Thinking about where to wander

Waco Lake, April 2015

The S.O. and I have nailed down our spring campground hosting gig -- we're going to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park in Missouri for the month of April -- but don't have anything solid lined up for the fall. We did apply for a couple parks for October, but are now having second thoughts. I'm not sure what we'll say if we get a phone call about hosting then. We're now thinking about staying up here on the tundra through October, maybe even into November, and then doing the snowbird thing, kind of wander across the southern tier of states until stuff melts up here. We had talked about doing something like that a couple years ago -- take off from here right after New Year's and stay gone until May -- but changed our minds.

There are a lot of places in the Southwest I'd like to see. Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Craters of the Moon National Monument. Carlsbad Caverns. Fort Davis. Taos, New Mexico. Bisbee, Arizona. Big Bend National Park. The Four Corners area. Various national wildlife refuges -- there are a few along the Gulf Coast that sound really interesting. Plus, of course, one of the newest additions to the National Park system, Mammoth National Monument, is in Waco. I could see spending a couple weeks camped on Waco Lake; we liked the Corps of Engineers campground we stayed at in April. It would be fairly easy to come up with a list that would be much too long to actually cover in just one winter. We shall see. . .

In the meantime, before we go anywhere, whether it's this Spring or next Fall, we need to do some minor tweaking to the Guppy. The S.O. has to install a shelf in a cabinet and we need to figure out a better place to stash the shop vac. Right now it's tucked into the space I want to use for stashing my sewing machine the next time we do a prolonged road trip. We also need to replace the charger for the RV battery (the one that runs the lights and water pump when camped at a basic site). The charger that's in the Guppy now doesn't seem to remember how to turn itself off so it keeps wanting to boil the RV battery. We should probably do that this month so we've got lots of time to figure out if the replacement works or not and can deal with returns if necessary. I'm not sure just what's involved in pulling out the old charger, but no doubt the S.O. knows what he's doing. Or I hope he does.

At least this time, assuming the weather behaves normally, I won't have to deal with trying to load supplies in the Guppy in subzero temperatures. When we head for Missouri this spring we'll be leaving a month later than last year. Conditions up here shouldn't be quite as harsh, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be a little better organized when it comes to packing stuff like groceries. Last year I wound up so frozen I couldn't think straight and left stuff at home I had meant to bring with us. I spent several weeks wondering why I couldn't find something -- a jar of pickles, a can of soup -- because the grocery bag I had meant to pack was still sitting empty back on the tundra.You know, maybe it's stuff like having to think about what's in the RV and what isn't and shuffling stuff back and forth that turns part-time RVers into fulltime: if you're in the RV 24/7 year-round there's never any question about just where that jar of green tomato pickles you thought you packed really is.