...And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
In another post, we reported that we had driven over 11,000 miles in the last quarter of 2011. Well, since January 3rd of this year, we have driven another 4,500 miles which included a quick trip back to West Virginia to go to my Dad’s funeral. My hero, best friend, and mentor was, mercifully, allowed to go home to be with the Lord just a week before his 86nd birthday. Dad had been trapped in a failing body for the last 4 years as a major and then multiple mini strokes kept taking him further and further away from his normal self. His whole family celebrated his life and what he meant to us. What a great man he is! We traveled from Florida with the camper to meet Melanie in Louisiana, and then went to WV. Matthew got to come home from the UK too. It was so good to be with them.
We are now back in Louisiana where Melanie lives and will visit with them until around the first week in March. We are in a pretty nice, local campground which is so much better than the hotels that we have stayed in before.
The trip to here from Florida was mostly without a hitch. We were going to take a little over a week getting here as we got used to setting up the camper, hooking back up to the trailer and then moving on down the road. We did it all in 4 days, though, when we heard about my Dad’s deteriorating condition and then his passing. The camper pulls really smoothly and the truck just humms down the road. We generally just drive about 62mph and watch all of the other traffic zoom around us. The joke is that I haven’t been passed by so much traffic in my entire driving career as in the first 4 days of pulling the camper. I did go 71mph one day when I passed another camper rig and needed to get-r-done because of traffic behind us. Absolutely, no problem for the truck. The only real problem with the camper is that you can’t just swing into Starbucks parking lot or dash into anywhere without giving it a good look-over to see if you can get back out again. I’ve learned why those guys driving those big rigs need a little more slack once in awhile.
One of the biggest things to learn about “camping” is to be aware of how much electricity you are using at any one time. The camper has a 50amp service. That isn’t really too much (your house probably has a 200amp service.), but it allows us to run a lot of stuff. One night, we were staying at a place that only had 30amp service. That was a small challenge, because we couldn’t do some of the stuff that we had been doing before. It all worked out.
STUPID CAMPER TRICK - We have 2 propane tanks. They are both 40lb tanks. How long do they last? We still don’t know. One day, we bought a pressure gauge to put on one of the tanks. Well, I had to turn the gas off on the tank to put the gauge on it. I turned the gas back on so that I could read the gauge and all seemed well. It got really cold that night (29 degrees), and we woke up a little chilled. Why hadn’t the furnace come on? You guessed it. I had

forgotten to reselect that tank so that gas would flow to the furnace. I had to put on at least the minimum clothing, go outside and get into the compartment to get gas flowing to the furnace. Lesson: make sure that there is at least one propane tank turned on and available to the camper.