The first Two days

(Starting this blog after a couple of days on the road.  Writing it first on a word processing program then I will paste it to my blog.  Am on my Mac Book Pro as it seems Google, who I used to really love, has cut off the iPad from it’s blog use.  There seems to be a big thing going on between Apple, Google and some other software companies to make their product sell more.  I personally see the users as the ones who will suffer from this game.  Isn’t there enough room for everyone.  Anyway I will find another blog source in time.  I mention this cause I bought some wireless time on my iPad for this trip and now have to use Lynda’s mifi card, and the Mac Pro to post this, stinks.)

The start:

Every year we have done this sojourn to the Keys we need to  perform a lengthly ritual to make that change.  We assume it will go easier with experience but leaving your house for 6 months and moving to another place is not easy.  The amount of things on our check list is huge as you can imagine.  Post Office, Doctors, Dentists, neighbors, Police, draining the house, timers and lights, maintenance on the Bus, packing, Car registrations & inspections, and on and on.  We did get a head start this year and towards the end thought we did a fairly good job and then..........The snow storm!  Two inches of snow fell the night before we left and with it came wet cold weather.  

I went out in the middle of the night and closed the slides on the Bus.  The ground was covered with cold wet snow as I creeped by in my slippers.  Because of the cold I started draining the outside hose bibs early also.  This was at 330 am.  The next morning what was going to be a snap was not.  My numb fingers with no feelings found it tough to even feed the kayak hold down straps through the buckles.  Putting the bike and ladder on the back was a torture.  Poor Lynda had to spread salt all along the path to the Bus to fill the food from the fridge and other last minute things. By the way Her part in all of this was remarkable, She covered so many things and I thank Her so.  Love that Woman.  So although late, we made it.  We drove the 228 miles to the Moose Lodge in Danbury CT that we stop at every year, set up and spent the night. Its a freebee as they let members just park on their lot.  It was a bit cold that night and because, we were just plugged in with a long extension cord we couldn’t use the heat pump thus, had to use the propane heater.  This is somewhat of a drag as we can’t get our big propane tank filled so easy and would need the gas in the RV park by NYC if it stayed cold.  The electric heat pump it seems won’t work at a temps below 40 degrees F.  That is why you don’t see them on houses in the North.

That night at the Moose we kept hearing of another huge snow storm on the way.  We knew we had to get out of Dodge real early and beat it to our site at Liberty Park RV in Jersey City before we got caught.  We did get out fairly early for us and zoomed to Jersey and  made it through the gate of the park just as the flakes began to fall.  That was with me getting off at the wrong Turnpike exit, damn Garmin, and driving the Bus through the crowded streets of Jersey City pulling the Honda, not fun.

So that was our first two days.  Too keep from using up our Propane I found a local Cuban hardware store and bought a nice electric heater.  Across the street was a clothing store and I picked up some long Johns for my legs as I knew it would be cold on the streets of NYC.  We also took advantage of the City life and ordered Chinese take out to the Bus.  Nice.  One last change for that day was that the new heater exposed some wiring quirks I had to straighten out from when I wired in an inverter to use for dry camping a few years ago.  Anyway I spent about an hour putting it all back to factory specs as we don’t use the inverter anymore to power everything.  The new heater along with the small one we had with us worked well.  With that, phew, we listened to the snow fall and wind blow and where cozy that night.  They had 19 inches of snow just a few miles in land from us.  The Moose club in Danbury got 12 inches and many trees were down everywhere.  We would have been screwed it we waited just a few hours more.  Double Phew.  And oh you can see the Statue of Liberty from our site, beautiful.  I will post photos.