April 1, 2024 – Day 17 Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN – Giant City State Park, Makanda Illinois Today was decision day, do we do the 600 mile drive to Ennis, TX? Or, completely change plans and head to Makanda IL and hope that the prediction of better weather is accurate and hope that some of the walk-in sites would still be available when we got there. At 9AM Paul called the campground to inquire about open walk-in sites. The ranger said they had just gotten in. When they left on Friday there were still 20 sites available. They needed to go to the park to check. The decision hasn’t…

March 31, 2024 – Day 16 Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN Today was Easter Sunday, the Roman Catholic flavor, not Orthodox Greek one. For the second year in a row we found ourselves on the road at Easter. Susan had plans for a roast pork loin, or ham, or something traditional. Paul tried to dissuade her since doing something like that in the RV seemed difficult to him even if it was just for two people. (susan here: It’s easy but don’t tell Paul!) So, what did we do? We went to the Chattanooga Aquarium! We’d bought the tickets earlier in the week on the way back from seeing something…

March 30, 2024 – Day 15 Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN Today was a travel day. By way of the dump station, we slid over just 9 sites. We had mentioned earlier that we needed to change sites in the same park. We had never done that before, it seemed inconvenient. Checkout for this park was noon, check-in was 2pm. Do we just drive around for 2 hours? At check-in the helpful ranger told us to sit tight and between noon and 1pm a ranger would stop by and give us our new paperwork for the new site. You clip the paperwork to the power pole at this camp. When…

March 29, 2024 – Day 14 Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN After yesterday’s day of walking and touristy things we wanted to take it easy. This was for a few reasons. The first that yesterday was a lot. Visually it was a lot to take in and it was a lot a fair bit of walking. Today’s plan was Ruby Falls and Raccoon Mountain Caverns. An ambitious goal. Possibly a lofty goal (susan here: well, okay an impossible goal. But goals are good things to have, right?) Through My Lens YouTube’s Josh said that Ruby Falls was worth it, but warned that it could be a strenuous 5 miles and…

March 27, 2024 – Day 12 Lake Powhatan Recreation Area, Arden NC to Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN We didn’t head out early from Lake Powhatan. We had a short drive (HA, yeah, we really said that. But! More importantly the site we were going to did not have a sewer hookup.) The next location would have power and water but no sewer. This means “home style” showers will be exchanged for “navy shower” for a while. This meant “home style” showers before we headed out to the next place for a 5 night stop. Paul also did ham radio while sitting in the Jeep. His second contact was Australia!…

March 26, 2024 – Day 11 Henderson NC to Lake Powhatan Recreation Area, Arden NC News flash: North Carolina is a big state. It’s not Texas big. That’s just BIG in all directions. NC is “tiny big.” When traveling from the east side to west side it’s 503 miles. Back to the morning. Paul was startled awake around 7AM by a loud BEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEEP!!! Around 8:30 p.m. the night before we looked at our coach batteries. They were way low, dropping faster than we’d have liked and definitely wouldn’t make the night. We did a quick google map search. (susan here: how the heck did we live without Google?)…

March 25, 2024 – Day 10 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD to Henderson NC We had a lazy pack out this morning without any issues at all. We didn’t need to move fast because checkout was by 11am plus our Harvest Host requested that we arrive after 5pm. The drive was only 4 hours away. Of course we had stop and go traffic delays which made it slightly longer. All in all not a bad travel day. We passed by the very cool looking Later Day Saints temple outside of Washington DC. Next we drove past the equally impressive Marine Corp Museum. (susan here: approaching it, well, it looks…

March 24, 2024 – Day 9 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD Today was a quiet day. Ann had her Sunday morning chores & shopping to do to get ready for the work week. We had our morning stuff to do which entailed filling and draining the water and sewage tanks (nothing new there). Then Paul went to put air in the low tire on the Jeep. Only he hooked up the air compressor backwards, burning it out. We’ll replace it in Phoenix. The final chore was debugging the power issue we had the other day. The good news is that our coach is not broken electrically and we can…

March 23, 2024 – Day 8 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD Yesterday was “Be A Tourist” day. Today is “Be A Local” day. Ann was taking us to Artomatic. Artomatic is a multi-week, multi-floor, multimedia arts vent held in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded by Washington, D.C artist and arts activist George Koch. The non-juried, open event has provided a venue for artists of all types (visual, performance, and literary) and abilities (from novice to professional). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artomatic Basically when a building is being transformed, say from a dead office space into a residential area, Artomatic will pop up. As you can imagine it’s had many locations over its 25 years. This…