Full time RV Park Living: Thunderbird Airpark

As I mentioned in the last post, our goal was to move the RV to a park a close drive to the property we're still attempting to buy.  This is Thunderbird Airpark, primarily of course an airpark, but they have 7 RV sites that they lease out for quite a reasonable rate.  They don't advertise the RV sites anywhere that I've found, so as far as I can tell these sites are full completely due to word of mouth or the occasional person like us that happened to drive by.

Our site at the airpark - still pretty tight!

Standing in front of the RV looking down the row of RVs - 
the grass strip is about 2/3s of the way between the RVs and the fence

We did spend some time at the property measuring out the driveway, house site, and septic field so we could finish our site plan, since that will be necessary for the building permit.  Our house plan is still underway, but we know what the footprint will be so we can go ahead with the site plan.

Measuring out the septic location at the bottom of the property 

I did drag Aaron to explore one site in the area - Ravine Gardens State Park.  The park has a couple of hiking trails and even a driving trail around the ravine (much to Aaron's delight!).  It's not a huge amount to look at, but it was serene and close!

At the bottom of the ravine

Aaron's parents came to visit for a weekend and we explored nearby Welaka State Forest, including Mud Spring, which was beautiful!

Mud Spring!

With Aaron's parents at Mud Spring

At Orange Point on the John's Landing Trail

 

We also checked out 12 Below Zero Ice Cream Bar in Pomona Park and went birding at Welaka National Fish Hatchery.

Enjoying waffle bowls at 12 Below Zero

Watching birds at the Observation Tower at the Beecher Unit 
at the Welaka National Fish Hatchery

We went to my sister's house for Easter and had a great time as always.

Dressed up for Easter dinner with my sister's family

My parents also came to visit for a few hours to see the property, visit our fun local hardware store (Hill's Hardware), and take us to lunch at 3 Bananas, an awesome place on the water in Crescent City.  They had come to Florida to visit my sister, so a few hours wasn't as crazy as it sounds!

The view from our seat at 3 Bananas

In local news, our new neighbors at the airpark took us to the local Fraternal Order of Eagles here in Lake Como, and we liked it so well we became members!  Turns out most of the people in RVs at the airpark are also members...I'm seeing how the word of mouth must have gone around for people to know the airpark accepts RVs!  

Helping our neighbors serve dinner in the Eagles' kitchen

I worked the register while Aaron washed dishes

Back at the airpark the baby sandhill cranes are growing up!

The last excitement for the last month-ish was when we were surprised by a burst drainage pipe under the sink after I did dishes one night!  I always thought it was remarkable that it didn't split before... since our sink is on the main slide, there is a flexible pipe that connects the sink drain to the inflexible drain in the rest of the RV, and it flexes back and forth and back and forth all the time as we bring the slide in and out.  So we had a late evening trip into Palatka (with the closest open hardware store) to buy a new pipe and fittings.  Fortunately it was a straightforward fix once we had the right materials!

Broken pipe!

Aaron working on fixing the pipe - access
was not easy

All fixed!

In land news... our latest update from the lawyers is that it will take another 2-3 months to resolve probate, determine the legal heir that needs to sign off on the revised legal description for the property, and get that signature.  Since Aaron can't stand to just sit in this park so close to the property he can't work on, we've decided to head back north for the summer.  We decided to go on a two week Alaskan cruise to use up some cruise credits we gained last summer during our COVID adventure, and then we'll spend the rest of the summer escaping from the heat in Virginia.  As soon as we actually own the property we'll head back to Florida and get to work!

Summer RV Repairs

In between our various travels this summer and spending time with family we did find time to do some needed maintenance and repairs on the RV!  Here's a quick summary of our activities.

We took the washing machine out of its housing to try to figure out why it was overheating while drying.  After removing the housing and reaching our hands into narrow awkward parts of the exhaust, we found a significant sopping wet lint buildup in the steam vent from the washing machine.  Unfortunately, this is in a part of the washing machine that you can't reach without extracting the unit and removing the cover (not like the convenient removable lint screens on a standard dryer), so I'm not sure what regular maintenance I could do to keep this buildup from happening again.  I have high hopes that it has never been cleaned since the machine was installed and thus will keep until we're ready to sell the RV...we'll see!  We're hopeful this will fix the dryer issue but we'll see for sure once I try to do some laundry on the road.

Dissecting the washing machine

Next up was our regular annual maintenance - changing oil and filters and lubricating grease fittings.  We get a little better at this every year!

Annual maintenance always involves lots of fun time for 
Aaron under the RV!

That's all we had time for before heading to Europe - after we got back, the first order of business was trying to fix the dangerous cloudy driver side window.  Aaron bought a kit for this that came with instructions on removing and taking apart the window, along with new seals with desiccant to put the window back together.  This was a scary prospect, but after we broke through the excessive caulk sealing the window to the RV itself (which apparently shouldn't have been there), it was actually pretty straightforward.  The result was a crystal clear window...which, spoiler alert, clouded up the day we left West Virginia in cold near-freezing temperatures, but cleared up again as soon as we moved south to warmer temperatures.  So it doesn't seem 100% fixed, but hopefully it'll at least hold while we're in warmer Florida for the winter!

No window!

Taking the window apart

As a side note and completely unrelated, we decided to clear a bit of stuff out of my mom's house, and so I went through my stuffed lion collection once more.  I had given away about half of the collection when we moved to Europe in 2007, and decided I really needed to pare it down again.  I kept about 15 animals and donated the rest to the Teddy Bear Brigade at Gleaning for the World, which seemed like a worthy cause.

These are the lions I donated

Next up: the muck at Sunshine Holiday Daytona destroyed one of our theoretically indestructible jack pads, so Aaron sawed it off and drilled some holes in the remaining bit so he could reattach the bottom of it so that the same buffer would exist on this jack as the others that still have intact jack pads.  Unfortunately, the other jack pads are still well and permanently attached and can't be removed without extreme effort, so it was easier to rig this up than to remove the other two.  At this point we regret putting the pads on in the first place, because aside from horrible muck they are quite nonremovable and we don't really see the benefit that was promised.

Not so indestructible!

Attaching the remaining pad with wires

Our next job was pretty straightforward - we wanted a better way to attach our waste tote to the car so we could drive it to the dump station without the effort we went through to rig things on the road.  Dad gave us a decent sized carabiner that should do the job nicely!

Waste tote hauling apparatus

Our next big planned project was to repaint the RV roof.  After some research we decided to repaint it with Bus-Kote, which is the white paint you commonly see on school buses and delivery vans.  It has microbeads in it that theoretically provide additional insulation, and it is bright white to reflect the sun.  We immediately noticed a difference in our ability just to walk on the roof barefoot without burning ourselves - time will tell if there is significant insulation value in terms of reducing our air conditioning need.  This involved constructing quite a scaffolding around the roof as Aaron did not trust me to paint the roof without falling off!

We used ladders on one side and leftover steel beams from 
our basement reconstruction on the other to form the verticals 
of the scaffolding.

We ran boards between the vertical segments to make a sort of railing

Painting the roof

Our last big - and completely unplanned - project was to replace the spring in the slide cover over the living room slide.  While we were working on other things Aaron happened to notice that the slide cover no longer had tension on it - thank goodness he noticed it before we left!  We took the apparatus off and discovered the spring that holds tension on the cover had completely snapped.  We had to replace the spring and, since we had everything taken apart anyway, decided to replace the slide cover as well.  This was another daunting task that actually turned out to be much easier than we anticipated.  The old cover had many holes in it, so we are also hoping this will fix some of the leakage problems we had during intense rains!

That's not supposed to be in two parts...

Hanging the new slide cover

That sums up our summer RV activities!  All ready to get back on the road!

 

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.  

Time at the farm for repairs

I had intended to keep more of an ongoing blog of our repair activities this last month+, but we were just so busy!  So here's just one big wrap-up post.

We spent about six weeks parked at our lovely parking spot at the family farm in West Virginia.  My dad had prepared some old plywood siding boards for our backing-in so we could avoid tearing up the front lawn, and they worked quite well.

Moving the boards into place

Parked!  I had to help Aaron with backing up so I didn't get
and 'in-progress' photo, but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, when Aaron went to plug in, we encountered an unexpected repair need...somehow over the winter one of the old wires running through the pasture went bad.  So our first project (and by 'our' I mean Aaron's and my dad's...) became re-fixing the electricity to the parking spot.  They did this in short order and had us up and running within a few days.

Diagnosing the problem

Setting up the tractor to lay another new wire
under the ground in the pasture

Everything was freshly in bloom in West Virginia, quite a nice setting for our work!

Apple trees in bloom

With the electricity out of the way....this repair session our main focus was on making the RV easier to drive - the stress of the driving experience is getting to Aaron a bit.  So we replaced the rear shock absorbers (we did the front last time) and the front air bags (tried to do the back as well but - thanks COVID - we couldn't find the part in stock anywhere), tweaked the steering adjustment to make the steering 'tighter', fixed the wiring for the rear view camera, and cleaned the interior of the driver side window (between the glass) so Aaron can actually see the mirrors.

Aaron had to contort himself in all sorts 
of ways to get the air springs out

The new air springs

Cleaning the window with distilled water and ethanol through a 
hole drilled in the rubber seal

In other repairs, Aaron took off the basement door that we dented at the gas station in Texas, fixed the dent, and repainted the door.  It looks great!  You'd never know that we damaged it. 

Hammering the bent frame piece straight

Fitting the fixed frame piece back in place

Sanding in preparation for paint

All done!

While we were painting, we also repainted two areas whose paint didn't look so great from last time - one other basement door and the black part of our bedroom slide.  I didn't think to take a picture, but after repainting the bedroom slide, the clearcoat and top layer of black paint peeled off like vinyl when we tried to polish it...so we'll have to do that AGAIN.

Painting the basement door

Makeshift painting booth

Painting the bedroom slide

Aaron built a little shield for our tow hitch to help protect it from scraping bottom as we went in and out of the steep driveway at the farm.

Testing the fit

Close up of the shield

We tried to straighten our front door, which catches in the wind on the highway and vibrates a lot and makes lots of noise.  We couldn't do much to straighten the frame without breaking the glass, but Aaron did tighten up all the hinges and whatnot and as a happy side effect the door is a lot easier to open and close now!

Somewhat futile attempt to straighten the frame

And just for fun...Aaron finished my little doorside shelf that he started on last time we were here.  I love it!

Installing the shelf

On a personal note, we had a few adventures.  My Uncle John's ash spreading was right after we arrived - a small outdoor affair.

The small gathering included mostly Uncle John's descendants
and my parents' descendants.  Aunt Jane is in white in the 
center; we are gathered around Uncle John's memorial bench.

We managed to get both doses of our Moderna vaccine, which makes me feel MUCH better about continuing our travels!

Goofy selfie station at the vaccination clinic

We went up to my sister's place (for the last time before they move to Florida!) to help out for a week while my brother-in-law was out of town on business.  We celebrated Star Wars day in style!

Fruit lightsabers!  Photo courtesy of my 6-year-old nephew Luke!

Finally, I started the long process of getting my loose and painful baby tooth replaced with an implant.  For those who don't know, I'm missing 6 permanent teeth (and all 4 wisdom teeth!).  Four of my baby teeth survived to adulthood, but one started wiggling around 6 years ago and I replaced it back then with an implant; this past December, another one started hurting and eventually wiggling, so it's time for it to go as well.  We ultimately decided to go back to my all-time favorite dentist (Dr. Eric Seitlin), who did my first implant, and I should be able to finish the process this summer while we're in and out of my hometown just 3 hours from Charlotte (where he's located).  Seriously, this dentist is amazing, if you're near Charlotte and looking for someone...  I have a photo of my extracted baby tooth that I thought about posting, but I don't want to disgust anyone, so I'll just post this photo of Latta Park where I ate lunch before my tooth extraction...

Latta Park in Charlotte

So that sums up our repair trip!  We're heading to Tennessee for a month-long trip around the state, so we'll have some more exciting photos soon!