gettin back in the groove

We are settling back into the routine here in our palace at the KOA. We have new neighbors next door who have 2 dogs that tend to bark at every little thing with a loud baying bark. They do take them inside at night and they are quiet when inside but they are out most of the day and it makes things a little unpleasant. They are on a monthly site and look like they may be set up for a long stay, hopefully the dogs will calm down and get used to the people and activity of the park.

We have made a couple of purchases to make our life here in the 5th wheel more tolerable. We have a portable ice maker that we bought at Camping World which we both love. We drink a lot of tea which means we use a lot of ice and by having a separate ice maker we can free up room in the freezer for more important things like ice cream!! We have a closet as soon as you come in the door and the ice maker sits on top of the washer/dryer in the closet where it is out of the way yet still handy. We simply sit it on the floor when we are moving.

I mentioned our washer/dryer. We purchased a used Splendid combination unit that was listed on the Escapees website. We bought it sight unseen and had to drive to Atlanta to pick it up but the price was right and it was nearly new. The prior owner had taken it out of their previous unit and decided not to install it in their new one. They had only used it a couple of times and it looked like brand new. The thing works pretty nifty. You just load the clothes in, pour in a tablespoon of liquid detergent and another of fabric softener in their respective slots, set the dial and turn on the power. The wash cycle starts and when it's done the dry cycle begins, your clothes are nice and clean and dry at the end. The biggest drawbacks are the small size of the loads and the clothes will wrinkle if you don't get them out right away.

While we were on vacation my company was sold. I guess I am "owned" by Farmer's Insurance Group now. I expected to find a huge amount of emails with all kinds of information about changes taking place but it has been eerily quiet. Makes me nervous. You can never fully know what's in the plans of these huge corporations, guess we'll just have to wait and see.

We have pretty much just hung around the 5er here since we got home Saturday. Amanda, Ryan and the kids all came over Sunday and went swimming and we had a nice cook out. We then went down to the city park where they had a small festival of sorts for the 4th of July celebration. We are planning on going on the Wed night dinner ride with our goldwing buddies tomorrow night. I'll keep you posted.