"if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room"

Monday, May 23, 2011

week end away

Well the lemonade is not quite made yet but it is getting better around here. We have spent the last several days just getting our emotions in check so we can move forward. I think we finally have a resemblance of a plan for our future.

We are very fortunate that we sold the house and moved into the 5th wheel when we did. Our financial situation is stable enough that we can take the hit of losing 1/2 of our income and still have our heads above water.
We do have a few bills left that we are going to take care of and get as close to being debt free as we can. We met with a financial advisor last week and went over our retirement funds and laid out our plans of leaving the 9-5 world and being semi retired full time rver's. He gave us a lot of good advice and helped us with our "plan".


So what is the plan you ask? Well I can't really say since my job is slowing down and I don't want them having a reason to "retire" me early. Let's just say there will really be no reason to wait until 2015 which was our initial launch date to start traveling. :-)


The owner of the KOA learned of Rudee's job situation and offered her some work. She will do some work camping in exchange for lowering our rent some. They still have not worked out all the details but she is looking forward to getting some experience that will look good on her resume'. I will help out some as well. We can only do a little in the evenings and on week ends for now but every little bit helps.
Tonight we went over and helped paint the interior of the pool. We only worked about 1/2 hour when a storm kicked up and we had to call it a night. They are hoping to get most of it done tomorrow and we will help them again if there is still more to do after we get off our "day jobs".

This past week end we attended the Indiana GWRRA motorcycle rally in Greensburg Indiana. I took Thursday and Friday off and we were able to head out around noon on Thursday. I had loaded the bike onto the back of the semi Tuesday evening so I only had to pack up the outside of the 5er and hook on.
We headed east on the interstate and met up with Rob and Jany Runion who were sitting on the on ramp near Brownsburg waiting for us in their rig. We traveled together the 80 or so miles to Hidden Paradise Campground in St. Paul Indiana.
We have stayed here the last 2 years for the rally since the fairgrounds where the rally is held has limited facilities for campers. I guess we have become spoiled with our full hook up sites :-).
The drive into the park is a little tight and has some twists and turns with trees that looked like they would jump out and grab the side of your RV at any moment :-O.


Once in the park we found our site which sits right next to the river, The only down side was I had to turn the rig around and then parallel park the whole out fit .... yowzer! Rudee hopped out and guided me around, and back, and forth and back and forth ..... you get the picture :-)
Actually with her expert guidance I only had to pull forward one time to center the rig in the site and we were parked!
Here is a photo of our site (the river is to the left):


We enjoyed the rally and spending time with our friends and riding our motorcycles. Our Harley has an intercom allowing Rudee and I to talk to each other while we ride. For some reason it was not working. I checked all the fuses but since the radio still worked I really didn't think it was a fuse and I was right, they were all fine. There are several adjustments that you can make and Rudee has controls next to her seat as well as my controls on the handlebars. I adjusted it every way I knew how but it still didn't work. I even called the dealer and talked to one of the service guys who told me it was probably just an adjustment ........ yea right. I knew it was more than that so I went ahead and made arrangements to stop there on the way home Sunday and drop it off so they can check it out Monday.



We even hit the Lottery this week end! We share tickets with Steve and Trish Suter where we each buy 5 tickets for each drawing and agree to share any winnings. Rudee checked our tickets from Wednesday nights drawing and we hit 4 of 6 numbers for $48. Missed the big bucks by 2 numbers :-(


I called Steve and gave him the happy news and we all decided to re-invest it into more tickets trying to get those last two elusive numbers to come up.


We made it back to our site here at the KOA late Sunday afternoon and got everything set back up. I even got a call Monday morning from the Harley dealer that our radio was "bad" and they are replacing it under warranty. We should be able to pick it up later this week so we can do some riding this week end, unless of course we are doing our work camping jobs :-) I'll keep you posted.

No comments:

Post a Comment