Halloween night...at last.
After a week of preparations, updating, packing, loading, and planning, we are finally ready to leave for our fourth trip by motorhome to Mexico. It has been very hectic with the pressures of getting everything ready and we have finally been able to cool down, calm down, and sit down.
Now the kids are knocking at the door for treats. We are expecting an early end to the procession as the rainy weather should do in all but the hardiest. By 8 o'clock, the flow is down to a trickle and we do the last minute things such as setting the thermostat back to 9C round the clock. Then all electrical devices except for some lights are unplugged or their breakers turned off. A final pee then the water is turned off.
We are on the road and headed for the London Flying J.
Thursday Nov 1
We get underway by 8:50 (late) and meet up with our new travel buddies, John & Pat. Really they are old travel buddies that we used to boat with for many years. Like us, they have converted their water yacht to a land yacht and are traveling to Mexico with us this year.
We cross the border with ease and head on towards Indiana but this time we are not going to La Porte to see brother Don & Mary. We are spending the night at a campground at Goshen Indiana which lies about hour's drive south east of La Porte. The reason...We have ordered a replacement sofa from Flair Interiors after visiting the factory in April and it is ready for pickup.
Friday Nov 2
We arrive at the Flair factory at 9 AM and have allocated up to 2 hours for the sofa to be installed. We bump into a guy in the parking lot and recognize him as Mark who we met in April. He had shown us several sofa models and gave us lots of ideas for our new sofa. He went right to work to check up on our delivery and had the sofa moved to the shipping door where we met him with the motorhome. They brought out the sofa in two pieces and moved them inside and assembled them in position. The window valences needed to be shortened as the new sofa is higher than the original. Mark swiftly removed the valance and took the offending pieces into the shop to cut them down. He returned in a flash and completed the installation in 30 minutes. Mark was a delight to work with and all the people at Flair were friendly and helpful. Flair gets our highest recommendations...10 out of 10!
With time to spare we head over to Wakarusa to go for a factory tour of Monaco Coach who make our rigs. We are greatly disappointed to find that tours are available only on Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time of year. Boo hoo. We will have to put this on hold until returning in the Spring.
We continue on to La Porte for a birthday dinner celebration in honor of Mary who has turned %%& years old today.
Saturday Nov 3
We spend the day shopping by firstly heading to Bailey's emporium, a discount everything store. The we head into Michigan City to shop a Meijor's for groceries and Menards for hardware.
Sunday Nov 4
We are on the road again by 8:30 after filling up at the gas station just east of Don's for a bargain price of $3.13 per gallon. The destination for the day is Cuba Missouri with a stop for gas just west of St. Louis for even cheaper gas at the Pilot station, paying $2.94 including a 4 cent per gallon discount as a Pilot member. The weather has been depressing for over a week now, including the spin-off of Hurricane Sandy. The temps at night are dipping down towards freezing and daytimes are a wet miserable low 40's F. This campground holds some of its site open for winter use and the campground seems eerily empty. The wi-fi is a big disappointment as throughput is exceedingly poor and we are unable to post emails or blog. We did get to GasBuddy though to preview prices for the next day.
Monday Nov 5
We leave the campground around 8:30 with a rainy 43F. Yuk! Chandler Oklahoma is our overnight destination. As with the previous night, this campground is known to us from our stopover of last year. The drive is steady cloud and rain until we reach Tulsa. The skies clear to cloudless blue and the temp warms up to 59F. Nice.
The wi-fi here is working very well and we are able to get caught up on news and emails.
Tomorrow we head to a spot west of Dallas for a couple of days to get a few chores done.
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