#3 Off and Running

Duffy romps in the snow with his ball for the last time this season (we hope!)

We thought getting ready to go would be mostly a downhill ride after the ordeal of getting stuck, but….. Packing up the RV is never easy, because you take almost everything you own, and if you own two of something, you take both of those! Of course you need all your electronic stuff, most of your clothes, all of your shoes and boots, all of the pantry and fridge food, and a ton of stuff for the RV and car, including all of your tools. Thank heaven for things like the iPod, because you can compress your CD collection. But then you forget where you put it (I’m still looking two days later)!!!

Loading water into the RV with temps in the teens is fun too. I couldn’t get the hot water running, and finally found it was a frozen bypass valve, which thawed pretty easily with the hair dryer. Of course, I was frozen by the time I found this out. Fortunately, the RV has a “basement heater” that has a fan that goes on when the heat in the RV goes on. It keeps the water and holding tanks heated. I have never used it before and put a temperature sender there that I could read from inside the RV. Kewl!

We wanted to leave the house at 9am, but got out of there at 11:45.

Waking up in St. Louis to a light covering of snow was a little

worrisome, but proved no problem when we got going. Our second day of travel was mostly in light rain, but when we arrived in Marion, just outside of Memphis, it had stopped. We decided to put the slides out, so we could store some of our stuff inside the RV – the pantry shelves and much of the bedroom storage cannot be accessed unless the slide is out. Things are a little more organized now.