On The Road Again Southerly Bound

It’s been a crazy busy last few months, most of in a good way. Between campground hosting, visiting friends and family and them visiting me, plus purchasing my new RV, along with my trip to Great Britain it seems I haven’t sat still at all. The month that I was at Blue Mound State Park was great for catching up and spending time with my daughters and I went to visit them several times and they came to visit me also. Plus I had visits from some close friends and other relatives, so the time flew by really quickly and before I knew it was time to move on. I finished up my last day at Blue Mound on 30 October. After making several stops along the way on Sunday, November 6, I started my trek southward. But before leaving Wisconsin, I spent several days at my friend’s house Steve and we did some modifying and improving to the new RV. Steve has a very nice fully equipped woodworking shop is quite the cabinetmaker. Steve was busy building the drawers and shelves and I added some new outlets in different locations to make them more convenient located. As many of you know it’s kind of customary that the RV business leaves large dead area spaces in parts of cabinets and sometimes do not put shelves where they are needed. One area that needed some work was in the living room above one of the furnaces. In this photo you can see there are three drawer faces. But when I first got it there was just the drawer in the upper left-hand corner.My friend Steve is quite the carpenter and built me two nice drawers to utilize some of this dead space.Also underneath the fridge, it was just the door that hinge down and you had to get on your hands and knees to be able to get at anything. One of the first things he did was make a drawer and put the door face on it.In the bedroom I had three large closet doors with close rods in all three, so what I had him do is take the center one and we built some shelves in there which are far more user-friendly.One other thing I had him do was build me some small spice racks to fit on the doors of the food pantry and a couple doors above the kitchen counter area.There was also a cabinet designed to house a washer and dryer, but knowing myself I would not have used one in my rig so we built some extra shelves in these closets, organizing things will be a lot simpler.In the meantime I was working on organizing putting some shelves in, and rearranging things but I have a long ways to go on that before I’ll know where to find everything. But I have got all winter to accomplish that. After spending four days working on these projects it was time to make my way westward. I spent the few more days stopping by friends and relatives and saying my fair the wells for now. So Sunday morning after saying goodbye to my brother in law Larry and his wife Jan, I hit the road making my way towards Minnesota. I made a quick stop for lunch to catch up with a friend there and then headed south driving hard the next couple days. I made a little bit of a side trip to near San Antonio, Texas to stop and visit my friends Lee and Tracy. Were met a few years ago at my first RVdreams rally, and have been keeping in touch with each other since then. I wanted to catch up with them and spend some quality time together. They had spent the summer working and exploring Alaska and just completed a little over a month working on a sugar beet harvest in Montana and will be spending the next couple months in Texas. They have a very nice journal that they keep track of their experiences as being relatively new to full timing and the jobs they do along the way. You can find their journal at https://camperchronicles.com/ and see what they’ve been up to. Right now they will be managing and selling at a Christmas tree lot for the next couple months in a suburb just outside of San Antonio. We spent a few hours visiting before I went and found the campsite for the night and then I had invited them for dinner which they graciously accepted. I made a nice stuffed pork loin and they brought some fixings and we enjoyed pumpkin pie for dessert. We enjoyed each other’s company catching up on the past few months, before calling it a night. I thought about spending two nights at this park but the next morning it was kind of off-and-on rain with no promise of getting better so by 11 o’clock I packed up and headed out. I drove that night till I was tired stopped in the wayside to get some sleep and then headed on towards Phoenix my next stop. I made real good time so on Thursday night around five I pulled in the Desert Shadows RV Park where it spent the month of March last year. This is where my friends Joe and Murlane spend the winter so the plan was to stop for a few nights to catch up with them. Right now it’s Saturday afternoon and tomorrow I will be heading out to Potrero County Park where I will be campground host for the next several months. This is a San Diego County Park on the far-east end of the county in sunny Southern California, I’m looking forward to my warm and sunny winter months. I was working on lining up this job just before I headed to Great Britain, and finalize it a few weeks ago. So if any of you are in the area this winter look Maxine and me up, this is kind of a nice quiet little campground in Southern California not far from the Mexican border east of Mexicali. The plan for next spring and summer is to work my way up the Pacific Coast, going through Northern California and onto Oregon and Washington State. I do have a job lined up for the month of June as a lighthouse guide at an Oregon State Park at (Heceta Head Lighthouse) I will be camping in the nearby state park (Washburne) and have to drive a couple miles each day to the lighthouse and then proceed to walk about a half-mile to the lighthouse where I will be one of several guides. I am really looking forward to this position as I’ve always been super fascinated by lighthouses and their history, so once again if you’re in the area stop by and see me. Well that’s it for now just a quick little update, with more to come over travels is to explore this beautiful country and all it has to offer, thanks for following along, Rick