A Full-time Life

SMALL ADVENTURES IN THE GROCERY AISLES

Grocery shopping is always a bit of an adventure on a road-trip.  First of all you have to find one, then you have to figure out where the bread and milk and carrots and cheese are located.  (We prefer not to shop at WalMart, which would probably make life easier.)  

In the 5th-Wheel we had a supply of freezer meals and a full-size refrigerator full of stuff to make meals out of...we could buy and store food pretty much exactly as we did when we had a stick house.  But it's different in the RoadTrek.

 
The kitchen is tiny and storage space is limited.  We didn't used to like to stop at grocery stores on travel days, because it was hard to find a place to park.  But now, with the B-Van, we can't carry too much extra food.  We have breakfast stuff and two or three emergency dinners "on board."  So we're stopping for groceries pretty often.  (Easy enough to do now though because it's not hard at all to find a parking place.) 

On this road trip, our adventure is learning to use the grocery store as our extra storage pantry -- and planning reasonably healthy easy-to-fix meals as we go. 

Here's a supermarket chain we've stopped at a few times on this trip.  We don't see this one in the Pacific Northwest. 

The name makes me laugh, but it isn't a bad place to shop.

(Photo courtesy of Google)

Here are a few interesting stores we've come across on other trips.

 HEB Supermarkets are pretty much the only stores you see in most of Texas. 

It is a good place to shop and prices seem pretty reasonable. 

The man who started this chain was named Herbert E. Butts, which proves, I guess, that success doesn't necessarily depend on one's name!

(Photo courtesy of Google)

We stumbled into this international gourmet grocery store in Rockford Illinois. 

Interesting because this area was pretty rundown, so it was quite a surprise to find a store that was on the upscale end. 

We didn't go looking for it, it was just the first (and only) store we found there. 

Sometimes you don't even have to go to a museum or visitor center to learn about the area where you are.

This little grocery store in The Dairy State -- Wisconsin -- displayed some area history.  The clerk said the  bottles were from area dairies, past and present. 

 

 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

   
We're on a road(trek) trip! 

We'll be traveling up the Eastern Seaboard, without many definite goals or specific plans.   Just living the Full-Time life visiting some new states and places and seeing what there is to see.

Stay tuned!

 

 

Scroll down, as always, for the latest posts. Click the post title to see (or send) a comment.   Or do an in-site search or hit the categories list if your're looking for something specific.  Those links are in the right hand column over there.

BIG FAT ZERO -- AND THAT'S AN EXCELLENT THING

Those of you who've been following FullTime-Life for a while might remember the reason our first Winter in the Florida Canal Cottage had a delayed start.

Instead of being here for the typical snowbird season (usually November or December through March) we did not arrive at Upriver until the end of February. 

 Here's a link to the post about why we spent an extra and unexpected 40 days in Oregon  during the early part of the  season, while Bill had radiation for a recurrence of prostate cancer.

Luckily, he had no serious after-effects and we left Oregon for Florida just a few days after the end of the 40 days of treatment.

While the urologiy oncologist was quite confident about the treatments, he said that  Bill would have to wait until June to get a PSA lab test to tell for sure.  (After radiation,  PSA test results would not be accurate for three months.) 

We just enjoyed our time here at Upriver and really  didn't dwell on the June deadline and what might happen.... but when he finally could take the test and the results came back reading A GREAT BIG FAT ZERO we were both very happy.   As you may already know, the PSA test is one exam where 0 is a great score! 

We've lived long enough to know that you never can tell what adventure life may throw at you next, but for right now we are looking forward to some simple adventures of the roadtrip kind. 

Here's a picture of Bill by that funny little door shown above.  It was in an alley near London Bridge back in 2007 (when we were younger than we are now -- and celebrating our 50th Anniversary year). 

AN RV LIFE

Visit the Links on these two Memes to read and see pictures of life around the world:  EVERYDAY LIFE  AND THAT'S MY WORLD

We've had a few questions recently (well, a couple anyway) about our Full-Time RV life  ... and what the term RV actually means.  It really is a catch-all for the many types of RECREATIONAL VEHICLES.    The term "Full-Timers" is commonly used to distinguish those who have made their RV their only home from those who use one just for camping and vacations.   

Many retirees use their RV as a Winter home when they head to warmer climates, while still maintaining a stick-and-brick home "up North".  These folks are refered to as "Snow Birds".

But we decided shortly after we retired that two homes were one too many, so we sold the house we'd lived in for almost 30 years and for ten years we lived and traveled full-time in our Fifth-Wheel RV.   Now it is parked back in the Pacific Northwest and is our West Coast home. 

Because a year ago last Winter we pulled the Fifth Wheel cross-country to Florida for what we thought would be a one-winter visit.  But we just fell in love with the Fort Myers area and  Upriver resort and ended up buying a Park Model trailer here.  We still consider ourselves to be full-time RVers -- but in a different way from how we started out.

Park Models (we fondly call ours the Canal Cottage) are licensed as an RV but, when in place, look more like a small house.  

They can be moved, but not by your average guy (or truck).  

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 Here are a a couple pictures of a park model (not ours) in the process of being moved out of a spot at the park where we were staying.

Park Model RVs do not have  water tanks nor batteries.  They must be hooked up to sewer, water, and electric in a Park.   Building codes require them to be not larger than 400 or 450 square feet of floor space. You aften see either a deck or an enclosed "Florida" or "Arizona" room built beside them. The ones that look like  houses are usually not moved many times.  They are set up on supports, and securely fastened to the ground. The axles and towing hitch are usualy removed. The utility attachments are made similar to a "Stick and Bricks" site built house.

 Fifth-wheel RVs are designed to be hitched to a special support on the tow truck. They  have two levels inside with steps to the upper level. They also are limited to 400-450 square feet of floor space.  They usually have one or more "slide outs".  These are additions to the rooms that move in and out on tracks to add more space to the inside of the trailer.   They are self contained, meaning  that you can live in them for some time without being "hooked-up" to park utilities.  They have fresh water tanks, waste holding tanks, batteries -- which are often used with inverters to change the 12 volts to household voltage, propane fired appliances and pumps to provide pressurized water.   Living or camping without hookups is refered to as "boon-docking".

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So, now that we're bi-coastal, with a tiny RV home on both sides of the country, we use our Class B Motor home for travel.  

Class Bs are really way too small to be used as a Full-Time home.  But ours has everything needed for exploring and traveling for short lengths of time.  

 It is also small enough -- and economical enough -- to serve as our daily driver. 

Here's a link to an earlier post that shows some inside pictures of our RoadTrek.

  
Here are some Google pictures of some other types of RVs:

With a fifth-wheel trailer, like ours,  you drive your truck and pull your house.  In this RV, called a Class A Motor Home, people drive their house and usually tow a car behind them. All of he newer ones have slideouts.  The price range is huge and the amenities on the upper-end ones  can be quite amazing. 

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A Class C Motor home is smaller than a Class A, but bigger than a Class B.  Don't ask me why.    It's like a a large camper built on the truck chassis and often has slide-outs as well.  We've owned a couple of versions of a Class C -- ours were hand-built by Bill on used trucks though.  They were a lot of fun -- I wish we  had some good pictures of them.
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 Here's an Airstream trailer, just one example of a pull trailer.  It hitches on to the tow vehicle like a utility trailer.

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This is a pickup camper.  We had one of these for a while after the kids were grown, but before we retired. 

CHANGE OF PLANS

If you want to make the gods laugh, it's said, tell them your plans.   I can add:  If you really want to make them crack up, then write a blog post about those specific plans. 

Because of medical reasons, those plans have changed or at least been postponed since I wrote this post at the end of last week.  We'll now be hanging around right here in Fern Ridge for a couple more months anyway.  

We are warm and dry (at least when we're inside.  And the sun is even shining as I write this) and among family and friends.   And this part of Oregon is not a terrible place to spend the Winter.  It rains and can be gray, but temperatures are relatively mild and chances are very good that there won't be anything we have to shovel. 

We'll probably have time to do some side trips -- maybe to another part of the Oregon Coast or to Portland.  There are lots of things in the Eugene area that we'll now have time to do.  And it will be a treat to be around family for the holidays.

So I'll still be blogging.  Come back to see us.  Just don't bother to visit the "Where we are now" page, because it will still say the same thing it's been saying for a while now.

More details click below.

BIG CAR, LITTLE HOUSE

We complicated our simple lives last winter after ten years of having everything we needed in one small space (our Fifth-Wheel trailer).  We accomplished that by falling in love with Upriver RV Resort  in Ft. Myers Florida and buying a park model there.  Click on the blue to see the post about our park model "canal cottage."  

We decided to leave the 5th-wheel in Oregon; it will be our West Coast home.  So then we had to think about how to get from Oregon to Florida and back again next time -- and how to do some traveling and exploring in between the two.  (We aren't ready to quit RV traveling yet.)

It doesn't make sense to drive the Freightliner when we're not pulling a trailer  -- and the small car we've kept in Oregon (for me to drive when we're here) would force us to stay in motels all the time we traveled.  Don't want to do that.  So we bought this.  It's called a Class B Camper. 

We will travel and camp in this van, but it will also be our daily driving vehicle.  The plusses include:  good gas mileage, not having to worry about whether we will be able to find a long-enough site, and (BEST OF ALL):  I can drive this baby!   It's not much bigger than the van I learned to drive in.   (I've never even wanted to learn to drive the big white truck, so most of the time that we've traveled I haven't driven at all.) 

The negatives (you may be ahead of me on this one):  It is very small.  I've joked about how we have no choice but to get along with each other in the small space we've lived in for the last ten years.  But compared to this van, our fifth-wheel condo-on-wheels is a mansion.  We really won't have a choice but to put up with each other now!  We stayed in the Van on our trip to the Oregon coast last month.  We still liked each other after three days.  Next, we'll try three weeks!

So we're getting ready for our Fall roadtrip in a much smaller space.  We have to decide what to leave, what to take, what to ship to Florida, what to give to Goodwill.  We have collected way too much stuff.  How does that happen? 

And, related to the previous post about home remodeling, Bill has already done some upgrading on the brand-new Van.  I'm not complaining though, because what he's doing is adding a space for our laptop and peripherals.   First things first.  We can't live without our Internet, no matter how small our traveling home.

Below are a few more thumbnails of the interior.  The rear bed makes up into a seating area, but since we won't have extra people with us while we travel, we'll probably just leave it as a bed until we get to Florida.

(Click any picture to enlarge.)

 

HOME IMPROVEMENT

We led a far more stable life in the past, before we became full-time RVers. We owned two stick homes, one for nine years, one for over 30.   During those years, we went through a few home improvement projects.  (Actually, I can almost hear our kids falling to the floor with laughter at the words "a few.") But this is a blog and it's better to keep your posts short, so I'll just leave it at that. For now anyway.

We frequented home-improvement stores back then. Unless we were buying light fixtures or something else that I might possibly have some opinion on, my part usually involved going to the store with a list of incomprehensible (to me) items. What is all that stuff over there anyway?)  Not my favorite kind of shopping. 

So, when we sold the second house, I thought we'd never have to go to the big block Home Depot or Lowe's ever again. But I was wrong. It shouldn't have surprised me how often an RV needs repairs or fixes. After all, we pull it down the road, subjecting it to bumpy, winding roads, and city start and stop traffic, and then, when we pull in and hook up, we expect everything to work just as if we had a regular condo, instead of one on wheels.  So repairs and fixes are often needed.  I'm glad Bill can do most of those.  We save money and frustration.  (It's very hard to find repairmen when we're on the road.)

But I've pretty much had enough of those stores. And since we're never buying anything that I have any remote knowledge of,  I don't even go into those stores anymore.  

Unless it's this one.  Jerry's is a local Eugene store that's been here for years and this room is in the middle of it.

There are all kinds of  good magazines there too, not just home repair ones.

This is what I call a good shopping experience.

 

CAMP SUNSET FOR SENIORS

A combination of cold weather (cold for here, not for the rest of the country) and colds (in the nose) that we've traded back and forth has kept us close to home the past couple of weeks.  The temperature has dropped low enough that we've had heat on -- the farmers are covering their crops at night.  But in between warming up by the electric fireplace and otherwise recovering from our head colds, we've still been enjoying some of the many activities Upriver Resort offers. 

I stole the Camp Sunset title for this post from a friend whom I met when we stayed at Voyager Resort in Tucson.  Karen said she had loved summer camp as a child and she said that the activities at Voyager, a "senior" resort, reminded her of the good times she had back then.  She used to sent out a great e-mail at the end of the winter season reviewing the stayover at "Camp Sunset." 

Even though Winter Camp participants have grayer hair than the typical summer camper, I bet we have at least as much fun.  Upriver is smaller than Voyager, which Karen wrote about, but it is just about as busy.  Some activities are scheduled ahead for the season, but there is also a Monday morning coffee hour for a weekly update and additional activities.

Last weekend a group of us from here traveled a few miles up the road to a theater performance of Broadway showstoppers.  Last night, we went to a concert right here in the park.  It was a high energy musical variety show by a group called the Marlins.  There is a circuit of entertainers who travel around snowbird areas providing live entertainment at very reasonable prices.

We have been to photo club meetings and signed up for boat club activities and classes.  We had a lot of fun at a wine-tasting event and party (with food).  A group here in the park sponsors thesea couple of times a month.  We look forrward to furthering our education!   

There are a ton of other food-related events.  During the past couple of weeks, we have been to a hot-dog roast, steak fry, banana split party, and chili cook-off.  We have bought produce from a local farmer.  

To neutralize some of those calories, we have beem swimming (last week, when it was warm), gone to exercise classes and used the exercise equipment room, and walked (it's two-and-a-half miles if you cover every street within the resort) and next door is the Caloosahatchie Preserve, which we've written about already, for hiking and bird-watching. 

There are a bunch of other camp activities that we haven't had time (or talent) for  -- golf, horseshoes, bocci, and card and game evenings.  There are computer classes, but we don't need an excuse to spend any more time in that area.   There are sewing groups (oh, yeah, that one's for me -- NOT!)  We definitely do plan to take part in more boating activities -- sooner rather than later, we hope!

The best part of any of these activities, of course, is that we make new friends through them.  This is a friendly and energetic place and we've had a good time the past couple of weeks in spite of the cold(s), both kinds of which are almost gone.

AUTUMN COLLAGE

Near the beginning of every school year, kids always seemed to have an art project using fallen leaves.  I still think that collecting leaves is fun.  But this virtual collection is less messy.

Autumn really is a great time to travel.  The weather is usually fine for walking, colors are spectacular and there are fewer people traveling than in the summer.  The best part of it for us nowdays is that we usually avoid the wet and cold season that used to come after fall.  We go from summer to fall and then back to summer again.  This is the Ozark Mountains  where we are now.

We visited Bosque Del Apache Wildlife Refuge, near Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1999 on our first long RV trip. We've been back a couple of other times since. It is one of the best places for birding during fall migration.

The picture below is what the whole Vermont countryside looked like in 2003.  We stayed in Danville.  This was our first trip across country.  We had always wanted to see the Fall leaves in the East. 

In Vermont and New Hampshire, locals call Fall tourists "leaf peepers."  We were happy to be among them.

This is Hannibal, Missouri in 2004. 

It's early Fall and the colors are not so vibrant but the "Big River" was a good place to be in the Fall.  We walked along it and took a riverboat cruise -- and imagined floating it on a raft -- and we bought copies of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" at the Mark Twain gift shop.

This reflection is Barker Dam on a clear sunny day at Joshua Tree National Park, Fall 2005.Joshua Tree is one of our favorite National Parks.  It is an understated park and you have to be a scenery junkie to really appreciate it.  We love it.

The little Cabin below is on Clark's Fork of the Snake river in Idaho.  We stayed near here in 2006.  Just a little later that year, we were in light snow at Yellowstone, but a few days later we were in Colorado where it was still beautiful Fall weather.  A month later, in Texas it was summer again.  So that year was a very mixed up year seasonally. 

  Last year, we experienced the worst fall weather we've had for a long time.  We were barely out of Oregon, in the coastal village of Fortuna, California, when the "storm of the century" hit the Pacific Coast.  We only had a few days of lovely fall color before it began to rain and rain and rain.  It's so beautiful along the Oregon and Washington coasts (when it is dry).  Here's a picture of the Eel River -- taken a couple of days before the storm hit.

We were happy when it stopped raining enough for us to hook up and get on the road again last year (we headed for the desert near Niland Caifornia).  And we're even more happy not to have experienced anything but lovely Fall weather this year. 

It is this time of year that truly makes us think about how fortunate we are.

If we had to choose just one season, it would definitely be Fall.

LADYBUG LADYBUG

We have ladybugs flying around here in Branson and quite a few manage to fly into the RV whenever we open the door.  Just like us, they're looking for a warm place to spend the winter.

We always loved ladybugs -- they are so colorful and they eat garden aphids.  What's not to like?  If we found an occasional one in the house, we always took them outside and told them to fly away home. 

But in late October of 2003, we stayed in Weston, West Virginia when the area had what they called a ladybug swarm.   We had those little red beetles all over the RV, outside and in.   Bad enough outside (hard on the paint job), but kind of interesting to see.  But inside, oh dear.  Down in the window tracks, in the light fixtures, all over.  That was not fun.  When there are that many of them, they are not at all attractive.  They actually have a stinkbug odor if you smash one, whether accidentally or on purpose.

It was painful to have to vacuum up the little things, but we really had no choice.   It took us a couple of weeks to get rid of all of them, even vacuuming every single day (something I try hard to avoid).  We sure hope they don't swarm this year, at least not in our house. 

Nicer one at a time

HOME IS WHERE WE PARK IT

 Thanks for visiting our blog!    Click on the "About" pages or any category on the right to learn more about us and our travels.  (The Category List is about halfway down the right-hand column.)  There are also a few clickable photo albums listed there.  Or just SCROLL DOWN this page to read our latest posts. 

Please visit us again.   To comment, even on an older post, just click on the post's title.  We will get an e-mail from Type-Pad telling us you've left a comment. 

  

GARDENING -- OUR RV WAY

This beautiful garden belongs to our daughter and son-in-law in Alvadore, near Eugene OR.  It's one of our favorite places to hang out. We don't get to see flowers like this too often any more, because usually we're not in the northwest during the Spring.  But in 2007 we were in Oregon in April and the flowers were at their best.  

Some of our family and most of our non-RV friends say that their yard is what they'd miss most if they were houseless like we are.   A few RVers must miss that too because they carry outdoor-friendly houseplants with them.  When they settle in they haul out the plants and then they have their own little garden wherever they are.  We're surprised sometimes at the size and number of plants that appear.  (And it makes me tired just to think about the logistics of packing them all away when it's time to move on down the road.)  

Fern Ridge Shores, where we're staying now, has quite a few semi-permanent residents and many of them have very nice flowers in their yards.  It does add a lot to the park.

But someone has to admire the results of all the hard work.  So we are garden and flower appreciators.  We enjoy the yards that belong to family, old and new friends, and even perfect strangers.  We love to stroll in public parks and gardens.  

We enjoyed all those things when we owned our own house too, but back then every visit to another garden involved, at worst, envy, or at best, trying to learn to emulate the gardener's techniques in order to make our own yard better.  And we always enjoyed the looking and planning a lot more than we did the actual work.

We are retired from all that now and the only thing I still want to learn about flowers is how to take better pictures of them.  I like to practice while I admire other people's yards: 

 

SIGHTSEEING? OR NOT

A while ago, a non-RVing friend wondered what we do when we're not sightseeing.  He said "you can't really sight-see all the time, can you?"    Well, of course, we can't.  For one thing, we both enjoy down-time, just doing nothing -- reading, listening to music, doing crossword puzzles, watching TV, walking with no particular purpose in mind.   (Our joke was that we had to spend three months in London in order to have 45 days to tour.  That wasn't too much of an exaggeration.  And our rented flat there wasn't anywhere near as nice to relax in as our RV is.)   

Our friend wondered what we found to do when we weren't sightseeing.     Well, just the everyday stuff of living, pretty much everything that we would do if we still had our stick house.  We visit family and socialize with old friends and new -- depending where our house is parked.  Whenever we live in one place long enough, we take part in community or RV-park activities.   

We use our computers a lot (I guess that's obvious).  We do most all of our household finances and bill-paying on line as well as all the fun stuff.   I honestly can't imagine doing this without the Internet -- and our cell phones  -- to keep in touch.   

We shop.  Even grocery buying can be an adventure when you're in different places all the time.  It's fun to  learn about new and regional food favorites.  Sometimes it takes a while just to figure out the layout of the stores.      

We cook.  At times, it seems like we just arrange food, but that would be true if we were still in the stick house.  We can cook anything we want in our RV kitchen.    Eating at home is a great reason to have an RV.  I'm sure we wouldn't feel as well if we stayed in motels and ate out all the time.   When we had the house, sometimes we would go out to eat just for something different to do.   We still eat out sometimes -- its fun to find new and different restaurants too -- but now it's often just as much an an adventure to eat at home.   We have different views from the "dining room" table and different foods to try.  Here in Port Aransas, we've been buying fresh shrimp right off of the boat.  Yum!

We have to do the same kind of stuff everybody has to do to maintain our home.  We clean house (It doesn't take too long!).  But there are a lot of mechanical and physical maintenance jobs.   "We" probably spend as much time on this kind of thing as we would in the stick house.  It seems there is always something that needs to be fixed or tweaked.  It really is a good thing that Bill can do so much of this stuff, because visits from RV technicians are expensive.  Early this morning, there was a heavy downpour and the outside compartment where our water-heater is got flooded.  This of course shorted out the heater.  Bill is working on this and I am helping.  (My important job is to turn the water faucet on and off while he runs tests outside.)    Between the two of us we will get it fixed.   He has already fixed the compartment so that it won't flood again. 

Really, about the only thing we don't do at all in the RV that we would if we were still in our "stick-house" is mow the lawn and weed the garden.  We don't miss those jobs at all.  But we do like to look at wildflowers -- and other people's yards and gardens.

OUR SOUTH DAKOTA STORY

  This is the State Capitol and grounds at Pierre in our home state, South Dakota.    Since 2003, we have licensed, banked, insured, and voted (absentee) there.  But we don't own any Dakota property and never have.  Our legal address is a box in Sioux Falls, a perfectly nice little city, but one which did not present many photo ops.  Like many full-time RVers, we chose South Dakota as our domicile for practical (tax-saving) purposes.  There are three or four other states that may provide similar advantages; Bill did a lot of research before we decided to choose SD.  Here are a couple of web-sites that were helpful in our planning:

Alternative Resources:  http://www.alternativeresources.net

Escapees: http://www.escapees.com

We use Alternative Resources, which provides mail-forwarding services.  ("How do you get your mail?" is one of the most frequent questions we get.) We simply call or e-mail AR with a current physical address and they forward all of our accumulated mail.  Because we now do all of our banking (and pretty much everything else) on the Internet, we get our mail only once a month.  The very nice people at Alternative will also take care of annual license renewal for our truck and 5th wheel.   I'd be willing to pay their reasonable fee even if we were in Sioux Falls.  Who wants to go to any DMV if someone else will do it for you? 

But this summer, we will put in a physical appearance, because our drivers licenses will expire in August.  (For this purpose, of course, they need to see our bodies and eyes.)  The state issues five-year licenses.  In 2003, this year seemed a long while off.  Now it seems like the time has flown since then.   

But here's the interesting thing about SD --  we really like the state!  We chose it for practical purposes and knew that after our initial visit to set things up we wouldn't have to go there often.  But there is so much to see.  We made a return visit in 2004 and actually look forward to being there again.  Needless to say, we never plan to visit "home" in the Winter (those snow marker posts along all the residential streets are downright scary).  We certainly hope to avoid tornado and hail season as well and both years we were there, were fortunate to have only beautiful weather.  (This picture is a typical prairie scene, where there's a monument to Chief Sitting Bull.  It's lovely in the summer, but easy to imagine how it would look in the dead of winter -- or what would happen when the wind swept across.)

We visited the Badlands and Mount Rushmore and spent quite a bit of time in Custer State Park, which has more wildlife than most National Parks that we've seen. 

On our second visit, we stayed in Sturgis (but not during the motorcycle rally weeks) and that was our headquarters to visit Pierre and other surrounding parts of the state.

Both times, we visited the monument to Crazy Horse, which is an all-time favorite place  -- in South Dakota or anywhere else we've been.

We look forward to seeing the progress when we're there later this year.