun on making a campground reservation, and had to hide for ten days so as not to spoil a surprise that took a year to plan, and involved family members arriving under top secret conditions from locations across the country!
So even though we were at an exceptionally lovely state park that whole time, I kept my mouth shut and my social media posts vague.
And it worked.
That was one utterly gobsmacked aunt/sister/mother/grandmother/great grandmother, and we hope to surprise her again at 90. Or maybe 88, just to keep her guessing.
(She’ll read this, so please take a moment to face NY and shout, “Happy birthday, Judith!”)
Maine, Aug. 12-19: I’ve already written about this adventure in detail, so here are two photos I haven’t posted yet.
They could be twins. Right?
(Click for my bread recipe)
Maine’s gets an A+.
The long diagonal from Maine to California, Aug. 19 – Sept. 10: For the first 11 days, we stopped for only one or two nights at a time, before spending the next 11 just south of Tucson. Tim has an aunt & uncle there, so we were able to visit with them and make ample use of their garage for building our solar panel frames.
Tim may eventually write up the nitty gritty on that, because all I’ve really learned from this process is that I’m good at metal grinding.
Who knew?
I will instead heap praise upon two friends who assisted with some of the physical labor.
My childhood pal, Mark (who went to the Mexican dentist with us a while back), gave us a hand under sweltering conditions in Tucson, and Ted did the same in Escondido.
Love those guys!
But I did not, so I’ve added glowy starbursty things to the photo.
We’ll see what happens once we’ve actually got them all wired up and working.
Remember Andrea & Shawn from our stop in Indiana, just a few inches up above? Hung out again in New Mexico.
Then, we met up in Tucson with Julie & Sean of Chickery’s Travels, who we’d met in Texas last year.
And finally, we reconnected with Ted & Jan of the Wandering Kolbs, for the first time since we met in Arizona, in January of 2017.
We’re all neighbors. We just rarely meet up in the same neighborhood twice.
Right now: We’re parked on site at the pumpkin patch for our seasonal jobs in Escondido. We’ll work 7 days a week for the entire month of October, co-managing all the fun things with another couple: hay rides, corn maze, school field trips, petting zoo, sunflower field, and of course pumpkins!
They’ve returned for their third season at a Pumpkin Station location, and we figured that if they like it that much, it’s worth giving it a try.
Here we go!
Where to next? Uhhh… I guess we’d better figure that out by Halloween, eh? We might go visit family in WA, or we might hide out in the desert for a while, to get some use of that solar power system. Or both!
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter for updates as we go.
We started full-timing in August of 2015, but I didn’t think to do an annual review until the end of 2016, and it was just a listing on Facebook of places we’d visited. After that, I started using a quarterly format.
- 2Q 2019
- 1Q 2019
- 4Q 2018
- 3Q 2018
- 2Q 2018
- 1Q 2018
- 4Q 2017 (doubles as 3rd installment of our Amazon Camperforce write-up)
- 3Q 2017
- 2Q 2017
- 1Q 2017
- 2016
So glad our paths intersected! Come to the SW after pumpkin season so we can hang out again. 🙂
Is there ice cream there?
I’m seeing a recurring theme of ice cream in these photos… 😉 Andrea and I look forward to seeing you two again soon hopefully!
I may have a slight addiction. Ha!
Nice rundown of your travels. If you decide not to do the FL-WA diagonal we did it for you this year. 🙂 Our plans were WAY too grand though as we’d planned to do FL-WA-back to Nova Scotia between Mar and Sep. Hahahah. We got to IA in late April and decided to slow down and smell the roses which meant arriving in WA at the beginning of July, leaving there in early Aug and heading back to the Hudson Valley for some off road time with our youngest son starting in about an hour. 🙂 We did end up chucking our FL residency and taking up ones in SD.
Yeah, this year we’ve been tossing around the idea of trying to stay in places for a month at a time, even though we start feeling antsy after 2-3 weeks. Such a balancing act.
Enjoy the time with your boy. We are fans of spending time with sons too!