Thanksgiving 2022

We struggled a bit finding somewhere to put the RV for Thanksgiving.  Since my sister and her kids were working/in school until Wednesday of the week, my original plan was to stay in Thousand Trails in the RV until Tuesday, then put the RV in storage and head to my sister's place.  However, in the first of what I was soon to find out was a long series of Thousand Trails booking difficulties, I couldn't find a place to park the RV into Thanksgiving week, so instead we decided to put the RV in storage on the Friday before Thanksgiving and spend over a week at my sister's (which all parties involved were excited about, so it ended up being a great thing!).  However, once we decided that, we could not find storage at any of the reasonably priced commercial storage locations in the area.  We finally thought to check the park where we'd be staying right before - Sunshine Holiday Daytona - and thankfully they had a mostly empty storage lot (most people who store with them are snowbirds who stay with them and store their RVs over the summer).  So come moving day all we had to do was pull the RV out of its camping spot and around the corner to the storage lot - nice!  Especially with gas prices these days!

We spent a fun week+ with my sister and her family, and my parents and aunt joined us after a few days.  We arrived in time to attend two of our nephews' belt promotion ceremony at their karate school, volunteer at a native American education event for the same two nephews, and attend a performance for our niece.

Belt promotion board kicking!

Belt promotion board kicking!

Aaron at his table with one of our nephews - 
the hostess introduced Aaron as an 'animal 
expert' with 'years of experience' ... which 
cracked us up as he only learned the names of the
animals associated with the pelts on his table
about 10 minutes earlier!

At our niece's performance, with my sister
and her husband and my parents

My sister and I went on a huge shopping trip for the week, determined that we weren't going back...all told I think we went back 9 more times that week 🤦... so much for that plan!

You'd think that would be enough groceries!

We made one big trip with everyone to Castillo de San Marcos, where two of the kids completed the Junior Ranger program.  It was fun!

Aaron with the boys inside the magazine-turned-dump at the fort

The kids with staff in uniform

Thanksgiving Day was so gorgeous we were able to have dinner out on my sister's lanai!  Short sleeves for everyone!

All in attendance at our Thanksgiving meal (including my 
sister's family, my parents, and my aunt)!

We stayed into the weekend after my parents and aunt left, and wrapped up the week with Christmas cookies, Christmas decorations, and a shark tooth hunting trip to nearby Mickler's Landing.  I found two shark teeth!  

With my sister's family at Mickler's Landing

The kids attempted to outweigh Aaron on the see-saw at one of 
the playgrounds in the neighborhood

We had a great week with family!  We picked up the RV from storage the Monday after Thanksgiving - it survived just fine in storage, and no signs of mice infestation this time!

First Time Storing the RV

So we just stored the RV for the first time EVER and I thought that might be blog-worthy.  When we first bought the RV, it smelled a bit musty and we have worked very hard ever since to kill all the mildew and eliminate the odor.  Through lots of dehumidifying and an ozone machine, we figured we'd done it, but I was still extremely nervous about ever leaving the RV unpowered (i.e., without air conditioning to keep the humidity down).  And of course any time without power or propane means I have to empty the refrigerator...a real challenge, but fortunately I was able to use a small fridge my mom sent down to my sister to store a few items I couldn't use up.

We picked a CubeSmart RV storage location because it was cheaper than any other alternative we found, allowed you to make all the arrangements online, and allowed 24 hour access through an automated gate.  Turns out you still had to check in personally to activate your gate code (by happenstance we did stop by the office so we were ok...if we'd tried to go straight to the RV storage location we would have been out of luck!).

The pros: the storage facility was fenced all around with vegetation or cloth preventing any passersby from seeing what was inside; the access road through the center of the facility was very wide; and the 24 hour access did work for us.  The cons (and I think this could be true of any facility): our neighbor had not parked within their designated space, overflowing into ours, which made it pretty difficult to park our gigantic RV, and making us nervous they might hit us if they pulled out with the same carelessness with which they parked.  Since people park these RVs and leave them for months, we really weren't sure what to do with this problem - it's possible the owners were nowhere remotely close to the storage facility to come and move the RV.  I suppose if we actually hadn't been able to park we could have gone back to the office and requested another spot (though there weren't many left), but I don't think having the owners come and move the RV would have been a plausible option, so I hope we don't encounter a slightly worse similar situation in the future...

Aaron managed to roughly center the RV between our two
neighbors while still staying in our spot, but you can see it's 
very tight!  The Jayco is the offending RV.

So I was nervous to see how things would be when we got back a week later.  Turns out the Jayco hadn't moved (I hadn't really expected it to in the space of one week), and apparently our mildew killing really worked because the RV didn't smell at all!  We were fortunate that there was no rain while we were gone and the temperature didn't go above the mid-80s, so things weren't too extreme for the poor abandoned RV.  We moved the RV to our next campground and plugged it in the day before we intended to stay in again, which let the refrigerator cool down (it takes about 24 hours) and allowed us to run the ozone machine once more just for good measure.

So what were we doing all week you might ask?  We stayed at my sister's place to help take care of the kids while her husband was out of town on a business trip.  She likes us to actually stay with her so we can help with the early morning child wrangling.  Before my brother-in-law left, we went to Castillo de San Marcos (another stamp for my passport!) and the Pirate Museum and Colonial Quarter in old town St. Augustine.  The fort was very well maintained/restored and I had fun helping one of my nephews participate in the Junior Ranger program there.  The pirate museum was one of the best we've seen (compared to several we've visited in the Caribbean), and we had an excellent and informative tour guide at Colonial Quarter that really made the visit worth it.

Looking out from atop Castillo de San Marcos

The pillory outside the Pirate Museum