Preparations in full swing

We're moving rapidly on several fronts, getting ready for departure.  Signed a property agreement to rent out our house this week, and have moved closer to finalizing our schedule.  We'll have some modifications and repairs done to our RV and our tow car in the second week of February, and then take off for a few days for a shakedown cruise, down to Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Washington side. 

The RV is close to completion.  Ivy has finished some modifications to the curtains and blinds, which were in bad shape.  I finished putting in a new TV - I can't live without movies, wherever I go.  Most of the systems have been tested out, and the remaining work will be done by professionals that work on RVs for a living.  Then we're ready to go. 

We've been having fun working out a tentative itinerary.  We expect to go south first to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, a bird sanctuary that's one of the best on the West Coast.  Another important stop will be southwestern Utah, with its many parks and spectacular scenery - neither of us has seen that before.  In late May we will likely be up in San Francisco, where we will meet with our London granddaughter, Hannah, for a family trip to Yosemite.  The rest of it is still quite vague.  But it's fun poring over guidebooks and picking favorite destinations.  And some of the out-of-the-way ones are even better. 

We're starting to contact friends and relatives for visits.  There are lots of people we'd like to visit with, so we hope to fit everybody in. 

It's starting to feel a whole lot more like we're actually going.  It's exciting and a little bit scary. 

Departure Date is Set

Well, we finally agreed on a departure date - April 1, 2010.  That's still a ways in the future, but there's so much to do that we can only feel comfortable with over two months of remaining preparation time.  Most of the systems on the RV are checked out now.  We had our first breakfast in the RV this morning, while it was parked next to the house.  So we're practicing a bit.  And it's mostly working.  We've done a lot to fix it up, but most of what is needed is cosmetic - it's a solid machine. 

Here's a photo of the RV itself.  It's a Monaco Safari, a 30 foot motorhome built on a Ford truck body with their Powerstroke 7.3L diesel engine.  The engine is very good, and it only has 20,000 miles on it.  The motorhome is very nicely made, and we were lucky to find one like this - they're fairly rare.  Monaco mostly makes the larger buses, and they have a lot of better quality detail work inside, so the machine doesn't show its ten year age very much. 

We've decided to tow a car while we travel.  Most of our acquaintances who do this kind of thing recommend a towed car - called a "toad" in RV parlance - to allow a lot more flexibility while on the road.  It turns out that many national parks only have one or two sites where you can park an RV, and to get around the park and see all the other areas, you need lower cost and lower impact transportation.  So we're reconditioning our 1992 Geo Prizm to take with us.  It's a manual transmission car with 158,000 miles on it, but it still runs pretty well.  We'll take it on this trip, keep it going as long as we can, and then unload it when it quits working or we get back. 

But what that means is a towing package added to the motorhome, so we'll need to get that done sometime in the next few weeks.  There are a few other minor things that need fixing, and we'll get a complete maintenance job done by an RV mechanic before we depart.  We're also planning to take a shakedown trip for a few days right around our anniversary, February 14th.  We'll probably head down to the Oregon coast and camp awhile.  That should be a good test of the systems. 

Very First Post

We've been out in the rain all day, working on the fershlugginer RV.  There sure is a lot of work putting this thing in order.  We'll probably be at this for another couple of months until it's all ready.