This Is Where The Fun Really Begins!!!

As I begin to type this, it is 4am on a Sunday morning and we are camping at Normandy Farms in Foxboro, MA. I am awake initially because Abby was at the foot of the bed crying. This is usually a sign of her needing to go out. But as I got out of bed to help her, I realized that she wanted space on the bed. Bed her sister Sierra was blocking her from jumping up. When got out of bed Abby quickly jumped up, taking about 60%  of the spot I previously occupied. My attempt to get any worthwhile space in the bed was just not happening so I decided to get up. I have a freshly brewed cup of coffee (I love K-cups!) and my iPad, so as a sports talks how host friend of mine might say: Here. We. Go.

There is so much happening that I have no clue where to begin. And again, I have failed to stay current on this blog. But I really do have an excuse this time because life has been beyond crazy. This past weekend was our estate sale. We hired a guy who came into our house, took a bunch of pictures, advertised online on Craigslist among other places, arranged everything as you might at a yard sale, and essentially sold away our entire stick and brick life. We sold all of my workshop tool, my John Deere lawn tractor, a bunch of furniture...pulling in roughly $5k over two days. This is a large part of the reason we are camping. There is nothing left in the house. We had a few things remaining: kitchen appliances, dining room furniture, and the custom bar and bar-back mirror/stemware rack that I built about 6 years ago for our huge family room. So we posted them on Craigslist. Saturday was the dash for cash day as we had buyers come to the house to pick up the items they bought. The hardest was the bar. Back when I did a lot of woodworking, that was (and still is) my pride and joy!

The two big pieces of news are that everything is squared away on the house and we are free to leave town. And we earned that Faith's employer is going to allow her to keep her job and work remotely from home, from wherever we might be. On top of a paycheck, this means we will still have health insurance. And was a huge load off my mind !!

OK! That is it for looking back. Time to look ahead. As the title of this installment says, this is where the fun really begins!!!! At last, after 4 years of dreaming and planning. After many trips to Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Daytona during which every sentence began with "Someday" or "When we...", we are just 5 days away from beginning the adventure of our lives! It's truly somewhat bittersweet. We have friends who we will miss. But the first snowfall is only a few weeks away and I promise I will not be missing the white stuff!! Oh, and we sold the snowblower too!!!!!

Thanks to Faith's employer we are able to take our time heading south. With the exception of maybe a conference call or two, she is going to be able to take time off until November 12th. So we have time to get where we are going and get settled in. Leaving here Friday morning, we are traveling to my Brother in law's place in the Philly area. We'll spend the weekend there, enjoy their incredible hospitality, go to my nephews baseball games and potentially hoist a cold one or two.

Then it's to DC for a few days. We are looking forward to going back. We were there last summer and the heat really prevented us from having as much fun as we had hoped. So we are going to spend a couple days seeing things we missed like Arlington National Cemetery and the Museum of American History.  I am kinda bummed that neither the Orioles or the Nationals made it to the World Series this year as we would be in DC at the perfect time! 

From there we will pretty much take a straight shot through Virginia and the Carolina's taking an extra rest day in North Carolina just to catch our breath and maybe do some laundry. ETA for St. Augustine is Monday November 5th.

As I have complained several times, I still can't get pictures to post on this site using the iPad. I may just get a laptop for the trip... Jury is still out on that. But the other thing I am thinking about is just posting pictures to my Facebook page and providing the link in this blog. I think I can post them so they are accessible to the public. But if you need to send me a friend request, please do so and I will happily accept!

So for now, I think I will make another cup of coffee and plan to head back to the house this morning to sell off the rest of our belonging. I am hoping to catch my this week but I am making no promises. At the risk of repeating: Here. We. Go!!!!!!    

Slave to Technology

My older brother has worked for IBM for roughly 40 years. He started there immediately after getting his PhD in Physics and it's the only job he's really ever had. I visited his lab once back in the mid 80's and he was showing me a laser beam that he had shooting around the room, bouncing off walls and mirrors, etc.  He said they were working on being able to use lasers to carry and deliver what he called digital information. It made no sense to me at the time but a few years later we started to see cassette tapes be replaced by The CD, a compact disc that contained music... Digital music delivered via laser. On that same visit to his lab, he showed me a message he had received that morning from his friend in Australia.  It was a bunch of green typing on a black computer screen and he called it "electronic mail, or e-mail for short". It seemed hard to understand. But he swore that someday everyone would have this thing called email. Looks like he was right.

Since that day some 30 years ago, I have become quite skilled at using technology. I consider myself computer savvy. I have an iPhone and an iPad and a stack of old laptops a mile high. I am not sure I have a clue how to actually use technology  but I manage to make it work nonetheless. And speaking of iPads, they confound me. For all of the techno-ease they provide, they still can be "clunky" or to use an old computer term from the 90's, "cluegy".  Every laptop and desktop computer we own is packed away in prep for its journey to Florida.  So I have the iPad. I thought I was at an advantage. But I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to post pictures on this blog using the iPad. In fact I have determined that it is essentially impossible. As much as I enjoy writing, pictures are much more fun and much less boring.  The utility on blogger.com, best as I can tell, doesn't support the Safari browser. If you have any ideas, leave a comment below or feel free to contact me via new fangled electronic mail at Steven.shelby@comcast.net.

That's all I have today! Enjoy this Thursday... Cheers!

It's September already?

The answer is a sad "yes". And we are still here in New England, waking each morning to cooler temperatures and the promise of autumn knocking on the door.  It's September and I should be in Florida by now, but I am not. I should be at least waking up in the camper, taking the dogs out for the morning walk.... But I am not.

Instead, we are in the house. In New England. And it's getting cold. So how did we get here? More importantly, how did we not get where we wanted to be? And what's next?

The summer has been delightful! We began in April camping at Normandy Farms in Foxboro,MA. which is a great place to be long term. Looking back, I wish we could have stayed there all summer. But it's quite expensive and we chose to move to another spot on June 1st. It was still convenient to Faith's office and for me to come to the house to continue my work toward having the place ready for sale. But we just were not that comfortable there. So we secured a fulltime site at one of our favorite places on earth, Charlie Brown Campground in Eastford, CT! The sites are big and grassy, the river is filled with rainbow trout, the early mornings are like heaven and the people are as nice as anyone you will ever know. I gotta shout out to Steve, Pam, Chris and their staff! They rock! But it was pretty inconvenient. We initially thought we could handle the 75 minute commute each way, and it certainly felt worth it given the spot we were able to come home to each day. But the back and forth commute took its toll literally and on us physically and mentally. It took a big chunk of our day that we could have spent enjoying our surroundings. The lesson learned is that, no matter how much we love a spot, convenience to daily activities is huge!!!

So we pulled out of Charlie Brown on Labor Day weekend. It was a tough move. We were saying goodbye to friends who we not sure we would see again. At least not soon. Add to that, our neighbor Mike in the site next to us who had become a friend, suddenly passed away of a heart attack (at age 54) just a few days before. But our plan was to take a vacation. A camping vacation. 

The distinction is odd. We live day to day in a camper, at a campground. But we wanted a vacation and we were going to do what we love most... We were going camping!!! The mental adjustment was freakin' me out! But we hooked up and headed out to Lake Winnipesaukee In New Hampshire. We spent the long weekend there and then went to Scusset Beach on Cape Cod of the following week. But then it was time to come back to reality. Reality can suck! But we needed to come back to the house and re-group.o

Since April, I have painted virtually every room in the house. I have replaced carpet in the finished basement. There is new flooring in the upstairs hallway, new carpet runner on the stairway, the front yard has new mulch in the beds, the list goes on.... And I could easily put another $3k to $4k into the place.  That is, if I actually had the money. 

We are re-grouping because we cannot put more cash into selling the house. Especially since the house is not going to make us a dime if we do sell.  We are one of millions of American families who are under water on their mortgage. We bought the place in 2005 when the housing market was nuts. I remember that we made an offer for the same as the asking price and were still worried that it wouldn't be enough. Seven years later the house is worth more than a hundred grand less than we paid for it. A almost identical house across the street was on the market for 6 months and finally sold for roughly $20k less than we owe on this place. So we have had to make some decisions. We have decided to abandon our dream and suffer through New England winters in this dreadful house for the rest of our lives....

Kidding.

Quite the opposite actually. The dream is very much alive. I don't plan on going into our financial and legal dealings in this forum any further than I have already gone. But I will say that we have taken steps to walk away from the burden of this house and be in Florida, potentially with a Landshark Lager and a turkey fryer in front of me, by Thanksgiving. 

There is a PODS container the driveway as I type.  We are loading it with the very few items we have chosen to keep along with stuff for our permanent site that we don't want to travel with. We have hired a friend of a friend to conduct an estate sale on October 13th and 14th. He will also handle cleanout of anything that doesn't sell.  Our ETD is October 26th. It's obviously still a moving target since things are still in flux. 

So we are now caught up on the past months of silence. I will continue to update the blog as we move along. It's been (and continues to be) a battle. But I am more convinced than ever that we will be in St. Augustine before the guy next door shovels the first snowfall.

Cheers! 

Just passed the three week mark of full-timing! We had a huge rain storm come through New England last night. And just when I recently got DirecTv set up with a high def dish and DVR, the farm thing got knocked over in the wind. So I need to put out site back together this afternoon and can hopefully restore the high quality TV picture we had yesterday.

I mentioned a while back that I was considering nstalling a 32 inch HD TV in the Passport. I actually did it, which is what motivated me to install the high def dish. It had worked out very well until last night!

To this point, my writings have been a pretty laid back account of our adventures. In the next installment in this blog, I will write about something very serious and very important. You will not want to miss it!
~Cheers, Steve

What the title means

So I don't really have much to write about today. I finally finished painting the kitchen today. We decided that a light yellow would be nice. The name of the shade was "peaceful calm" which sounds harmless enough. But after the choice was made a friend of mine who is in the paint business reminded me that yellow covers really badly. And yellow over coffee type of a color is even worse. So what I thought would take a gallon has taken 3.5 gallons. But today it is done!! I have to put the kitchen back together tomorrow and then move on to the next project.

I got a nice comment from Debbie who asked where the title Gators and Grapefruit came from. First, thank you for reading and following the blog, Debbie! The significance of the title is first that our dream is to be in Florida, specifically in the St. Augustine area. After many visits there and to Jacksonville including the weekend of the Florida- FSU game, we have become Florida Gators fans. Grapefruit is a favorite fruit and probably in the top five of favorite foods. Seems they grow a few of them in Florida. Unfortunately, due to health issues and resulting medication, I ave been unable to eat grapefruit for about the past three years. So when I got thinking of a title for the blog, it's the first thing that came to mind. Of course the whole episode has created a real craving for grapefruit which is a lot like cheating on your wife: you can dream about it and stay healthy. But acting on it would not be pretty! Thanks for asking!

Well, I am not sure which will pop up next, a project at the house or a project here at the camper. We feel like there is a lot of sway and wopple in our camper. We have electric stabilizers and I can't really get a feel for how firm they should be. And the springs feel really soft. So between myself, Faith and the puppies, things can get rocking in here. So I have to address the issue. Just not sure how I am going to go about it. I am also thinking of upgrading the TV. This rig came with. 19 inch TV which is fine in the bedroom but not so good from any distance. I have seen a couple of discussions about people with similar rigs upgrading to a 32 inch. I need to measure and price parts, etc. but it could be the next project.

We continue to adjust to the concept that we live here. This campsite is our home! But we are having a wonderful time of it! More soon. ~ Cheers!

Rude Awakening

This morning at 6:30am: "Honey? Can you wake up? I don't think we have any water!" This is how my day began.

We are very aware that temps are dropping into the 30's at night. It's April in New England, whataya expect? And for the first three nights of our new adventure we made damned sure we paid attention. Two of the three forecasted below 35 so I just left a drip of water running n the kitchen. It's something I have made a habit of doing on cold nights in any house I live in. But last night, we got watching the basketball game, got tired, and forgot to look at the overnight forecast. It got into the low 30's. Oops.

So I am up and out the door in a flash! The site next to us s empty.... They have pressure. So the campground didn't, as Faith had wondered out loud, turn the water off overnight. I pull the hose off our water connection and turn it back on the find plenty of pressure. OH NO!!! Had my worst nightmare happened and I have turned our brand new Passport travel trailer into an ice cube on wheels after only a few nights? I go to the hose connection the the camper, disconnect the hose and see ice in the hose. Crap! But it's fairly slushy and does not see to extend into the camper. Fortunately I have a spare hose that I hooked up. Pressure is restored. Faith can now take her shower and go to work. I really think everything is ok, thankfully! There were no bursts of air or anything that would lead me to believe there was an internal problem. Pressure was outstanding! So we dodged a bullet. I will do better next time. ~ Cheers!

As of today, I haven't figured out how to post pictures to the blog using the iPad. This is going to be a must because both Faith and I prefer it over a laptop or a desktop computer. We own both, but the laptop is for Faith's work and we plan on getting rid of our home computer when we sell the joint.

So this has been an up and down day. I put some time into getting the camper ready for travel. But also learned that my truck (a 2007 GMC Sierra) is going to suck yet another $500 out of my hide today. This time it is a ball joint. In the last year, I have forked up various amounts of cash on brakes and replacing a wheel hub. I love this truck. But it is starting to take a toll on my wallet. But ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.

The tires are next. I can't complain... The have 60k miles on them. And while there is plenty of tread left, apparently the play n the ball joint has caused a cupping along the inside of the tire. Given the amount of travel coming up, new tires are probably a good idea. So I guess I gotta just suck it up.

By the way, I am well aware of how completely boring this blog is. When we get on the road, I suspect it will get a little more interesting. And I think Faith may start to blog as well, which will certainly help. In the meantime, maybe I should start writing about baseball, bad experiences in local restaurants,or how intolerant I am of intolerant people. Not sure it matters since nobody is reading this crap anyway. Cheers~ Steve