March 28, 2024 – Day 13 Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN We watch a lot of travel videos on YouTube. Josh of ThroughMyLens.com is a lot of fun to watch. One day his video on Chattanooga, TN showed up. Chattanooga was already on our stop list for a couple days but we perked up and paid attention even though it was after 9:30 p.m.! He showed us some great, “Don’t miss this!” places in the Chattanooga area. We immediately changed our reservation at Chester Frost Park from 3 nights to 5 nights to be able to do a lot of what was in that video. We’re really glad we did.…

March 27, 2024 – Day 12 Lake Powhatan Recreation Area, Arden NC to Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN We didn’t head out early from Lake Powhatan. We had a short drive (HA, yeah, we really said that. But! More importantly the site we were going to did not have a sewer hookup.) The next location would have power and water but no sewer. This means “home style” showers will be exchanged for “navy shower” for a while. This meant “home style” showers before we headed out to the next place for a 5 night stop. Paul also did ham radio while sitting in the Jeep. His second contact was Australia!…

March 26, 2024 – Day 11 Henderson NC to Lake Powhatan Recreation Area, Arden NC News flash: North Carolina is a big state. It’s not Texas big. That’s just BIG in all directions. NC is “tiny big.” When traveling from the east side to west side it’s 503 miles. Back to the morning. Paul was startled awake around 7AM by a loud BEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEEP!!! Around 8:30 p.m. the night before we looked at our coach batteries. They were way low, dropping faster than we’d have liked and definitely wouldn’t make the night. We did a quick google map search. (susan here: how the heck did we live without Google?)…

March 25, 2024 – Day 10 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD to Henderson NC We had a lazy pack out this morning without any issues at all. We didn’t need to move fast because checkout was by 11am plus our Harvest Host requested that we arrive after 5pm. The drive was only 4 hours away. Of course we had stop and go traffic delays which made it slightly longer. All in all not a bad travel day. We passed by the very cool looking Later Day Saints temple outside of Washington DC. Next we drove past the equally impressive Marine Corp Museum. (susan here: approaching it, well, it looks…

March 24, 2024 – Day 9 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD Today was a quiet day. Ann had her Sunday morning chores & shopping to do to get ready for the work week. We had our morning stuff to do which entailed filling and draining the water and sewage tanks (nothing new there). Then Paul went to put air in the low tire on the Jeep. Only he hooked up the air compressor backwards, burning it out. We’ll replace it in Phoenix. The final chore was debugging the power issue we had the other day. The good news is that our coach is not broken electrically and we can…

March 23, 2024 – Day 8 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD Yesterday was “Be A Tourist” day. Today is “Be A Local” day. Ann was taking us to Artomatic. Artomatic is a multi-week, multi-floor, multimedia arts vent held in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded by Washington, D.C artist and arts activist George Koch. The non-juried, open event has provided a venue for artists of all types (visual, performance, and literary) and abilities (from novice to professional). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artomatic Basically when a building is being transformed, say from a dead office space into a residential area, Artomatic will pop up. As you can imagine it’s had many locations over its 25 years. This…

March 22, 2024 – Day 7 Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD We stopped in DC to visit with our friend Ann who lives nearby. On the docket were DC tourist traps. Paul really wanted to see the cherry blossoms, Susan had already seen them, Anne sighed and put up with us (Paul). Locals don’t go there because even in off times it’s too crowded. We had also hoped to see some of the museums in downtown DC, maybe National Gallery, Smithsonia, Air & Space or even the International Spy Museum. It turns out that these museums are just like the big National Parks. They’re over crowded and you need…

March 21, 2024 – Day 6 Lums Pond State Park Campground, Bear DE – Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD Before we went to bed Paul started the process of sanitizing the fresh water tank. It’s a once or twice a year thing and it’s very important to do. You start off by putting 1/4 cup of bleach into the tank for every 16 gallons of capacity and fill it. Then we ran all the taps for a few minutes and waited 12 hours. The only reasonable time to do it is at night because you won’t have water for 12 hours. (susan here: 9 p.m. is a very unreasonable…

March 20, 2024 – Day 5 Lums Pond State Park Campground We woke up around quarter past 5 to make sure that we had the coach ready by 6AM. There wasn’t a knock on the door at 6 am so we waited a few minutes. Paul went into the office to ask what the game plan was. Nicole greeted him—they must have caffiene in their veins—and told us that the mechanic who was going to work on our coach wasn’t in yet. Arghh…. Then Paul got to deal with the joy of having his LinkedIn account hacked. Despite having a quality password Paul isn’t sure how they did it. But…

March 19, 2024 – Day 4 Bayshore Ford Truck Center, New Castle, Delaware I’ll bet that section heading got your attention, didn’t it? Heh, you’ll just have to read on. We woke to a beautiful sunrise. The birds were singing, the squirrels were cavorting all over the Jeep. (susan here: ACTUALLY, Snow White was dancing. And birds were singing. And they were all jockeying with each other to land on Snow as she sang to them.) We had risen early so we didn’t have to scramble to make our 9:30AM oil change appointment. Susan had her coffee so all was right in Chez Cezanne. We were all buttoned up by…