It’s with a little sadness that we’re leaving Florida, heading north to our workamping summer job. We couldn’t have timed the trip more poorly with a forecast of 4 to 8 inches of snow in Pittsburgh.

Our summer campground doesn’t open for 3 weeks and we debated about winterizing the coach and putting it in storage on site, but decided to leave it in Florida at the campground. In retrospect I think that was a good decision – it would not have been much fun driving it through a blizzard and hopefully, we can sneak down in the next few weeks to spend a little more time in Florida or at least to enjoy the trip north at a leisurely pace.

The few week hiatus will give me a chance to fill in our story along with finishing our “things you need now” section. It will also give me a chance to show you around our beautiful city here in Pittsburgh – the insider’s view.

Barb and I like to take our time driving – especially heading north to the snow and cold. We planned on stopping in or near Savannah, GA on the way back. We’ve been to Savannah many times. It’s a fascinating city – one of most interesting cities in the US.

But, we thought we would try a different stop near Savannah and picked Darien, GA. – just 30 miles south of Savannah. I would like to say that we had planned the stopped based on the historical significance of the town but in reality it picked us.

We’re driving, getting tired and cranky and we look at each other, nodding that’s it’s time. Barb begins to search for pet friendly hotels, calling and checking for availability. That’s how we found ourselves at The Quality Inn at the intersection of I95, Darien, GA exit.

Most exits off of the interstate look the same – a bleak wasteland of chain hotels, fast food restaurants and gas stations.

We have a little routine. Barb searches the area for an interesting restaurant that locals frequent while I walk Lola and try to discover a little about the history of our stop.

At one time, Darian GA was the 2nd largest settlement in Georgia, founded in 1736. It’s lost a little of it’s former glory but it’s still an important river port for shrimp and sturgeon fishing. You can order sturgeon caviar from Walter’s Caviar for a mere $165 for a 4.5 oz tin. I don’t think you’ll see that a the campground pot luck.

We would have loved to take some more pictures of the surrounding area, but it was pouring when we arrived and through the next day. We stopped at Darien Square which was the business and cultural center of the city. The Methodist Church was build in 1843. Merchants and timber barons lived in homes around Vernon square when Darien was one of the world’s leading exports of pine timber at the end of the 19th center.

Take some time on your next driving or motorhome trip to stop and learn about the history of the area. I think you’ll find that every stop holds an interesting story.

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     Barb and I are amateur wine makers and we love to tour wineries. I’m not sure how we’ll continue our hobby in the motorhome with limited storage, but we’ll be sure to maintain the tasting hobby. For our last anniversary, we visited manyt of the wineries along the Erie Wine Country Trail.

Wine making has come a long way in the US. You’ll now find wineries making decent wine in most states, not just California, Washington, Oregon and New York.

This morning we did really fun winery tour at The Lakeridge Winery in Clermont, Fl which had the bonus of being pet friendly. The tour started with an interesting short video describing the history of wine making in Florida along with some interesting information about the beginning of the winery.

The tour proceeded to a catwalk overlooking the fermentation area which had a sweeping view of the fields. The tour finished with a complimentary tasting of 10 of the wineries offerings. The wines of the muscadine grape are meant to be drunk young and many of the wines are finished as semi sweet to sweet wines. They’re not to my taste but semisweet and sweet wines are very popular.

The winery hosts festivals many weekends with a wine and seafood festival starting tomorrow, March 22nd. Check  out the winery’s website for further information and tours. http://www.lakeridgewinery.com

We stopped at the Tike Bar at Lake Mineola for lunch, our second trip. The grouper sandwich and jalapeño burger were yummy.

We’re winding down the days until we have to head north to our workamping job, our photography business. Tomorrow is cleanup and preparation day. Yipes, I’m not ready.

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Henry the cat who sits in the campsite across from us, playing stare down with Lola is back after their mandatory week out of the campground (affectionately known as The Thousand Trails Shuffle), along with Henry’s Mom and Dad. If you’re a pet owner, you’ll understand that you first begin to meet the pets and then a few weeks later, finally introduce yourselves to the “parents”. Henry’s a pretty cool cat – he sits and watches the world go by on his leash knowing that he’s just too cute and that everyone who walks by will stop to pet him.

I got absolutely drenched this morning and sadly, I predicted exactly when that would occur – when I was at the furthest point from the motorhome in the campground. That’s how I used my professional background in weather analysis, leaving the furniture outside of the awning, not wearing a coat and not changing my route. I usually run into the regulars at the exact same spot every morning. But everyone except me used some sense and changed their route to get back before the deluge.

We’ve been in this park for close to 5 weeks now, winding down our Florida trip and trying to get mentally prepared to head back north for the summer.

There are 4 migrations going on this time of year for the RV enthusiasts. The snowbirds who winter in Florida, Texas and Arizona are getting ready to head home to their house and life, reconnecting with friends and family to spend some time with the grandkids.

RV enthusiasts who stored their motorhomes and trailers for the winter up north are beginning to plan for the summer RV season, either planning weekend trips away from work or planning on being on the road most of the summer, traveling from rally to rally which are basically group get togethers at a campground for groups of folks with like minded interests. There’s a rally this summer at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the big airshow and convention of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Barb and I went last year and had a blast along with 500,000 other aviation enthusiasts.

There is group of full-timers who need to work to help pay for their expenses, migrating north from a winter in the warmer climates to summer jobs around the country. They’ll be spending the summer working at a campground in exchange for free camping and/or wages.

And finally, there is the group of full-timers who are either well healed retirees or who have pared their needs and desires to allow them to live simply on very little – they’ll be leaving their snowbird nest to travel around the country to see the sights, visiting with friends and family.

I guess we’re in group 3, migrating north to make our stake to stay warm next winter and hopefully to work our way into group 4. Our workamping job is our seasonal wedding photography business. We have a few trips planned to see our daughter Nina in upstate New York for her birthday, a trip to the Smokey’s and hopefully one more week long getaway, work and financing permitting. We’ll be spending as much time as possible, working from our summer location at the Indian Brave Campground in Zelionople, PA while commuting to our photography studio in the Pittsburgh.

I’m looking forward to investigating the area around that part of the state including the historic town of Harmony PA. And the campground is very close to the Zelionople airport. I just might have to wander over and check out the airplanes.

Reading blogs on a variety of subject is fun and informative. But, if you are typing in your blog’s address manually and going from site to site, there is much easier way to aggregate the content into one, easy to read package.

The technical term for this is RSS or really simple syndication. Basically, RSS translates a blog into a format or feed that can be read by a special reader. Most blogs and sites have a feed. You’ll usually see this symbol or you might also see “subscribe by RSS” 

Google Reader has the been the most popular RSS reader but in google’s own wisdom, they are discontinuing the service this July. Users of RSS readers have been scrambling to find an alternative and it seems that the most popular now is Feedly. They had a million downloads this past week. And the best part is that it’s free and available for all popular browsers. It’s also available for your iPhone, iPad and Android. I’ve been using it for the past two weeks and it’s fantastic and very easy to use.

Just search for you favorite site or add sites that Feedly suggests to your new stream. You add different categories to keep your news and information organized. No more tedium of remembering and typing in individual addresses.

As an alternative, one of my favorite ways of viewing blogs along with news and other information is the application for your iPad, iPhone and Android device called Flipboard. It organizes news in a fun column-like format and it’s very visually appealing. I guarantee you’ll be hooked.

Not all sites are available by search on Flipboard. To view RV Roadreport, you’ll need to search for feed://rvroadreport.com/feed/ – If you can’t find the feed of your favorite site, try that URL and substitute the site address.

Both Feedly and Flipboard allow you to share stories on Facebook and Twitter. Flipboard allows you to integrate and interact with Facebook and Twitter, both reading and posting your news and stories directly.

Here are a few sites to get you started.
RV Road Report
Our heroes John and Kathy Huggins Living The RV Dream Blog 
Nick Russell’s Gypsy Journal 
The Geeks on Tour 
Techno RV
Travels with Emma 
Travels with Alison

It’s was a beautiful walk this morning around the preserve, especially to see a mini balloon festival with 12 hot air balloons floating near and over the campground. That just cemented my bucket list destination to see – The Albuquerque Balloon Festival which this year starts on October 5th. We’ll be busy with weddings that week but maybe next year.

I was stopped by a fellow boston terrier owner of Beans (as in boston beans) this morning who has seen us walking around the campground. Eventually Lola and Beans became friendly and we carried on a fairly long conversation about the funny nature of our dogs and what to feed them that comes out in a reasonable format to bag. This doting on our pets drives my kids nuts. I believe they are jealous of Lola, thinking that she gets more attention than they ever received. Of course that’s not the case, but I think it is a phase in the circle of life. At least Lola doesn’t have a drawer of clothes of her own in the RV like the campground boston terrier Mitzy. 

I moved 17 times after high school chasing my flying career, looking for my real break and a job with the airlines. Everything I owned fit in the back of a VW Rabbit – I was able to move at a moments notice, footloose and fancy free. When the flying at my flight instructor job in Pittsburgh dried up in the winter, I simply hopped in the Rabbit and headed to Miami to teach at the Opa Locka Airport.

It took a lot of years of struggling but my first break was meeting Barb in Johnstown PA. I was living in a cheap-rent student apartment near the University of Pittsburgh branch campus, eating cheese noodles and huddling around a kerosun heater to stay warm in the cold mountain winters. Barb was my next door neighbor and one thing led to another.

I was close to 30 when I got that big airline pilot job and it’s nice salary. We bought a big house, began to accumulate things, raised 3 wonderful kids. The master plan was working. I had a nice salary, a nice retirement package, everyone was healthy and life was wonderful.

Not to bore you with the details and I fear I may have done that already, in one sentence, Kate had a bad accident, we lost all of our parents, one to violence and two to Alzeimer’s, after taking early retirement, my company US Airways went bankrupt and stopped paying and our hobby photography business became our sole source of income. We had a big house, medical bills from Kate’s million dollar accident and lots of debt.

I began to long for that simple life again and used to joke that one day I would again be in a position where I could take off in that VW rabbit with all of my worldly possessions, like a rolling stone. It’s taken a while but we’re getting pretty close to meeting that goal. We sold the big house, all of our furniture and bedding and sold or gave away most of our accumulated stuff.

While we picked up a few items like deck chairs and a few bowls and glasses, we’ve haven’t been home to stock up our RV and have been living on whatever fit in the back of our Mini Cooper which we brought to Florida at the beginning of this trip – and we’ve been living quite well and have been perfectly content.

Your probably have a story that’s not too different from our story. You probably have a fluffy white dog or a cat that you walk on a leash and you dote on your them, painting their nails and dressing them up like dolls. And it drives your kids crazy.

But our kids forget that we used to dote on them when they were little. They became the focus of our lives and the center of our world. They don’t remember those years. Rather they remember the middle school and high school years when they were pushing away from us, asserting their independence and becoming young adults.

And now that they have their own lives with heavy responsibilities, cares and concerns and we are becoming what they were in their early 20′s – footloose and fancy free. Yippee! Kids again with no responsibilities or cares.

It’s been uplifting to be in the campground this winter. I was feeling the weight of the year of my 6th decade but here among the active and vital retirees, I’m just a spring chicken.

So kids don’t be jealous. You’ll be here one day. In the circle of life, we have a short window of opportunity to act like kids again, rolling stones, footloose and fancy free before you put us in the old folks home. Good luck finding us then.

I started this story of our new adventure from the where we are today with the idea of filling in the blanks as I went along. Since we have a couple of lazy days ahead here catching up on work. I’m going to start from the beginning and date the posts back to the date when our story begins – at least in ernest. They’ll be at the end of the blog or the beginning of the history, starting with Where it All Began.

It’s always nice to add pictures to a post especially considering that I’m a professional photographer and all but I didn’t have one for the post until I looked up and a turtle walked by the motorhome – the campground has scores of nests that are fenced off for their protection.

I’m going to keep it short today – I’m trying to get our taxes done which is somewhat worse than  having a tooth pulled. I received a box today at the activity center of bills, tax forms and other work related to-do items. There wasn’t even a candy bar – what a let down.

So I thought I would share some snapshots that I took yesterday, walking around the campground. It’s fun to see how some campers personalize their site with signs and doodads for lack of a better term. I’m fascinated on my walk every morning by the endless array of motorhome and trailers, from antique GMC coaches beautifully restored, to tiny 16 feet trailers parked next to massive motorhomes costing several hundred thousand dollars.

Most everyone has a satellite rig of some sort and some folks are loaded for bear with multiple roof antennas. I’m not a big TV watcher but I have to admit that after reading the news on my iPad, catching up with Facebook and Twitter, being burned out with work and relaxing in the leather recliner that I never owned until now, there is something very appealing about an hour of shows before bed with a glass of wine or cup of tea.

I’ve been getting a kick out watching some of my old favorites on Me-TV like Mash, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart shows. Tonight I think I’ll catch an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s fun to see some of the featured actors before they became famous – Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Robert Duvall, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, William Shatner.

I’m feeling the heavy weight of this amazing winter season coming to an end. We’re going to have to head north to monetize our travels. But, I’m excited about some upcoming trips. We’ll probably take a week to get back, visiting some spots on the way. And we have a trip planned to upstate NY to see our daughter Nina followed by a trip to the Smokey Mountains for a family reunion at The Twinbrook Resort in Maggie Valley North Carolina. More fun to come and i’t going to be exciting.

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I have to admit that I poo-pooed the ubiquitous campground golf cart but, and it’s taken a while, I understand it now and want one. I’ll get to that in a just a  moment, but for now please don’t think that I am getting old and soft even though I am getting old and soft.

We’ve been in this campground for almost a month now and you get into a little routine. I’m always up before dawn, trying to sneak in a couple of cups of coffee before Lola bothers me to take her out. She has it timed perfectly to the minute, knowing just when that 2nd cup is almost finished and it’s getting just light enough outside to see.

We start our walk with a stop by the lake. Until the time has changed and my Thousand Trails employee friend has to be at work, I would see him at the same time every morning by the lake, watching the sun come up and taking pictures with his smart phone. We took the same pictures of the lake every day and every day the lake looked completely different – the light, the fog, the stillness of the water, the sky all creating a completely new and endlessly fascinating scene.

It was a great way to start our morning – a quiet stillness with a few words of light conversation, feeling the surge of energy when the sun popped over the horizon. If you’ve spent some time on the beach, you know the feeling – starting your day watching the sunrise and winding it to an end at sunset, maybe with a glass of wine. Here, the end of the day is marked by fireworks every night from Epcot which you can see over the tree line at the lake.

Lola and I walk our 3 mile loop around the campground perimeter, return to the coach, put food in her bowl, make another pot of coffee and some breakfast, do my little cleaning routine inside and out and open the blinds to let the light in, settling in to check email and to get some work done.

I haven’t allowed myself fully, the luxury of participating in some of the campground activities. I’ve been feeling guilty that we have left our photography studio for the winter and so I’ve been working harder remotely here than I do at our office. I have another few days to participate in the daily pool volleyball game or play some shuffleboard or play some pickle ball. The pickle ball games look pretty competitive with some serious players.

The morning flies by and like clockwork, Lola wakes up and I get hungry around noon. I make some lunch – Lola benefits of a few scraps and we take a little stroll around the D section. I try to work until our 3PM followed by a dog park break, drop Lola off at the coach and then a walk to do some lap swimming and socializing, work, dinner, work, relax bed – I’ll have to come back to the hourly afternoon report.

So, here’s where the golf cart comes into the picture. I’m pretty active – I walk a lot, ride bikes, kayak and generally like to keep moving. I can understand someone who has limited mobility using a golf cart but I could never understand why someone who is healthy would ride around in a golf cart, until now.

This is the scenario. It’s about a 20 minute walk to the activity center and mailroom. I’ve already walked several miles, I’ve made a trip to the dog park by the activity center, I’ve done that again to take swim and now I need to pick up a package today and fill 3 gallon water jugs. That’s not a load that is logistically easy to carry – it would just be so much easier in a golf cart.

There are some pretty funny motorized vehicles here on the campground, from electric bikes to stand up scooters, golf carts and various motorcycles 2 and 3 wheeled. This person has all the bases covered – a golf cart for the campground, smart car to get groceries, conversion van for trips to a state park with limited facilities and the big poppa motor coach for living large at the campground.

It’s one of the very few rainy days we’ve had since we arrived in Florida at the end of December. It’s a good morning to get some work done, which has been a bit difficult with the pool and social hour calling mid-afternoon. I did my usual 3 mile loop around the perimeter of the campground starting with a stop by the lake which looks very different every morning. This morning it’s very quiet and calm.

I wiped off and fed Lola, made breakfast and an extra pot of coffee, getting ready to settle in to check email and do some writing and working on wedding albums. Elizabeth and Jeff’s album is next up in the queue. Lola’s zonked out on the couch. 

About the time I settled in and dried off, I remembered that the black water tank needed to be dumped. If you’re not an RVer, this is something you don’t think of at home. All of your waste – what you eat and waste water from the shower or sink goes into tanks under your motorhome which must be dumped.

If you have a sewer connection, this is just a matter of opening up some valves and waiting and maybe attaching an extra hose if you have a black water flush system. In the beginning, Barb informed me that this was a yucky blue job (as opposed to a pink job – from John and Kathy at Living the RV Dream). After a while, she gave in and began dumping tanks with the best of them.

So now, I’m once again dried off, enjoying that 3rd cup of coffee, the gray skies and the cool breeze coming through the door along with the pitter patter of rain drops on the roof – I hope nothing is leaking.

We recently joined The Escapees Club. It’s one of a number of clubs that cater to those of us who are out on the road for extended periods of time, or full time. There are other organizations, one restricting membership to motorhome or bus style owners (as opposed to trailers and one oriented towards those with trailers).The Escapees doesn’t restrict membership to one type of RV and quite a few of its members are full-timers. It has a first class mail service and it even has an RV park that operates like an assisted living facility, allowing you to stay in your RV when you can no longer be out on the road.

Walking around the campground this morning, I was think about the term escapee and what that means. I think that Barb and I had the vision that we were about to escape and leave all of our troubles and concerns behind. That hasn’t turned out to be the case. We’re certainly escaping the winter weather but I think you bring all of the same troubles and concerns with you on the road. And I think those troubles and concerns can be magnified in a small space.

We’ve met some folks here who are carrying some sad stories with them on the road – losing a daughter at age 46 to cancer, our neighbors losing their son at age 36 in a motorcycle accident, Barb’s friend Kim whose house was damaged in Sandy and who’s here with her very ill husband, possibly on his last RV trip. Our new neighbor is a paraplegic, confined to the support of his wheelchair. There are widows and widowers who have lost a spouse and are finding companionship and solace on the road.

I thought we had prepared for this lifestyle. It was a huge adjustment for us when I left the airline, working and being away from home for 75 hours a week only to start a business where we worked and lived together 24 hours a day. We moved out of our 4 bedroom house into our photography studio with a 2 burner hot plate, toaster oven and pull out couch, trying to prepare for living in a hallway.

We didn’t expect to feel the loss of moving away from our friends and life. After all, our parents are gone and our kids have moved out, although Kate is back temporarily in Pittsburgh for college. We really don’t have anything holding us to Pittsburgh other than our business. I think that’s something we will get over in time but it’s been especially hard on Barb. She misses her social circle in Pittsburgh. We’ve met some great people here, some of who we will continue to keep in touch with, but somehow it’s different with relationships more fleeting.

Maybe it’s easier for guys but I have been feeling a little out of touch with a longing for home. This is something that only guys will understand – and maybe our good friend Jane. If you leave a city where you grew up, the thing you miss the most is the sports. It’s frustrating me that I don’t have the Internet bandwidth to watch the Pens games. I’m missing my buddy Chuck and our lunches together at a local craft beer pub. I’m missing my buds at the cigar shop that opened a block from our studio. I think I’m just missing the connection.

I definitely have a new found appreciation for the couples who out here together on the road, living in a very small space – just the two of them. It really takes a special bond, connection and love for one another to live this lifestyle.

Is there really more than one answer to that question? Disney!

Notwithstanding that Orlando is a major industrial and high tech center – you’re probably not camping here on a business trip. The metro area has a $13.4 billion technology industry employing 53,000 people; and is a nationally recognized cluster of innovation in digital media, agricultural technology, aviation, aerospace, and software design. More than 150 international companies, representing approximately 20 countries, have facilities in Metro Orlando.

But as a tourist, you’re most likely to be more interested in Walt Disney World, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Typhoone Lagood Water Park, Blizzard Beach Water Park, Downtown Disney, ESPN Wide World of Sports, Disney’s Boarwalk Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, City Walk, SeaWorld, Gatorland and Wet ‘n Wild.

We made, like many parents, the mistake of taking our kids to Disney when they were too young. They really have no memory of the trip and Kate , who was in stroller, certainly has no memory. When I going to flight school in Daytona, everyone who visited wanted to see Disney, so I’ve visited there 20 or more times and it doesn’t have the same attraction that it had the first time I visited And since we are practicing our golden years budgeting, the $200 plus ticket for us is a bit of an extravagance.

It’s very easy to drop a ton of cash at Disney in a very short time period but there are ways of economizing. Camping is one way to economize although not at Fort Wilderness Campground as much as I hear that it’s a wonderful place to “camp”. There are tons of hotels on International Drive and along West Memorial Highway, many advertising some low rates. It’s a bit of a drive to Magic Kingdom but both are fairly close. There are lots of reasonably priced campgrounds in the area. Many have cabins if you’re not a tent camper or RVer which is one way to economize if you have a big family or if you’re traveling with friends.

But there are other interesting and cheap or free attractions in the area. I’ve just scratched the surface, while concentrating close our location on the west side of Orlando.

Downtown Disney is free and meh, worth the trip I guess. It’s lots of shopping for gifts, restaurants and movie theaters – very commercialized but did I say it was free.

Showcase Citrus a few miles north of the campground on RT 27 is a self-pick organic citrus farm that’s a lot of fun. There’s a farm store, a lake out back with some seating to spend some time relaxing and a few farm animals for the kids watch which was Lola’s favorite feature. She slipped out of our hands and started chasing a rooster, stopping just short of the lake where the rooster jumped in to safety. I could just see the horrified children has she caught the rooster with feathers flying everywhere. The rooster paddled through the lake to safety. One of the workers laughed and commented that “I’ve never seen them do that”.

Honey Bell Tangelos – the most amazing fruit I’ve ever tasted. They are ugly on the outside but so juicy and sweet on the inside. There is a grove grove of them towards the back of the farm unmarked and I’m not disclosing their secret location. The marked location closer to the entrance to the farm is pretty barren from picking.

Just north of Showcase Citrus towards Clermont is The Presidents Hall of Fame with wax dummies, statues and other presidential memorobilia. It made the Roadside America website, a really interesting online guide to offbeat tourist attractions. I would suggest taking a look at some of the attractions in your home town. There are most likely some interesting attractions there that you have never seen.

Almost next door to Showcase Citrus is The Citrus Tower. It was one of the Florida’s first attractions, built to 226′ with and observation tower. It’s original purpose was to view the sweeping expanse of citrus farms but now, it’s more and observation tower of urban sprawl.

The Tiki Bar and Grill at Lake Minneola Inn was one of those out-of-the-way finds, located at 508 S Main Ave in Minneola. The menu is bar food but barb and I had a nice grouper sandwich and the view is beautiful after you choke a bit walking through the “tiki” smudge pots on the path leading to the lake.

If you’re looking for a fun and casual place to dine in a new city, I suggest looking for pet friendly restaurants even if you’re not taking your dog (assuming you’re not a non-lover of someone else’s pets). Most dog friendly restaurants have outdoor seating and they’re more casual, not taking themselves too seriously.

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