Almost ready to go…
July 31st was a Monday. We chose that day for lift-off as we needed to be around for our twin niece/nephews birthday party, so Monday it was! It was a little chaotic in the weeks leading up and the stress levels were pretty high. We had people picking up furniture and donations, and our cleaner working 8 hours a day cleaning up after us, getting the house ready for our tenants (thanks Mandy!) We were not quite about to kill each other, but tensions were pretty high. At the end of the day, we just gave up on being selective in what we were going to keep, donate or toss and were just happy to be done with it all. Just being honest.
Next came the property manager and her broker. They had to inspect things, take photos and list the house for rent. All while we had furniture being moved out, cleaning happening and ‘fix it’ stuff going on. The good news came quickly. We had gone out for a few hours soon after our house listed to take more stuff to the tip/dump/trash place. We received a call a few minutes before we arrived home to say there was an agent at the house with an interested couple and they needed to get in the house. So long story short – we met our new tenants! They seem to be a lovely couple – hailing from Canada. He works for NATO, so we ended up renting our house out for a 3 year contract! This whole RVing thing better work out… or we’ll be renters ourselves!
Lift off happened! And then what?
We are not morning people. Well, John isn’t. I am. But John doesn’t get to sleep until the early hours of the morning, so waking him up before 9 or 10 is not in my best interest! 🙂 We had a long drive ahead though, so we dragged our butts out of bed pretty early and got moving around 10:30am. Thanks to Pat (John’s mum) for making us sandwiches and snacks for our drive! We drove away from Virginia Beach and hit the highway with the destination of Gettysburg, PA.
If anyone knows Hampton Roads, they’ll know traffic stinks! What should have taken 2 hours, took 4 and we hadn’t even reached Richmond! Fortunately, we have our fridge, bathroom and snacks on board, so we just dealt with the traffic and I sat back in my seat with footrest and chilled. Kira (dog) didn’t. She panted the whole way. More on her later.
Sometime between Virginia Beach and Gettysburg Farm RV Campground (read the review in our next post), we managed to hit some shredded tire that was in the middle of the road. Something you don’t do in an RV – swerve to avoid roadkill of any kind. It didn’t make that much noise, and everything seemed to be ok, so we chugged on. 10 hours later, we arrived at the campground. Yep – day one was done. Should have been 7 hours, but another thing we have learned – you need to be flexible. There is no rushing in an RV. We just pace ourselves and go with the flow.
Too good to be true…
Just as we were leaving the campground later in the week, I noticed our generator exhaust was hanging in an odd location. John checked it out and realized that the darn tire shred had made the exhaust bend back behind the front tire and was hanging without the support of some of the brackets. So we had our first casualty and roadside bandaid fix. John used some zip ties to hold it up until we could take a better look at it. We also noticed the mudflap at the rear of the rig was also bent a little. Oh well. Could have been worse!
Is it worth it?
We can honestly say that after the months of stress and anticipation leading up to our departure, as soon as we hit the road, it all fell away and we started to relax and enjoy the ride. Yes, things happen. Tire shred shows up, exhaust pipes bend, and dogs have major anxiety issues (Kira!) but we are relaxing in to this lifestyle and going with the flow.
