A new Chapter Begins...

Well alot has happened since my last post!  We left Phoenix and made our trip to Florida for Trish's doctor appointment.  The trip was great  with the only problem being an air bag on the truck failed however we made it to Panama City Beach with ease.  Fuel mileage for the truck was 12.8 average.  Not too bad...

After Trish's doctor appointment we decided we would look for a piece of property to put up a building to store our stuff that we are paying $300+ per month on.  We stayed at Southern Trail RV park in Vernon, FL for the months of March and April while we searched for the right property to buy.  After two months we found a foreclosed property in Alford, Florida (50 miles north of Panama City) with about 2 acres, an old farm house, 3 out buildings, two septic tanks and two wells.  Man what a find!!!  Perfect for fulltime RVers!  We decided to renovate the house, move our furniture in and then head back down the road!  COOL piece of property!

Well... Not so quick...  The transaction to purchase the property was a very long and complicated ordeal...  I won't bore you with all the details but I think I know why the banks and government are going broke...  This was the most complicated purchase of real property I have ever made in my entire life.  Enough of that...  So we decided to completely gut the house and renovate it, put in a garden and plant a fruit tree orchard.  This will be our home base.  We started by building a full hook up site for the 5th wheel and then started on the house, garden and orchard.

I'll update the pictures to give you an idea of what we are working on...

More later... I'll try not to let so much time go by for the next update.  The last 3 months have been a complete BLURRRRR...

JC

Washer Dryer Project is FINISHED !

Well we worked on the dryer until 10:00PM last night and finished it finally! The dryer came in 2 days early so we made the final trip to Best Buy and picked up the final piece to the puzzle. This dryer has a unique mounting system as it "hangs on the wall" as opposed to sitting on top of the washer. At 91 pounds you can believe it was a challenge to get it up and hang it on the mounting system. Trish and I used the top of the washer and a home made fulcrum system and after much wrestling managed to get it into place. The 240 volt circuit I installed with the separate 30 amp breaker panel worked perfect. The only thing left to do is reinstall the trim at the bottom of the laundry closet and the doors... DONE!!

This won't save money for a long time but it sure is going to make our life on the road easier and give us more time to do the things we want to do. The weather here in Phoenix has been really nice. Different from Florida as it is cool in the evening and warm in the day. We are really having a good time! More later... Jim

Rig Projects...Like peeling an onion!

Have you ever noticed how a simple project on your Rig has a way of tuning into anything but simple??? Our rig came from the factory, " Washer Dryer Ready" so you would think... Go buy and washer and dryer and set it in place and hook it up... Right??? Well not exactly... Not even close... This has turned into a four week project, (so far) and the last dryer I ordered will not be here until February 2. This set makes the 3rd set I have ordered and received. The first two just would not fit exactly right. So I have had to reconfigure the washer hookups, and relocate them 2 inches toward the rear of the laundry closet and move the water hook ups from the right hand side to the rear of the closet. So far I have moved the washer into and out of the closet 7 times to get the perfect location, allowing the doors to be reinstalled on the closet. We washed 4 loads of laundry last night and everything worked flawlessly!! The dryer is the next part of the project... This dryer will actually "hang" on the wall! This is a very interesting design. I still don't know if I am strong enough to lift and set it into the mounting system... I have started taking extra vitamins and am in a rigorous training program to get into better shape for this project... Hope it works!!

More later and will post some photos of the project...

Jim

What a Holiday!!

Well, the holidays for 2008 are in the history book and it's time to look forward to 2009! Trish and I spent Christmas in Williams, AZ this year ... Just the two of us. We had planned to spend it at the Grand Canyon but got snowed in about 50 miles south in the small town of Williams. However, we did have a lot of fun! We have not seen snow like that in 35 years! It was a good thing we left the rig in Phoenix and took the Jeep with 4WD, it sure came in handy not to mention fun! After two day in Williams the storm blew through and they did a good job of clearing the roads so we spent a full day up at the canyon. We viewed it from about ten different locations and then headed to Flagstaff to spend the night..

Trish took lots of pictures, you can see some of them by viewing the "current sites" at the upper left side of this page. I'll leave those pictures up until we take another day trip. Speaking of day trip... we were really blown away to discover Sedona, AZ on our way back to Phoenix. We decided to make Sedona our next day trip. Of course it's time to go back to work for a while to refill the coffers.

Our first few weeks here have been fun but not much success with selling photos... We are hoping that the future will be better now that the holidays are over. I think things would be better if people did not watch the NEWS... Doom & Gloom! It is time for people to go back to living their life and quit acting like sheep and buying into "how bad things are" Oh well don't get me started on that... All I have to say is we are looking forward to 2009... Sales, travel, experiences... After all, that is why we became fulltimers... FULLTIME living our dream, and smelling the flowers along the way!

More later... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Jim & Trish

What a site this morning!

While sippin' my first cup of coffee this morning, gazing out my favorite window, this is what I saw. This was sooooo cooool! Four hot air balloons were launching about 100 yards out of the campground with the perfect view from our rig!

I ran to the bedroom, and woke Trish... I said, "Baby, wake up... you have got to come see this" Needless to say, she is so into stuff like this, she put on her jeans and a sweater and ran outside with her camera and telephoto lens and took about 200 pictures in the next 30 minutes. I will go through them and add a few to our "current sites" folder here on the BLOG. What a great way to start a Sunday morning! This was such an incredibly peaceful site...

Jim

Merry Christmas from Phoenix

I hope everyone is well! Trish was down with the flu for a week but is doing much better... Praise the Lord for that, I lost about 7 pounds! We are planning a trip over to the Grand Canyon for Christmas. We are driving the Jeep and leaving the Rig in Phoenix so we should be able to get some interesting pictures. I will post them in our "current sites" link in the upper left of this BLOG site. Stay tuned...

Boy... We have so much to be thankful for. A lot of the people here in Phoenix seem to be hard hit by the current economic conditions. There are so many houses here for sale and so many foreclosures. Most of the full time RVers we have met are just happy to see the price of gas and diesel back down to where they feel they can travel more often. We were so fortunate to sell the Florida house when we did. We closed on it in June of this year and from what we understand the prices in Panama City Beach are still falling. It seems we got out just in time!

We are so happy we decided to bring the Jeep along. It really works well for the days we go out and sell for Air Photo. It should also allow us to explore some parts of the desert and get some interesting pictures. The landscape here is so different from anything we have ever seen. So far the weather has been good except for the storm that dropped snow in Las Vegas! It was cold, rainy and windy here in phoenix. It also dropped 12 inches of snow in Flagstaff which is about 100 miles north of us... Today it is suppose to be sunny and a high of 63... That's more like it!

More later... Merry Christmas!! or should I say, "Happy Birthday Jesus ! " Thank you GOD for this perfect gift you have given us... This gift of eternal life truly defines LOVE in the purest form... Thank you Lord for you alone are worthy of praise and worship!

Jim ( A King's Kid!)

We are in Phoenix for Christmas and the Winter

Merry Christmas to all! We have moved from Athens, Alabama to the Pioneer RV Resort in northwest Phoenix... What a great trip we had! 1800+ miles of really beautiful country and trouble free travel with the 5er. Trish drove the Jeep and followed me towing the 5er. That was the only part of the trip that could have been better. With a larger truck I would have felt good enough to double tow the Jeep behind the 5er after we reached Texas and the rest of the trip. We saw many 5ers double towing with the same truck we have...

The truck averaged 11.5 MPG and the Jeep averaged 23MPG. We were pleasantly surprised to see the price of diesel and gas drop as we traveled west. In Alabama we paid $2.59/gal for diesel as we were leaving, the last fill up about 100 miles south of Phoenix we paid $2.03/gal. That made the trip cheaper than we budgeted for!!

We are so amazed at the landscape here... Trish is enamored with the very large cactus plants that are everywhere here in the desert. This campground has them growing wild all throughout the landscape and it is so different to us. Fascinating to say the least...

We are starting to work our first roll of film for Air Photo, Inc. this week. It is taking a little "getting use to", to be able to find these homes because the streets and driveways are really different for us. Different as they are not your typical concrete like in the east. Everything here is gravel, rock, or very coarse sand. Again... I will say fascinating to us. This is such an interesting lifestyle for Trish and I. We are experiencing very new and different things!!

The picture was taken the day we left Alabama... We had planned to leave on Monday.. but it snowed that day, we postponed our departure by a day. Tuesday was very cold with a heavy frost. WE DO NOT OWN AN ICE SCRAPER... This is Trish scrapping the ice off the mirror with her American Express card!!! TOO COLD, we are heading south and west.

Phoenix is much warmer... Much more to come... and more pictures soon... Jim