Wandering America: See Ya Down The Road

Yep, that’s what the the weather dudes are reporting. We’re all set to hit the road, but will let this last bit of weather pass by before heading out. So, today we’ll go through the house and see if there are any last minute preparations that need to be accomplished. So, we’ll probably get quite a bit of reading time in during the day.

We still have to go to the shed and “Snuggles” it. We place Snuggles, the dryer sheets, throughout the shed to keep the insects out. It seems to work in that we don’t have any spiders or any other insects making their home in our shed. Plus, the shed smells so nice inside. We, also, spray insecticide all around and under the shed. Now, we have no idea if this has any impact on mildew and/or mold, but we haven’t had any in the five years that we’ve been here. “Snuggling” the shed is the last thing we do before locking the door and closing up the shed.

Last evening we had Norm and Linda over for a nice lasagna dinner. Judy had prepared a fruit salad and some garlic knots to have with the lasagna. Of course, there was some beer and wine to have with the meal. It was our “fair thee well, see you in the fall” get together and dinner.

Norm and Linda were our motivation for living the fulltime life. Waaaaay back in the fall of 2003 I stumbled onto their website, See Ya Down The Road. I was so taken by it that I had to go back to the very first post (October 1999) and follow their journey. Then I would get excited when the next update showed up online.

Somewhere along the line in 2005 I emailed them and told them that if they were ever in Michigan to let us know so we could meet up with them. In June of 2005 they did just that; here is the except from their travelogue entry:

“Darrell and Judy Patterson live north of Lansing and are internet friends we had never met. They are planning to retire and hit the road fulltime. We met them at DeLuca's restaurant in Lansing where we ate delicious pizza and talked about the RV fulltiming lifestyle. It was nice to finally meet them and we hope to see them on the road soon.”

And here is Norm’s picture taken that day. We hadn’t taken our camera so we didn’t get a picture of them.

We moved fulltime into our fifthwheel at the end of July 2006 and “hit the road” on October 14th. On the 15th we met up with Norm and Linda, Rich and Diane Emond, Don and Gloria Martin, and Dirk Harrington in Tom Stinnett’s parking lot in Clarksville, Indiana. It was our first “rally”, impromptu as it was. We’ve been “bumping” into them several times a year ever since then and have been adopted into their family.