Solar eclipse

Like after a touchdown at a football game, the crowd cheered. You could hear the applause and the hoots and hollers from across the vineyard. I added my voice with a full out scream. Woo HOOOOO! We were cheering the fact that, after an hour of watching the sun being slowly devoured, bite by bite, the moon had just silently slipped into place and completely blocked the sun.

We were at a winery in South Carolina, staying overnight night in our Roadtrek camper van. We found the location by researching on Harvest Hosts a couple of months before. The winery scheduled an event for the eclipse and they were limiting attendance to 300 people. We were the only rv there! We stayed two nights, one before and one after the eclipse. What a treat. We drove a record 600 miles on order to arrive the night before. News stories of traffic jams in the vicinity of the eclipse had us worried. We were at the Jersey shore for a close friend's birthday party on saturday night. As soon as we had a slice of cake, we made our hasty good-bye and hit the road. 

Mike Wendland, from Roadtreking.com created a one hour video all about the RVers who traveled to view the eclipse. He called it the Biggest RV Travel Weekend ever. If you follow the link and watch the video, you'll see that he starts by interviewing me about my past Eclipse experiences. 

My mom was an eclipse chaser. I went with her to see two of them. The first was in the Atacama desert of Chile in November of 1994, the second was in Turkey in 1999. Both times, I cried at the point of totality. There is something primal and disturbing about the world going silently dark in the middle of the afternoon, no matter how much you understand what is happening. It has to be experienced. It's so hard to describe the power of that experience. This TED talk does it well.

So this eclipse at the winery in South Carolina had big shoes to fill.

And fill them it did!

On August 21, the day of the eclipse, people started arriving about 11. Then two big tour buses arrived about noon. Everyone was issued a pair of eclipse glasses as well as a wine glass. The band set up and started playing. They were great ... Time pirates ... With a playlist that included Moon Dance, Aint no sunshine when she's gone, Moon Shadow, ...

This was our parking spot for the total eclipse

Here is an aerial shot of the winery taken with Jim's drone - the eclipse party was by the tasting room at the right. YOu have to look closely at the far left to see our RV.

Well - it did feel like a spacecraft-worthy event! Does that mean our RV is actually a Shuttlecraft?

How did we get that cool artwork? 

Oh .. My .. God. It was perfect. The stars came out. The clouds stayed clear. The corona was wispy strands of silk. The diamond ring blazed brightly coming out the other side. And, yes, I cried. 

Roadtrek Factory - Kitchener, Ontario

For the first time in our RVing life, we are not orphans. Our first motorhome was a 1997 Safari Class C. See this blog post, especially the comments. Safari only made class C's for a couple of years, and the Safari company went out of business completely in 2009. Our second motorhome was a Gulfstream Endura "Super C." Although the Gulfstream company still exists, they didn't make the motorhomes anymore, just trailers. We have never been to a factory for our motorhome, and never were able to expect factory service ...

Until now!

In between Indianapolis and Syracuse, we decided to take the northern route through Canada, which would allow us to visit the Roadtrek factory in Kitchener.
Not only did we visit and get a tour, but we stuck around a few days and they also were able to fix a few issues. 1. the electric sofa that wouldn't move 2. a missing rear bumper and 3. the battery drawer that would fall out if you opened it. All this with no charge. Now that's customer service!

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Play Time

The rally was over on Saturday night. We had really good Verizon Internet where we were parked, so we decided to stay thru Sunday afternoon and do our live streaming "What Does This Button Do?" show from the Roadtrek in the parking lot!  It went well, you can watch it here: Beginners Questions on Smartphones.  Here's what it looks like to have a broadcast studio inside a Roadtrek van!

After Indianapolis, we had nothing on our work calendar until the NE Area Rally in Syracuse, NY the first week of August. That means we had two and a half weeks to travel less than 800 miles. Oh boy, what should we do. Looking at the map, we decided this would be a great opportunity to cross the border to Canada for a little while.

For the first couple of days after the big rally, there was a little rally that we attended with other Full-Timers and Elks Lodge chapter members. It was a relaxing fun time. Jim did some woodworking?

Then we headed north. We just felt so footloose and fancy free. We found a place to stay overnight by checking our HarvestHosts.com membership and discovered a winery just on the Canadian side of the border.

It was so picturesque, we made it our headline photo for this blog. The wine wasn't bad either. Sprucewood Shores Winery.

Walmart giveth, Indiana taketh away

The only thing that is a drawback about traveling in our new, little Roadtrek RV is that we don't have a towed car with us. It's not that difficult to stow the contents, unplug the electric and drive away, but you gotta really want to. It needs to be important. When we're parked at a rally we like to stay put unless it's something really important.

We were at the Indianapolis rally for 5 days. I guess we need to learn to stock more wine! We ran out the night before the last day. We still showed up to the Roadtrek group's happy hour and we bummed a glass of wine! The next day, we stayed till late afternoon because there was a really good Verizon signal there and we needed to record our weekly "What does this Button Do?" class. (You can see it here: Beginner's Questions on Smartphones 7/16/17)

I don't know if it looks like it, but doing that live show is quite a bit of work and it's stressful. Therefore, we always reward ourselves after a show is done (whether it went well or not!) by celebrating with a glass of champagne. We had none. No champagne. No wine. No beer. Nothing to celebrate, reward, or relax with. And, everyone else was gone, we couldn't go begging.

Well, it was time to hit the road anyway, and we needed to do grocery shopping. We went to Walmart. We've been to enough Walmarts to know that some stock beer and wine, and some don't. We were taking our chances. It's probably state laws, we don't delve into it that much.  In this Walmart, we were quite excited to see that they not only had wine but also liquor. We stocked up! Our next destination was a small rally with RVers who belonged to the Fulltimers group, or the Elks. We are part of this group, we would not be working during this rally, just partying! I even picked up supplies for my favorite partying cocktail, Seagram's 7 and ginger ale.

Satisfied with our full grocery cart, we made our way to the checkout. The clerk took a look at our haul and informed us, "Sorry we can't sell you alcohol on Sunday."

Aaaaaarrrrggghhh
How dry I am.

Off to work we go

It's cool how our life has evolved. We've  been presenting seminars at every FMCA national convention since 2005. They do 2/year, so that's 24 rallies so far. They're usually one in the east and one in the west. Between the FMCA and the Escapees "Escapade" rally - that's what sets our primary travel itinerary each year. Then, in between rallies we play - or go home to Florida. We also fill in with other rallies, RV parks, senior centers, computer clubs, and even people's homes. Wherever people gather who like to learn about technology - you may find us there.

This time, the destination was Indianapolis for the FMCA convention. First stop - a friend's driveway in Gainesville area. We try to stay and visit Alex any time we're passing by. Now, with this little RV, its so easy! Alex likes to travel by RV also and she has a little Casita trailer. We think she would like the Roadtrek as well, so it was fun to get to show it to her. I wouldn't be surprised to see her get one sometime soon.

And, we lucked out while we were there, another friend, Mark Miale, was playing music at nearby One Love Cafe. If you ever get the chance, go hear him, he's really good. Here's his website: MarkMiale.com with lots of samples of his music.

Ok, now we're ready to get off to work! No other stops along the way so we're just in travel gotta-get-there mode. When this is the case we often stay at Walmarts and Cracker Barrels. We find them by using our trusty All Stays Camp and RV app. It doesn't matter when we get there, no reservations required and there's everything we need in the way of food and supplies. At Cracker Barrel we get dinner AND breakfast!

We didn't even need to use the special RV parking spots! We fit into any parking spot - and this one was more level.

Another place we can stay for no extra charge is Thousand Trails RV parks. We pay an annual membership fee, and then can stay for up to two weeks each at about 50 different parks around the country. One of these was on our way and not too far from Indianapolis. We can also use our Allstays App to find these. See this highlight from our What Does This Button Do show that demonstrates how to do that. Finding Thousand Trails Parks with Allstays.

We always like staying at Thousand Trails.

Even pulling into the FMCA rally was simpler with the Roadtrek. Parking us is always a bit of a problem because they have specific areas for Vendors, and for Attendees. But we're not vendors and we're not just an attendee. We are in a class almost by ourselves as Seminar Presenters. A few others are in this category - Wayne and Dahelia Hunt who teach the fitness classes, Al Hesselbart who teaches RV History, Roger Marble who teaches about Tires and Genealogy (that goes together like fish and bicycles?!) These are people that we see twice each year at FMCA because we're usually parked together. But, since there are so few of us, the parking crew is usually clueless as to where to put us. Now, when we drive in with a Roadtrek - they point "over there are all the Roadtreks!" Hey, that's fine with us. Roadtreks usually get electric hookups, are near the bath houses, and are near the activities because its understood that people traveling in these little motorhomes don't have cars to get around and generally like to have the shower facilities nearby as well.

Roadtrekers are a social bunch

One of the first people we ran into was Mike Wendland and his wife Jennifer. They run the website Roadtreking.com and he wanted to interview us about our transition to the small motorhome lifestyle.

Then it was time to get to work. We had to go to an Office Depot to get a bunch of stuff printed (using the remarkable FMCA Office Depot discount) Then it's Jim's job to package the printouts with our USB drives of all our teaching content - videos and .pdf files - that we include with our special membership offer during the rally. And it's my job to review all our seminars and be sure we're ready for our presentations.

Here was our schedule:

Then it's a blur for 4 days of the rally.

This is the hands-on class on smartphone photography. People learn by doing. 

Here's a sweet little slide-show / movie that Facebook put together of these days.