Right now, we’re in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. We weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow, but the “free” wifi at the Artillery Ridge Campground in Gettysburg sucked. The signal went out about 2 hours after we arrived yesterday. So we decided to leave there early and come here today.

Artillery Ridge – the place has a cool-sounding name, so I thought it would be cool as well. Nope. Kinda dumpy. And the lousy wifi cinched the deal. I didn’t even bother to ask for our $40 we pre-paid for tonight, as I didn’t want to get into it with the owners.

We’d stayed at Drummer Boy Camping Resort three years back, the last time we were in Gettysburg, and that place was nice and had good wifi. Should have stuck with them.

One redeeming quality of Artillery Ridge Campground though, I have to admit, is that they have an awesome diorama of the Battle of Gettysburg inside a small Civil War museum.

It is probably 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. I took Max to see it this morning before we left. Anyone can come and see it, however people staying at the campground can see it for free.

They also had a picture of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, which any self-respecting Mainer knows turned the whole battle by defending Little Round Top and preventing the Confederates from flanking the Union line.

Chamberlain was born in Brewer, which is the city on the east side of the Penobscot River, right across from Bangor. After the war, he came back to Maine and served as Governor, and later as President of Bowdoin College.

But back to the “accident” I started this missive with.

So we were pulling out of our spot at the campground in Virginia on Tuesday. I was outside directing, Angie was driving. The part of the campground we were in was in the back, in the woods. The spots were pretty neat because they were kinda carved into the side of a hill lined with trees. But they were tight…probably a little too tight for a 32-foot RV.

Anyway, Angie takes the turn out of the spot a little too sharply (she has to because the there is a tree looming directly in front of her), and takes a nice chunk of bark off a tree with the end of our awning.

This is, of course, the new $400 awning that we had put on just before leaving on this trip.

I’m afraid to unroll it and see what the real damage is.

And while it is true, I was “directing” her, she is so good at telling me how to drive when I’m behind the wheel that I figured she didn’t really need my help.

There is a section of I-40 outside of Asheville, coming off of the Smokey Mountains (looks like Black Mountain on the map), where the grade is so steep that there are large warning signs about your brakes overheating if you ride them. This is especially a problem for trucks and/or RVs like ours.

By the time we got to the bottom, our brakes were smelling it up good. So decided to pull off at a Stuckey’s and let them cool down. Ended up buying a case of pecan rolls, enough for us to keep one and send one to each kid back home.

We were trying to get to Chapel Hill, which is a good 4 hours. We got all the way there and Angie decided we should bite the bullet and go all the way to Quantico – an idea I had suggested before we left Asheville, but one that she poo-pooed on at the time.

Women.

So we ended up driving about eight hours yesterday. But no more driving now until Tuesday. We’re having a nice, relaxing visit with Angie’s sister and brother-in-law all weekend.

It just so happened that three of our authors live along the same general route that ends here in Asheville. After visiting all of them, we now are heading back across the state toward Virginia to spend Memorial Day weekend with Angie’s sister and brother-in-law.

It is beautiful here. And the weather is, for lack of a better word, perfect. It is a shame we can’t spend more time here. But we’ll have to save it for a future trip.

The place is not fancy, but decent. Definitely a one-nighter kind of place.

Yesterday was a bit nuts. Got up early and drove and drove and drove from Savannah, GA. Arrived about 1:00 PM. We scrambled to get our work done, filed a lawsuit against Amazon, then rushed out the door to make it to a dinner invitation by 5:00.

Tomorrow we head to Roebuck, SC.

This place is nice…very nice. Clean, on-site restaurant, beautiful lake, a beach and good, free wifi. It is the picture that would come to mind when you say “RV resort”.

However, not everyone is so careful when they throw out the word “resort”. Earlier in the trip we stayed at Paradise Island RV Resort and it was a freaking dump.

On second thought, that description is probably a little too harsh. But the place is certainly not a resort.

First off, it is in the middle of Fort Lauderdale – not on a beach, not on a lake, not even out of the city.

Second, the RVs were packed in like sardines. I was actually concerned we couldn’t back in without hitting one of our neighbors. I’ve never seen an RV park with sites that tight.

Third, 90% of the sites house trailers or permanently parked RVs. The place was a trailer park with a few camping sites.

Angie and I have often half-joked that there needs to be a law that defines what you can call a “resort” because the term is thrown around willy-nilly.

We’re off to Savannah in a little while. Because of the repairs, the canceled rocket launch, and the fact that we reorganized to make sure we stay with Angie’s sister and brother-in-law in Virginia over Memorial Day, our schedule is all out of whack. So we have to drive every day this week until Friday. We want to get to Savannah early today so we can use at least the afternoon to enjoy the city.

The scenery is pretty industrial, but it is cool they will let us stay in the RV while they service it.

We came in for an 8:45 AM appointment after spending the night at their adjacent campground, called RallyPark.

The major reason for the service is to repair our water heater, which is leaking like a sieve. There is also a laundry list of minor things I had them look at too:

+ a small hydraulic leak (which turned out to be from our rear slide, and not our rear leveling jack like I thought),

+ a weird quirk where our generator will sometimes shuts off randomly (they think it is a problem with letting the gas tank get too low, introducing air into the line, as everything else on the generator looks normal),

+ a nick in the windshield,

+ stiff gray and black water valves (they need greasing), and

+ a stuck driver’s side door.

In the process, they discovered our air conditioner filters and evaporator coils were packed with dust. The worst he’d ever seen, I believe is the way the mechanic described it.

Everything is done except the water heater because they had to order a new one from the distributor in Tampa. They couldn’t get it here and installed before the shift ended, hence our reason for spending the night in the service bay.

Apparently spending the night in the garage is a pretty common occurrence. In fact, there are several fellow RVers in the bays behind us also spending the night.

We have everything we need, as Lazydays provides full hookups. If you couldn’t see outside, you’d never know you were in a garage.

And the wifi signal is excellent, much better than their RV park. I suspect it is because we are piggybacking on a wireless network they use for internal stuff. So coverage is great everywhere in the service bays.

We can’t be in the RV while they are servicing it. But there are plenty of diversions here. We started off the day at Cracker Barrel with breakfast (there is one on-site). Then we spent a few hours with Rhett Pennington, a sales guy, looking at RVs.

Rhett was very helpful, but in the end we couldn’t justify trading up. However, we did learn some important things from Rhett. Many RVers trade in every few years. The reason is that an RV’s depreciation rate increases sharply when the RV reaches 45,000 miles. So if we wait and try to do a trade-in after we hit the 45,000 mile mark (which we are only 6000 miles shy of now), we will have a ton of negative equity versus just a little. Rhett said that once you pass the 45,000 mile mark, you are better off just keeping it for 8 more years – which is when the depreciation rate starts to level off again.

After we left Rhett, we headed over to Camping World (also on-site) to browse the selection of “must have” RV gadgets. Then it was on to lunch at Macaroni Grill and some book browsing at the Barnes and Noble next door.

Tonight we are working to make up for all the time we blew today.

We have to be out of the RV by 8:00 AM so they can finish the work. So tomorrow will probably be another Cracker Barrel breakfast, then off to the LazyDays service lounge, which is really well-thought out, to wait out our time and get some business done. It is a massive lounge with tons of tables, desks, couches, comfy chairs, two large, flat-screen TVs, toys for the kids, and a bar in the center that serves free Starbucks coffee. They split the lounge into two halves – one for people with pets and one for people without pets.

And there is, of course, free wifi.

The day before we studied about tarpons as part of Max’s homeschooling. We found out they can get up to 8 feet long, can weigh up to 350 lbs., and like to eat small fish and crustaceans.

She brought some children’s motion sickness medicine along just in case Max got sea sick but she never needed to break it out. Max loved the boat ride, even when they hit the large swells.

The tarpon got away, unfortunately. But Max managed to catch two sharks (with some help from Captain Paul).

a hammerhead…

and a lemon shark…

We’re visiting with some friends in St. Petersburg until Tuesday, then it is off to LazyDays in Seffner (outside of Tampa). We have a leaky water heater that has been dogging us since we left Maine, so it is a good excuse to visit. LazyDays is the largest RV dealership in the country. And it has this enormous complex that is a destination in and of itself. Since we are so close, we have to stop by just to say we’ve been there.

I get a frantic phone call when we are about 20 miles out of Key West from Angie.

“Look to your left, at 10:00. What is that?!”

“It is a plane,” I said.

We had just passed a small airport and I was sure a plane was what she was freaking out about.

After several exchanges of “it is a plane”, “no it is not” I pull the RV over and Angie finally shows me exactly what she’s talking about.

She is right, it is not a plane. It is some sort of white blimp, just hovering. And it seems to be at least a few miles up.

We figured it was some sort of weather experiment and went on our way.

Ironically, when we came back down to Sugarloaf Key yesterday, we picked a campground from which the blimp is clearly visible. I broke out the binoculars yesterday afternoon and got a good look. It is tethered. And that is pretty amazing considering how high up it is.

With the curiosity nearly killing me, I did some googling and found out what it was.

It is called Fat Albert and it is located on Cudjoe Key. It is part of NORAD’s air defense network. it is literally tethered to the ground by a 10,000 foot cable.

One of the reports I read said that there were two of them, one for surveillance and one for broadcasting TV Marti – similar to Voice of America – into Cuba. However, reports indicate that Hurricane Dennis destroyed the TV Marti blimp in 2005.

Here is an interesting, but unconfirmed, story of how one Fat Albert broke loose during a storm and dragged a fishing boat nearly to Cuba.

As we drove off the mainland and on to The Keys last Thursday, I have to admit I was unimpressed at first. The Upper Keys look like any beach town on the coast of the USA. It isn’t until you get down to about Islamorada that things start turning into what you’d imagine The Keys to be.

The first thing I noticed is the water is this unbelievably sharp blue-green color. Because the color is so rich, one almost suspects Florida is dyeing the water.

By the time we arrived, dinner was around the corner. So, the first thing we did was hit Mallory Square, where they hold the Sunset Celebration each night.

Friday we got up and headed into town for lunch at Jimmy Buffet’s place, Margaritaville. Pretty obvious that Jimmy’s gone completely corporate, as this place is clearly a tourist trap. We had the obligatory “cheeseburger in paradise” for lunch. I’d have to say it was…meh, pretty average. I wrote off the whole experience as something to do once just to say you did it.

Next stop was Ernest Hemingway’s home. I’m much more a fan of the man than the writing, as his real-life stories are much more interesting than anything he made up for his books. The tour guide was reading from a memorized script (including the jokes), so the tour was a bit dry. But here are some fun facts I remember:

+ Hemingway wrote half of his works in Key West, and all in the span of just nine years.

+ Pauline (his wife at the time) was a former editor of Vogue and thus was more interested in style than function. To that end, she had all the ceiling fans in the house replaced with ugly chandeliers, making the house incredibly hot during the summers.

+ They were both cat nuts, and thus the grounds are now home to about 60 cats – all descendants from Hemingway’s original six-toed cat.

+ The house, built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a marine architect and salvage wrecker, has never flooded or suffered significant hurricane damage. That’s because it is built out of solid limestone blocks and was sited on a hill 16 feet above sea level – the highest point in Key West.

After Hemingway’s house, we putzed around Duval street – the main strip of Key West – killing time until our sunset cruise on the Liberty Clipper.

The cruise, on a 125-foot schooner, goes out into the Atlantic, just off the southeastern coast of Key West, so you can watch the sunset unobstructed. (At one point the captain announced that we were now closer to Cuba than the closest Walmart.)

Here is a picture taken from the ship:

Mason and Max had an awesome time. Mason in particular loved the ocean.

On Saturday, we made the journey to the marker indicating the southernmost point of the continental United States, which we found out later is one of many white lies.

First, Key West is not part of the continental United States, but is an island off the continental United States. Second, the southernmost point on Key West is actually the Naval base behind the buoy. And third, it is 98 miles to Cuba, not 90 miles, which is written on the buoy.

Next stop was Sarabeth’s for brunch. This place was, hands down, the best restaurant we ate at.

The final stop was Kermit’s Key West Key Lime Shoppe for the key lime pie voted “best tasting” by the Food Network. It was pretty darned good pie.

We had to break off our Key West adventure on Saturday so we could head back up to Key Largo for swimming with the dolphins last Sunday (more on that in a future post). But we are just north of Key West now, in Sugarloaf Key, until Saturday. So I’m sure we’ll make one more trip into Key West before leaving.