Saturday, May 7, 2022

Not Kentucky...

Well, I know I promised an exciting Kentucky trip last time...but the weather worked against me :-(.  We were at the farm getting ready to leave in the RV, and Aaron was getting blown all over the place packing up the outside of the RV.  He looked up the weather and we had 10mph winds at the farm and 30mph winds predicted at our first destination.  Then he looked at our final destination in Indiana, outside Louisville, and they were calling for rain for the weekend we were to spend there camping with our friends.  So he decided that it wasn't worth the risk of driving the RV in those winds (we were liable to get blown off the road) just to spend the weekend hunched miserably inside the RV to avoid the rain.  Instead we decided to drive the car all the way to St. Louis to see our friends at their house.

We did have a great time visiting with them in St. Louis, attending a St. Jude fundraising "Rock and Roll" Bingo, going on some walks, and playing lots of games.

Rock and Roll Bingo, which involved many delicious snacks
Mary prepared

Waiting for our table at Taco Buddha...they are happy to serve
you margaritas on the sidewalk while you wait (Mary & Mark
and Mary's daughter Lisa, plus Teddy the dog and Aaron)


Enjoying a smokeless firepit in the backyard patio-in-process

Playing Splendor

As an added bonus, our found time (we left Friday instead of Wednesday) gave us some time to work on several projects on the RV!  Aaron removed a damaged jack pad (still to determine: how to replace/fix/deal with it), applied new caulk/sealant to various seams on the RV, and worked on my washer/dryer.  After testing all the electrical connections, we finally dug deep enough into the machine to see that the condensing unit was completely clogged with lint - surely the problem!  Unfortunately, unlike normal dryers, there is not a lint filter to clean on this unit, and the only way to remove this lint is to completely dissect the machine the way we did, so I'm not sure how we're supposed to prevent this from happening again in the future.  Hopefully it is fixed for now, though because I kept on running outside to help Aaron with other projects, I didn't actually get to observe the full cycle and didn't retrieve the clothes at the end of it so I'm not 100% sure whether it finished the dry cycle without error...

Somehow this happened to our heavy duty rubber
jack pad at the last Thousand Trails we camped at 
in Daytona Beach

The jack pad removed

Working on the washing machine

As I write this we are sitting in Miami preparing to leave on our big European cruise trip.  If all goes well (that is, we pass 3 COVID tests over the next few weeks), we'll spend 7 weeks cruising to and around Europe!  This is to kind of make up for the massive European cruise trip Aaron planned for spring 2020, and uses up a bunch of the future cruise credits we accumulated then when all our plans were canceled.  Tomorrow we start the whole process on a two week transatlantic crossing on the Disney Magic.  So, if we pass our COVID tests tomorrow and get to actually get on the ship, I won't be able to update the blog for about 2 months.  I'll post again in early July after we return.