Pella Tulip Festival

I can't believe that we have been here for three weeks now. The weather has not been very kind to us. We are running the heat pump almost on a daily basis and it is 48 degrees right now outside and the wind is blowing so hard, it is shaking the rig ever so often. It has been so rainy and cold the last few weeks that we were happy when the weather was decent yesterday and we decided to check out a tulip festival that we saw advertised on TV.

Each year they have a tulip festival in a small town about 40 miles from here called Pella. They have a huge window and door factory on the outskirts of the town, which reminded me that we actually had a Pella door front door installed in our house in New Jersey. We found a place to park the car and started walking towards in the center of town to see what was going on.

There were tulips planted all along the main street and pretty much in front of every house. I was not aware how much of a Dutch influence this town has, but we were soon to find out. Walking towards the town square we heard some music and went to check it out.

The little kids were so cute. We continued on to find a huge windmill, which is actually a museum. We will visit it some other time, since there was a lot of people around waiting on the afternoon parade.

We checked out some really nice victim shops and found this beautiful tile work on the side of a building.


Well, it took us about an hour to finally make it to the town square.



The tulips were so beautiful and all over the place. There was also a small oldies car show and I just had to take a picture of this car. Apparently Doug's dad used to own one when Doug was a child and him and his brother used to ride in the back. Would not be able to do this today.

Well, I have to work again tomorrow and Sunday. Sure hope it gets a little bit warmer, or I will be freezing my buns off.

We are working!

Yes, after 2 1/2 years of traveling and enjoying this beautiful country, we are working again. But first a couple of pictures of our new "home" for the next few months. The car is not in the picture, since Doug is at physical therapy for his shoulder, but it fits behind the rig just fine.

See the water puddle in the front. It had rained here since last Thursday with some heavy thunderstorms and even though the rain stopped yesterday afternoon, the ground is so saturated that the water just has nowhere to go. Our spot is on the opposite site of the amusement park, which means that you really can't hear the kids screaming on the rides at our site. If you enlarge the picture you should be able to see the Ferris wheel in the background.

Before we started working last weekend and the weather turned bad, we decided to work a little bit on the truck to replace the sub woofer. It turned out to be more of a project than I had thought, so right now everything is taken apart and we should be installing the new sub woofer some time this week.

See the new driver seat!! When we were in Kansas City, Doug had to go to the spare parts department of MCH (it is a guy thing) and found this beautiful Elite chair for about $300 less than he had seen it on the Internet. Since we were there already, we decided to have them install the chair, which was a good thing, since the base plate had to be changed to fit the seat.

Now let me tell you how our first weekend of work went. Doug is not supposed to work until May 21st, but told his supervisor that he was willing and able to work should they need him sooner. He got a call the next day and worked last Saturday from 8 am to 3 pm setting up stages for competing school music groups from the area. It was a good workout for his shoulder. I got the swing shift on Saturday, which means giving lunch and afternoon breaks to four different store as well working in their inventory room. It started raining in the afternoon, but it was not bad enough to close the park. I was supposed to work the afternoon shift on Sunday, but due to it being only 50 degrees outside and rain in the forecast, the park closed at noon and I did not have to work.

I have to say that my back was hurting at the end of day on Saturday, but I did have fun. There was this little girl that bought some pretty rocks, which are sold in a bag for a certain amount. After putting all of them in the bag, the bag was not full yet and I told her that she could get some more rocks. She looked in the bag and told me very politely that she had all the rocks she wanted. These moments are just priceless and I am looking forward to moments like that when working. I have my schedule already for next weekend and hopefully the weather will cooperate better.

We made it!!

We arrived at Adventureland on Wednesday afternoon, but unfortunately our trip since my last post did not go as smooth as we had hoped for.

We left Thackerville, OK on Monday morning and everything seemed fine. I saw a pick-up truck slowing down a little bit and looking at the rig when he passed us, but I thought he was just admiring it. Well, I was wrong. We stopped about 50 miles up the road for me to get gas to find out that the truck had decided to spit up. The whole front of the rig, the back of the truck cab as well as anything sticking out a little on the side was covered with an oily fluid.



We first thought it was engine oil, checked the oil level and it was okay. We could see a few drops of fluid under the truck, but nothing was leaking badly. We wiped of a spot on the front of the rig to see if we would keep leaking and continued on. Our next stop was a Flying J in Oklahoma City where we got weight and again, we only saw a couple of drops of fluid under the truck and the spot that we had cleaned off was not covered again. We bought a gallon of engine oil and continued on. For the rest of the day we kept stopping about every 50 miles and got to Oasis RV Park around 4 pm. The rig looked just awful.

We decided the next morning to go on to Kansas City and have the truck looked at there. Kansas City has a very big truck shop presents and we knew Volvo was there. Before going to the campground we decided to go to a truck wash and get the truck and rig professionally cleaned. If I would have had to clean the rig it would have taken forever. Doug decided to also get an underbelly wash for the truck and once he got to campground you could see that it looked like a hose to the transmission was leaking. Doug took the truck right away to the Volvo dealer. We have dealt with this shop once before and were not very impressed. Well, they said that they could not get us in until the next morning and Doug came back to the campground. After discussing our situation for about an hour we decided to drive the car down to MCH and talk to them about our problem. They said that they could get us in within the hour and just bring the truck by. Luckily we were only 3 miles away from the campground and had the truck at their shop in no time. MCH found two leaking transmission hoses, replaced the transmission oil and we were able to pick the truck up the next morning and go on to Adventureland.

We arrived in the early afternoon and started check in. When I saw that they had put us into a site that has 30/50 amp I was getting a little bit nervous and we decided to drive to the site with the car first. I am glad we did, since there was no way we would have fit the rig and car never mind the truck there. So back to the check in office we went and the girl was nice enough to call Joe, who was the guy I had talked to about two months ago. So Joe drives up and you can see that as he passes the rig takes a good look and then took another good look. It seems to happen a lot to us since we have the big truck. At first he said he was not sure if he had a spot big enough for us, but then Doug and Joe where able to find a nice pull through spot that fits all of us. I was very relieved, since I did not know where we would have gone if they did not have room for us.

So now we are pretty much settled in, laundry is done, and we met with the human resource department yesterday. I have a meeting with the retail department tomorrow morning at 8:30 am and we will fill out all our paperwork next Wednesday. The only thing really left to do is wash the roof, since the truck wash did not do that. But, since it is only 56 degrees right now and pretty windy, it will have to wait until the weekend when it hopefully is less windy.

On the road again!!

We had originally planned to leave Retama Village on Saturday to start our journey to Iowa. Well, we woke up on Friday morning, realized that we had done everything that needed to be done before we leave and decided to go ahead and hit the road. Linda was kind enough to take some pictures, since we were busy getting packed up and saying goodbye to our friends.


It was going to be a new experience for Doug, since he has not towed the rig with our big Volvo, so we decided not to make a reservation anywhere, since we did not know how far we would actually get. I have to say Doug did a fantastic job. We drove 320 miles, getting through San Antonio right before rush hour and stayed at a campground in Sattler, which is a little bit west of New Braunfels. We have stayed there a few time and it is really nice and quite. Unhooking that night was no problem, we went out for German food in New Braunfels and left Sattler the next morning around 9:30 am. Driving on I35 can be a bit challenging and after what happened we have decided not to travel through a big town again on the weekend. We were driving nicely along towards Austin when a dump truck came onto the highway. Doug gave him plenty of room to pull in, however, I guess the guy did not think so and dead stopped. Doug was able to get over into the middle lane while cars were moving quickly to avoid him. I unfortunately had to come to a full stop. Luckily the car behind me was paying attention and did not hit me and we got moving again.

We made it through Austin, Waco and Fort Worth just fine and then we met another idiot. We were merging from I35W onto I35N when a little Prius decided that he could not do the merge and decided to stop on the on ramp. The car behind him veered to the right and also stopped. There was nowhere for Doug to go, so he hit the breaks hard and luckily came to a stop before hitting anybody. Luckily I had kept some distance behind him and was able to veer to the right as the car behind me veered to the left avoiding me. If we would have been in the F550, Doug probably would have not been able to stop with the weight of the rig behind him. I am so proud of him handling this bad situation and was so glad when we finally arrived in Thackerville after driving 300 miles around 4 pm. Amazingly enough the content in the rig survived all this pretty well. No drawers or cupboards opened up and nothing came flying towards me. It seems that our new air hitch really does a nice job keeping things in the trailer in place.

We decided that it was time to take a break and are staying here until tomorrow morning before we continue. From here we will divide the remaining 700 miles into three 230 mile day trips and should be at the campground at Adventureland on Wednesday. Hopefully, nothing else this drastic is going to happen from here on out.

Hitting the Big One!!

I turned 50 this last Saturday. Throughout the week I have been teased about going to be half a century old and it got me thinking about my life until now. I have to say that I have never been happier and more at ease with myself and the world since we started RVing. Turning 50 is really not a big deal and I can easily say bring it on, because I'm having a blast.

Doug and my girlfriends here at Retama organized a very nice potluck on Saturday to celebrate my birthday, a neighbor of Bonnie and Gail's birthday (same day as mine) and a kind of going away party for Dale and Mark, who left for the summer yesterday.


We had a very relaxing happy hour with all our friends and started grilling about 5 pm. We all brought a dish to share and there was plenty of food for everybody.

And then came the BIG surprise for me!. We have an ongoing debate about a "German Chocolate Cake" sold over here in the US. German Chocolate Cake here has a coconut flake frosting and as I keep telling everybody, there is no such thing in Germany. Well, for my birthday I got my German chocolate cake, which did not have coconut flakes on it and they actually spelled my name correctly. That is not something I take for granted here. :-)

All in all we had a great day and now it is back to getting ready for leaving here in about two weeks to start our workcamping adventure this summer.

Moving right along!

I can't believe that it has been two weeks since I last posted. Between working with Doug's shoulder and getting slowly ready to leave here, it has been busy. The doctor's visits have been going good and we finally got the approval to start physical therapy last Wednesday. The scar has been healing up nicely and now starts the mobility therapy. It sure is different than the therapy for the right shoulder. He is now scheduled to have mobility training for four weeks and then four weeks of strength training. However, we are supposed to leave here in four weeks. We will see what happens. I still take it day by day. He had his first physical therapy session on Friday and let me tell you, they really gave him a good workout. Unfortunately, there is some stiffness in the shoulder, which means he is missing some range in motion, but they feel that it can be worked out in time. I am not allowed to work with him this weekend, since they aggravated the shoulder enough on Friday, but hopefully that will change next week.

In the meantime, Doug has worked on the inside of the truck to get it comfortable for him whenever we do leave here. Today we decided to work a little bit on the outside. Can you tell what is missing in these two pictures??

It is the rust that used to be on the two main rails. I got out there with a grinder this morning, getting all the rust and pitted paint off and Doug did a really nice job painting it. It is actually so shiny that the red from the cab reflected in the rails. I am very happy with the way it turned out.

Last Thursday we decided to work on the tire pressure for the rig and truck tires. This is a standard procedure before you get rolling in the spring. I'm glad we are doing it early this year, since on the last tire the tire stem broke off when I tried to attach the air hose. OOPS!!!!. Come to find out it really is not such a big deal if it happens when you are standing still. I moved the kitchen slide in, Doug raised the trailer up, Grant (our sweet neighbor) loosened the bolts for me, I took of the tire and off to a tire store we went to get a new stem installed. It took all but 10 minutes for them to have the tire fixed, we put it back on the rig, filled it to the correct air pressure, re-leveled the rig, opened the slide back up and were done. I rather have a tire go down while we are sitting still than on the road.

Last Wednesday was St. Patrick's Day and I decided to participate in the "parade". It is a fairly small parade around the block, but it was still a lot of fun.

Donna and Grant hosted a delicious St. Patrick's Day dinner with corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions and everybody had a great time. We had a great turnout with 94 people showing up. I had no idea that there was that many of us left.

So as you can see we are keeping busy and there are still a lot of things on our to-do list until we can leave. Till next time ....

Time flies when you are busy

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I last posted on our blog. First of all, Doug is doing much better by now. He needs very little pain medication by now, mostly after we have been exercising. The staples came out last week and he has been put on a more rigorous exercise schedule until he can start physical therapy in two weeks. The sling will come of permanently on Monday (he has had it off a few time already) and he is able to get himself dressed in jeans and shirts by now. Say goodbye to the sweatpants!!! Now we just need to get the arm moving a lot so that it does not stiffen up.

Since his surgery I have been pretty busy myself, being a chauffeur, going grocery shopping (which I hate with a passion), emptying the septic tank and pretty much doing everything that needs to be done with your hands. A big thank you to Skip and the propane guy who helped me put the big propane tank back in its holder. The tank apparently weighs about 80 lbs when full and that is to much weight for me to lift.

The other day I was working again in the big red truck. All the cupboard doors in the sleeper area open and close as they should now and I got the cup holder tray on the dashboard mounted again. It was a little bit difficult, since it is a tight fit, but I did not realize that I was actually being photographed while laying under the dashboard.

Thank you so much Linda, at least I have prove that I am working!!

When we bought the red truck we knew that we had to come up with a solution for storing all our tools in the truck. The nice big toolboxes that they sell for the back of the truck are just not in our budget right now and so we came up with a different solution. Since we have a very big basement and really have not utilized it very well, we decided to get an eight drawer Craftsman toolbox to store the smaller tools in it.

For the bigger tools and other stuff we got two 36"x24"x24" toolboxes installed on each side of the truck behind the rear tires.

Once the truck has been at the Volvo dealer to get the computer worked on we will fill up these compartments and I should be able to get my coach house back. We will be leaving shortly of course, but it will be ready for me when we get back after the summer.

Well, if everything goes well the F550 will be sold tomorrow. So we gave the truck one more bath today and hope that everything goes well tomorrow. Till next time ....