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.
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.
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
Home2 with Roger and Susan 