Best Laid Plans

Location: Catskill, NY (High 39, Low 20)

Yesterday’s work didn’t exactly go as planned unfortunately. Although we arrived on schedule early in the day, after equipment issues and several trips to Home Depot, the job still was in prep stage and it was almost 5 o’clock. So we have reluctantly tabled the flooring job until we return to the area in June.

And speaking of planning…I have started to seriously check out the weather for our trip south next week. Yes, next week!! We have our stops already planned…an overnight in PA, another overnight in VA, and then a bit longer stop in SC. We are hoping that next Tuesday will be departure day. So far, Tuesday’s weather looks fine…Wednesday’s is a little more iffy. I think…based on what it looks like at this point, that we may leave Tuesday and head as far as PA, and then sit for the sloppy weather before we move on. We will wait a couple more days to firm our plans up further.

Today is Harry’s last working Monday…and we are seven days from DEPARTURE DAY!!!

Helping With a New Floor

Location: Catskill, NY (High 36, Low 18)

Yesterday, Harry was once again working on house improvement – but not ours!!

Last winter, we made plans to help out at my sister’s place, putting in the upstairs hallway floor. But for one reason or another, it just didn’t come together – until now! Yesterday was the day.

 

 

We arrived at the house bright and early, and Harry and Mike got busy working on their job for the day. Well, once they were done clowning around!

 

 

While the guys were working, my sister and I were holding down the living room fort. (Picture taken by my niece Hannah)

 

 

 

 

Oh, and a few of my sister’s neighbors stopped by for a visit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of the doorway thresholds were finished by mid-afternoon.

 

 

 

And then we were off to our next engagement…dinner with a couple of Harry’s coworkers…

A great way to end the day!

 

Today…day two of the hallway floor…

EIGHT days until we head out. That day is in the long range forecast now, and so far, the weather looks good. Hopefully it stays that way!!

A Good News Day

Location: Catskill, NY (High 38, Low 17)

Yesterday was an all-around good news kind of day! It started off when we got up and had running water. So that was a great start!

At 10:30am, the guy from Deiderich’s RV was back to work on our heat strip and water pump. The heat strip turned out to be a really quick fix. There was a sensor reset process which took about one minute, and bam! our heat strip was coming on. Nice!

The water pump didn’t take much longer. Our old one wouldn’t go off – it’s a model that isn’t even made anymore, and this seems to be a common problem, from what we’ve read. So they replaced it with a new one. (It may need to be adjusted a bit, it started running unevenly last night, so we will give them a call today.)

We were also very happy with our extended warranty. The whole bill for the service call and repair came to almost $500. We have to pay only $86, which sounds so much nicer to our budget. We are definitely glad that we went with the extended warranty. This one repair is about 1/6 of the cost of the warranty. We are still covered until mid-2018. It is a relief to know that we have that protection against a lot of big repair expenses for the next five years.

At the same time our repairs were being worked on, Harry was at Albany Med. undergoing a test called a Stress Echocardiogram. He hasn’t had any problems, but due to his family history of close family members having heart attacks, heart bypasses etc. at a relatively young age, his doctor thought it was best to find out now if there is any issue. Everything seems good so far. The person watching all the stats said everything was good with his heart rate, blood pressure etc. So now we wait to hear about the results when the pictures are checked out by a cardiologist. Hoping for continued good news!

Yesterday was the end of Harry’s next to last week of work. This time next week, he will be done! Today we are heading over to my sister’s for the day, and Harry and Mike are going to be putting in their upstairs hallway floor. So it’s going to be a hangout and chat kinda day.  

We are now down to single digits! Nine more days before we hit the road!

Long Day

Location: Catskill, NY (High 19, Low –4)

You can probably see from the temps what made yesterday a long day. We watched the temperature in the water tank area creep up slowly by small 0.2 increments. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon before it got to 32 degrees. And the area where we believed the frozen section to be was underneath that between the water pump and the fresh water tank. We figured there was probably a ten degree difference at least. Since the outside temperature was still only 16 degrees at that point, it was a fight to get every little increase on the thermometer.

Luckily, we had enough water here for the essentials. I had bought a big container of water to use for the cats’ drinking water so we still had some of that. And Harry went out to the water connection and brought in a bucket of water to use in the bathroom for flushing the toilet. Our biggest worry was whether the ice would thaw and leave a working system, or whether something had burst down there.

By late afternoon, we could see that we weren’t going to have water anytime soon. So I called my sister to see whether we could borrow her showers for a bit. She said, come on over, so we threw all our bath supplies in a bag and headed over to their house. Wow, did those showers ever feel good! We hung out there for an hour or so, chatting, and then headed back home, rejuvenated! By the end of the day the temperatures were starting to come up a little – we actually got to our high at the end of the day.

I got up in the middle of the night, around 2 am, and checked the outside temp – we were up to 24 degrees, and I decided to try the pump again. We had a little water! We were excited that things seemed to be thawing, and went back to sleep a little more relieved. This morning when we got up – checked again – and we have WATER!!! Nothing ever sounded so wonderful as that water pump did this morning.

We just finished watching the weather, and the temps look pretty good for the next ten days. We are SO hoping that the weather holds until we get the heck outta here!!

TEN more days!!

Frozen

Location: Catskill, NY (High 26; Low 2)

Well, two days ago it was cold and yesterday was colder, We were fine all day with temps underneath staying around 40 degrees. But this morning it is even more frigid outside; according to our thermometer, it is -2 degrees right now. And we, not surprisingly I guess, have a frozen line somewhere. We are thinking the line from the tank to the water pump. Fun, fun, fun.

Other than that, there is not much going on around here. Harry went to work yesterday, and I stayed around here, doing research online, and otherwise hanging out. I was going to go to the store, but I just didn’t feel like getting all bundled up as there wasn’t anything that urgent I needed to pick up.

At the moment we are sitting around watching the thermometer…and hoping that things are just frozen and nothing worse. We have a bit of a warm up coming, thank goodness, so once we get through today we may have seen the last of the real cold stuff before we head out. With things frozen up, Harry has taken the day off, so he has six days of work left. And I sure hope the weather cooperates so we can get out of here on time. Eleven days left!!!

COLD

Location: Catskill, NY (High 35; Low 9)

This morning, cold is the word of the day!! When we woke up this morning and checked the outside temp, we found that it was a balmy 9 degrees. Our docking center is at 20 degrees, but Harry took the water filter out yesterday and there is nothing else in there that can be harmed by the temperature going below freezing. Underneath we were right at 32 degrees. We also had our tank heaters on. Everything seems to be working fine – our water is running and the temp underneath is already starting to climb a bit.

Inside we are nice and toasty warm. We set the heat at 65 degrees overnight – we usually turn it down a little more than that, but with this cold weather, we want to keep the furnace piping that warm air underneath. Other than that, we slept great, very cozy under our nice down bedspread.

Today we mark three weeks already since we moved from the driveway to this campground. We’ve had a few issues - with our heat pump control, the leak in the piping underneath, our water pump not shutting off after it gets to pressure. It has been a bit of a pain to have things like this come up…but we had things break down in the house too. We know stuff like that is going to happen, no matter where we live. Other than that, we are loving life! We talked about it last night, and neither of us can think of anything that we miss from the “sticks and bricks” lifestyle.

We started yesterday keeping track of our spending. The first few months will be the test of the amounts that we are allocating to each category. I expect that we will need to tweak the numbers a bit, once we actually get moving. Right now I’m just going to work on keeping track of everything we spend – that’s the first step!!

Twelve days until we can head south in search of some warmer weather!!

New Year’s 2013

Here we are at the start of another year! This blog entry is going to be different from my New Year’s blogs of years past. Ever since I started this blog, my first entry of the year has contained a list, and usually a pretty extensive list, of those jobs we needed to complete throughout the year. We don’t have any of those left! (Only selling our Honda, which hopefully will be done next week.)

So my goals today for this upcoming year are more of the personal variety! That’s a welcome change.

Healthy living is my #1 goal! I started making some changes in the way I cooked, and what I ate this past October. Although my weight loss slowed quite a bit in December, I did manage to lose a few pounds, for a total of 20 pounds so far. That is a third of the way to my goal. So now that the craziness of the holidays, house sale, and getting done work is over, I am hoping to get back on track.

As part of my (our) goal of healthy living, we want to become more active. We will be getting started on that goal after we get out of this icebox!

We are so excited to be getting started on our new life! Harry has 8 days of work left, and then we hope to be able to head out. We have our route south pretty much planned and will be staying in Florida for the months of February and March. (We originally wanted to head to the southwest, but with our time constraints we didn’t feel that it was worth traveling all that way this year – next winter!)  In April we will travel up to PA for a Heartland Owners campout. Then we will head for South Dakota to set up our residency and get our drivers licenses. From there, we will be heading back to the northeast for the summer months to take care of necessary appointments and visit with family and friends. At least that’s the plan!

Here’s hoping for a great 2013 for all of us!!

Thirteen days until we hit the road!