Month: February 2025

February, 2025

We are back in Nacogdoches, TX where the Foretravel factory is located. It is also the home of several other businesses that service and support Foretravel coaches. These include Xtreme Paint and Graphics where we are headed. Xtreme specializes in fixing and modifying everything to do with the fiberglass bodies of the coaches and painting the coach repairs and the coaches themselves. It is not just Foretravels, but they work on almost any coach.

Other specialists in town fix all of the mechanical systems in the coach. And interior remodeling and reupholstery companies. And resale outfits that sell and service Foretravels and almost any other brand you can think of. And of course, tire shops, custom chrome and lighting shops, and much more. When you come to Nacogdoches you can get just about anything you need or want for your RV.

Nacogdoches is also a college town, the home of Steven F. Austin State University. About 12,000 students make up a significant part of the Nacogdoches population of 32,000. One thing we notice when we are there is the vast selection of places to eat. Every fast food variant there is, most of the chain restaurants are represented, and lots of local places from BBQ to burgers to family diners. Anything you can think of to eat, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you will find here.

We moved over to Xtreme from the Foretravel Factory campground on Sunday. A spot was ready for us to park and plug in.

Repairs and More

Monday morning we reviewed all that we thought we needed to get fixed with Rance and Greg from Xtreme and added a couple of other tasks. This updated the original insurance estimate. Greg reviewed all of the changes with the insurance adjuster and got the final OK.

Dave Cobb’s coach was in the main fiberglass work bay when we got there. By the time the insurance stuff was done, his coach moved to paint and we moved onto the service bay. At the end of each day, Greg moved our coach outside and plugged it in. In the morning it moved back inside. We were able to stay in the coach during the day.

Maggie got out frequently. There was an empty lot next door where she was able to roam around and get some exercise. And we went to the dog park almost every day if the weather was OK.

A place to explore and usually dig in the dirt.

Rance (the Gandolf of fiberglass) tore right into things. He has done it before so he just takes things apart and gets to the fixing stage pretty quick.

The crunched ladder was removed and discarded. There are no replacements available so he just filled the holes and repaired the fiberglass surface.

The freezer we ordered while we were in St Louis arrived. We brought it into the coach and plugged it in for a few days to confirm that it worked. It does very well. After a week or so I rearranged things in the basement and moved it down there. Somehow there is enough room for it and everything that was down there before.

Rance cut off the crunched lower corner. He did most of the repairs on the bench and later reattached the bottom section and added more fiberglass on the inside and the outside of the joint.

He repaired the docking light housing in place, I thought it would have to get replaced. He said it was faster and stronger just to rebuild it in place.

He also repaired the rear quarter panel that sits in front of the radiator the frame on the engine battery bay just ahead of that, and the battery bay door, all of which were damaged when the tow bar broke.

We were in Nacogdoches over the long Thanksgiving weekend. So we roasted a boneless turkey breast. It tasted as good as it looked.

And with some roasted yams with bits of marshmallow, gravy, and some stove-top stuffing it made a pretty nice Thanksgiving Day dinner. There was a pumpkin pie involved as well a bit later in the day.

The best part of a Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner as I remember it from when I was a youngster, was the turkey sandwiches that came that night or in the next days. When we were kids it was probably white bread, today a nice multigrain bread, Miracle Whip would have been what we got 70 years ago, today, Hellmann’s Real Mayonaise, then nice, generous slices of turkey, a bit of salt and what makes it wonderful, pepper.

When we were kids, the turkey probably sat out on the kitchen counter until it was time for sandwiches, the turkey might still have been just warm. I know enough about food safety now that that doesn’t happen but warming the sliced turkey in the microwave for 15 seconds or so has the same results. Now, it is a warm sliced turkey sandwich with mayo and pepper. Almost as good as dinner itself.

The dog park was a frequent stop in the late morning. We had Maggie’s throw toys with us, she would go get them and then play keep-away. And then find some dirt and try to bury her toy. The toys got dirty, Maggie got dirty, and it was her time to play and entertain herself. She got a couple of baths while we were there.

She had a trim before we left but it was growing out. By the time we get to Orange Beach, she will be overdue.

Maggie knows where she likes to spend a good part of her day, sleeping in the window. Once in a while, Susan sings her a soft lullaby, “How much is that doggie in the window?” Priceless.

Thanksgiving weekend meant we needed to drive over to the Foretravel campground to empty our waste tanks and add fresh water. So on Sunday morning we drove over and did what needed to be done.

That isn’t a DOT-certified driver’s seat. No passenger seat either. But it worked. While we were in NAC we checked with Infinity Upholstery about repairing some of the worn leather on the front seats. It was not inexpensive. Most of the labor cost is just disassembling the chair cover to get to what needed fixing no matter what we did. And at 24 years old, it seemed like recovering both chairs made sense.

We looked at lots of different UltraLeather options

And settled on this combination. They are a distressed look, breathable UltraLeather material.

So they came and removed the seats to reupholster them, it took about 10 days.

The result was nice, we like the colors, and the UltraLeather is very soft.

Rance finished up his repairs and adjustments. The rear corner looks perfect. The spots where the ladder holes were disappeared. The rear engine hatch fits the way it should. And the Cummins badge got an upgrade.

While we were in NAC, I looked at many different ways to add a side marker light and turn signal towards the back end of the coach. This is mainly for someone next to us. There is a front side marker and turn signal but the same thing would have been difficult to add along with the required wiring near the rear wheel and mounting it on the fender would have made it stick out too far. So I settled on the lights shown above. It is an LED light bar mounted to the fender. The amber lights are on when the exterior coach lights are on (any time the coach is moving) and is a sequential turn signal when the turn signal for that side is on.

The paint shop painted them the color of the body panel, I ran the wiring and Rance did the final connections. They needed a longer “on” signal than just the momentary flash signal to start the sequential lights so I tried a couple of different ideas to get them to work but now they do.

Lunch-a-Lots

When I was in Boy Scouts decades ago, one of the Patrols in the Troop was nick-named the Lunch-a-Lots. Pretty fitting when we are in Texas, Lunch out with friends is a frequent event.

Fittingly, one day while in Nacogdoches, we drove down to Livingston, Texas, about an hour away, to meet Rudy and Carolyn from Houston for lunch. It was good to see them.

Another day we drove to Woodville, Texas, about an hour and a half away, to meet Keith and Jo Newlin for lunch at a Boarding House-style fixed price restaurant. It was different but good. They brought out plates full of fried chicken, bowls of potatoes, coleslaw, vegetables, baskets of rolls, and dishes with peach cobbler. I liked the fried chicken but wasn’t too keen on the boiled collard greens. We were stuffed.

And Scott and Carol Seibert drove to Nacogdoches from the north part of Houston for lunch at Auntie Pasta’s. We met Scott and Carol about 10 years ago for the first time at dinner at Auntie Pasta’s. They have been good friends ever since. The food and company at Auntie Pasta’s is always good, well worth the drive.

And when Dave Cobb came to get his coach at Xtreme, we went to Nac Burger in Nacogdoches. This is a spin-off from Butcher Boys but over where the University is. Same food, good burgers, and all of the fixings.

So we were fortunate to have been able to connect with our friends from Houston and we enjoyed spending time with all of them. We frequently stop there in the spring to see them but this spring we are going to head home by going up the East Coast.

We also had a very nice lunch with Mary Elizabeth Jordan who lives in Nacogdoches and then back to her home for a visit, coffee, and dessert. She and her husband, Chappell have been friends for many years. Chappell died a year and a half ago. They were and still are the most gracious hosts. It was nice to see her.

Heading for Orange Beach

We were wrapping up things in Nacogdoches. Rance finished up a last-minute item on a Saturday morning and gave the back end of the coach a quick wash. It was raining. We left and drove to Lafayette, LA, about 1/3 of the way to Orange Beach. On Sunday the weather had cleared and we left for Orange Beach with an estimated mid-afternoon arrival.

More Later, Much Love,

Maggie, Susan, and Roger

February, 2025

We got home safely from our trip to the West Coast and points in between. I had just a couple of days before the Carter Work Project began. After that, I spent a few days sleeping late and recovering. It was an exhausting week but very rewarding.

I wrote in an earlier blog about finishing up all of the backfilling and grading along the driveway. That consumed a lot of time in the five weeks between the CWP and our planned departure date for the winter of November 11. But it got done, even if it was only a few days before we left.

I had to get another oil change on the coach before we left, they are at 5-6,000 mile intervals and we were almost due.

We rented a carpet cleaning machine and cleaned the carpet in the coach. It didn’t seem that dirty until you cleaned it and got buckets of pretty dirty water coming out. We watched for a few days when the weather was going to be nice and the days warm so we could get the carpet cleaned and dried out.

We had a supermoon during this time, these are never easy to take pictures of at night but in between the trees at the end of the driveway, the bright moon was impressive.

By October we are usually much further along in the leaf-falling process. This year all of the trees seemed to be 3 to 4 weeks late.

We have a big Basswood tree in the back that starts dropping leaves in August. They were just starting to fall when we got home at the end of September.

The Sugar Maples were among the last of the trees to drop leaves this year.

We harvested apples from our Honeycrisp and Haralson trees. There were not many Honeycrisps, they are good for eating. But we got many Haralson apples, these are good for pies. We cleaned, peeled, and cored all of them and made about a dozen pies plus bags of sliced apples that got frozen for later Apple crisps. Most of the pies got assembled and frozen without cooking. We cook them later right out of the freezer. We baked several, ate some, and gave the rest away.

We make a rustic pie with an oversized crust that gets folded over, egg-washed, and sprinkled with raw sugar. They are very tasty.

I was hoping to trim the apple trees before we left but ran out of time. We are trying to keep them shorter than they will get if you don’t keep them trimmed. Our neighbor up the street with nice apple trees says it is almost impossible to over-trim an apple tree. She said to cut off every branch that is pointing up. Easy to plan on doing, harder to get done.

We got Maggie in for a trim a week or so before we left. She is just over two years old here and moving from being a puppy to a young lady. She always looks good and here she was on a new soft bed that Susan got her playing with one of her sleep buddy dogs that we got her when he first came home to us. She chews up soft toys pretty fast, some in just minutes, but seems to leave these alone. Maybe she remembers them as littermate substitutes.

Load and Go

We are stopping in Nacogdoches, TX to have Xtreme Paint and Graphics do some repair work on the coach from our tow bar mishap last spring.

The right rear corner was busted up and the ladder was crunched. The rear quarter panel on this side over the radiator and the battery bay door needed some work as well.

The rear docking light housing was banged up too.

I removed the ladder before we went out west and used some metal straps and sealing tape as a bandage to hold things together.

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We had plenty of time to load up the coach. We worked on those items that we knew we were going to take but didn’t need in the house. We loaded all of the staple food items, some of these are things we cannot find anywhere on the road. We like Westen brand salad dressing but never find it anywhere out west or down south. Go figure. We loaded the refrigerator freezer with everything we wanted to bring like pies ready to cook and a lot of homemade soups, red and white chili. The freezer was stuffed.

We had more frozen stuff that we wanted to bring so we packed it into a cooler with ice and some dry ice thinking (hoping) it would keep it cold enough.

Everything else got loaded up. We checked and double-checked all of our lists. We finished up the closing of the house and shop checklists and checked them again.

We hooked up the pickup to the coach and checked all of the lights the afternoon before we were going to leave. We were ready.

In the morning there was not much to do. A last pot of coffee, most of it into the thermos in the coach and our travel mugs. Turn off the water pump in the house and close the incoming water valve, double-check thermostats, one last walk around, lock the doors, get ourselves and the dog into the coach, pull the pickup out of the barn, lock up the barn, and then count to 10. Did we get everything? Yes, off we went.

Maggie seemed more nervous riding in the coach this trip. We think she got a little spooked riding in the mountains with all of the ups and downs, starting and stopping, and twisty windy roads. The vet gave us some calming pills. They seemed to help but at the end of each day, she just wanted to be very close to us.

We stopped overnight at a Camp Walmart (parking lot) just into Missouri our first night. It sure looked familiar. We looked back in our log book and sure enough, we had stayed there several years earlier heading North.

In the very late Fall and early winter, there are not many overnight options. Very few heading south on I94 through Wisconsin into Illinois. More options going south on I35, mostly small casinos and a couple of RV parks once you get into Missouri.

A Walmart overnight works fine for us, we have plenty of water and waste space, and plenty of battery capacity to get through much more than one night. The parking lots are well lit and we can run in if we need something. RVs staying overnight are usually in the same area where overnight semi-trucks will park. And occasionally these will be the refrigerated or freezer trucks with somewhat noisy cooling units. Somehow the noise just fades into the background, we go to sleep, and in the morning almost all of the big trucks are gone

We stopped in St Charles Missouri on the north side of St Louis for two nights to visit our friends Amanda and Douglas. They spend November and December there. Amanda grew up in this area and her mom lives nearby. So this is their holiday stop. We always enjoy this stop, time for a couple of meals, some game time, and lots of coach talk. We have known them since shortly after we got our coach, they are young enough to be our kids and make us older people feel younger. And they are moving from 40s to 50s and doing much more long-term forward-looking planning and saving. The kindly uncle in me likes that.

Maggie moves right in anywhere we go and after the excitement dies down, takes a nap.

Our refrigerator freezer section was stuffed. We had filled our cooler with overflow and added some dry ice. Everything was frozen solid but the dry ice only lasted a couple of days. When we were in St Louis with Douglas and Amanda we had a lasagna and apple pie from the cooler and rearranged as much as we could so that what was left in the cooler could start to thaw without much risk.

Douglas and Amanda had a small portable freezer that ran on 120v AC or 12v DC. It was small but nice. I looked it up on Amazon and it was pretty expensive. I wondered if the same brand had bigger models and they did, one at 42 quarts, about twice the size. I did some measuring and we decided it would fit in the basement. I looked the next day and it was on sale at Amazon, a flash 5 hr sale, more than $100 off plus it included an insulated cover which was $79. We didn’t debate for too long. I ordered it for delivery in Nacogdoches.

More on this later.

We left the St Louis area and headed south to West Memphis which is in Arkansas to stay overnight at the Tom Sawyer RV Park on the Mississippi River.

The park is just above river level so you get a close-up view of the river traffic. And there is quite a bit of it. Some of the tow boats and the number of barges they are pushing are much bigger than they are at home. Where we are in Minnesota, 15 barges are the biggest they push with big twin-engine tow boats. Here they use three-engine tow boats and push as many as 30 barges. Of course, down here there are no locks and dams to contend with.

The next day we drove to the Corp of Engineers Rocky Point Campground just south of Texarkana.

It was a nice campground, all of the familiar parts of a COE park. Water and electric hookups and a lake view.

In the morning it had a sulfur smell in the air. There was a Sulpher Creek nearby, maybe that was a warning. As soon as a breeze came up the smell dissipated.

We left there and headed for Nacogdoches, TX. We spent a couple of nights at the Foretravel Factory Campground. We filled our freshwater tanks, emptied the waste tanks, and did some laundry in preparation for a few weeks at Xtreme Paint and Graphics to get repairs done.

We managed to get over to Auntie Pastas for Shrimp Wontons and dinner. This is one of our favorite spots to have a meal out.

Next up, repair time at Xtreme. Four weeks are set aside in the schedule, we are hoping for less.

More Later, Much Love,

Roger, Susan and Maggie