On the road again! We are back for season two with RoVer, and we’re testing out the snowbird lifestyle…heading south for the winter (or most of it, anyway!). While we have talked about doing this for a while, our ‘real’ planning for this trip started back in September when I booked the campgrounds and planned our two-month adventure. And here we are, five months later! When I chose February 2^nd as our departure date, I never could have known just how perfect the timing would be – a huge storm stretching from Texas to Maine was moving through the country and planned to hit Rochester starting the night of Feb 2^nd. And we left town around 10:30 that morning. As of Friday afternoon, it has dropped 12+ inches of snow and counting at home. If we hadn’t left when we did…it would have been a several day delay. Phew!

The off-season has been busy with planning and prepping – two months on the road is very different from anything we’ve done before. And RoVer needed some attention from the dealer, to repair the items that didn’t fare so well at the end of last season. She spent about 2.5 months there, from mid-October until after Christmas – not because there was THAT much to be done, but it’s apparently a busy time for them, and heck, we weren’t going anywhere so we told them to take their time. After a few challenges and shaking of our heads, we finally felt like RoVer was fully road-ready by about six days before our trip. Just in the nick of time…

And, this would, of course, be our first time towing Plum, our Buick Encore GX. We hooked the car up on a reasonably nice day in late December and did some practice driving. I actually didn’t think it was too bad, and Mark and I both feel like the RV rides more smoothly with all that extra weight in the back end. There’s less sway, and the bumps feel smoother. Yay!

We came up with a few ideas to make two months more feasible:

• Remove the mattress from the bunk and use that space for storage. It’s just 4” high, so I was measuring EVERYTHING for weeks, trying to determine what could go in the bunk vs. elsewhere in the RV. It’s amazing just how many things are taller than 4”.
• Upgrade our Planet Fitness gym membership to the “black card” that lets us visit ANY Planet Fitness location (vs. just our home gym in Webster) – double benefit of being able to work out AND shower in a more spacious environment (since RoVer’s shower is our least favorite feature). A bargain for just $12 more per month (and only one of us had to upgrade because it also allows you to bring a guest every time you visit…two for the price of one!)
• Bring our air fryer from home. We use it all the time at home, and I couldn’t imagine two months of meals without it. It’s a bit bulky, but we knew we could make it work!

January was REALLY cold in Rochester, so there wasn’t much we could really ‘load’ into the RV, since so much stuff has the potential to freeze. Fortunately, Feb 1^st ended up being in the 30s, and it was going to stay above freezing overnight, so we were able to get some things loaded the day before departure. And then on Wednesday morning, we finished up, and I worked the tetris game in our freezer and refrigerator to stock them both with as much food as possible. Our fridge and freezer at home have never been so empty! I just wish there was someone at home to clean them thoroughly while they’re empty. Oh well.

We hooked up the car, overcame a couple of challenges/head scratchers with that, and had everything ready to go…and then we just had to close up our townhouse. This didn’t take long…we just had to put  antifreeze down the drains so the pipes don’t freeze, turn off the hot water tank and water, and lower the thermostat. Renting is wonderful because we didn’t have to deal with anything outdoors – no need to worry about who would plow the driveway or any of that stuff.

US Mail does present a bit of a challenge with extended trips – they will only hold mail at the post office for 30 days, and we needed a way to ensure we could get specific pieces of mail if needed. So we rented a mailbox at a local Webster business that’s like a UPS Store, and then had to have a temporary change of address put in place so our mail would go there. Then, we’ll have our mail sent to us whenever we want, wherever we are.  

Our drive on Wednesday was to Harrisburg, PA, about 260 miles. We wanted to get far enough South to hopefully get into warmer weather, but we didn’t want to drive the full eight+ hours to our first campground in Virginia. It’s still pretty darn cold in PA in February, so we booked a hotel room. A key part of choosing the hotel was a satellite view of the parking lot to ensure we could park RoVer and Plum, and navigate in/out easily. Fortunately, we found the perfect hotel. The drive went really smoothly – the weather was perfect and roads were completely dry (the calm before the storm, I guess!). We love the rearview camera that we have in the RV (the one we discovered by accident on one of our last trips in the Fall) which lets us watch Plum at all times and know, confidently, that towing is going well! It helps a LOT with passing, too, so we can more easily tell that we’re clear to move back into our lane after we pass another vehicle (which was one of our biggest concerns with towing). We were both really pleased with how well our first towing experience went, and we’re thrilled that we’ll have a car for our two-month adventure. Honestly, there’s no way I would have done this long of a trip without a car – I can’t even imagine having to bring the RV everywhere we need to go for two months.

After one day of perfect weather, I guess it was too much to expect a 2^nd day of the same. So, on Thursday, it rained. All. Day. Ugly weather, but it was all part of that massive storm system, and much better than snow or ice! Mark drove for the first hour or so, and then I offered to take over which meant I ended up taking RoVer and Plum on the DC beltway, with tons of traffic, in the rain. Oh what fun. But we made it through safely…just some white knuckles to deal with. We arrived at our campground in Ashland, VA (just north of Richmond) mid-afternoon which gave us plenty of time to do all the stuff we hadn’t been able to do in the cold at home (e.g. make the beds!)

And Friday brought another very rainy day at our campground. We had a few pockets of dry weather, but mostly it just rained. And rained some more. Still SO MUCH better than snow. And it was in the 60s most of the day, so the warm temperatures were nice! Fortunately, we knew from the forecast that it would be rainy, so we didn’t make any plans that would require us to be outdoors. We ran a few errands in the morning, finding a local Target and WalMart (Google maps is such a necessity!), and made our first Planet Fitness trip in the afternoon. So far, that plan is working well!

We’ll be here in VA for four more nights, and on Tuesday we’ll head to North Carolina. Here’s a sneak peek of where our travels will take us in the next two months (cities noted along the route are where our campgrounds are located)…over 1,100 miles to travel, mostly in small increments, until our final stop in College Park MD before we return to Rochester at the end of March! Oh the places we’ll go…