Our New Home

Here's an exterior view of our new Alfa. There's an additional slide on the other side at the rear.

Well, we’ve done it! We took the plunge to help the U.S. economy by purchasing a new rig. New to us, that is. It is actually a 2004 model with 36,000 miles on it. Beautiful inside. Lots of space, including two slideouts. The outside needs work, though. It has peeling decals and is chalky so lots of elbow grease is in our future.

We have been lurking around RV dealerships since January, looking for deals. We even put a bid in on three different rigs but we ended up either rejecting them or being rejected by the financing agency we dealt with. Even though we have an extraordinary credit score (835 on Experian, which is better than 98 percent of the U.S. population, we were told), they were nervous about us because we simply have too little debt! That was a new piece of madness. Anyhow, we kept on triangulating and got very friendly with Ricky, our finance guy who works in California.

When I found an Alfa 36 motorhome on eBay, I wrote the dealer to see how we could work a trade for our Holiday Rambler. We came together on the price and we chewed it over for days. The problem was the motor home was in Missouri, 1,100 miles northwest of us. I wanted to find someone trustworthy who would do an appraisal for us. After a few hours on Google, I located an RV repair shop in St. Louis. I called the owner and explained my needs. I wanted him to be my eyes and ears and brain and go over the rig with critical eyes. We agreed on the price for his services and a few days later he came back with a pretty honest report, as it turned out.

So why would a person drive 1,100 miles each way to buy a different vehicle, you might ask? What we found was pricing of similar motor homes in Florida are about $25,000 higher than in the Midwest. Go where the bargains are!

We decided to go for the financing and our friend Ricky said he thought it would go through this time. It did at a very conservative 4.49 per cent rate. Now we had to arrange to drive our rig north to the Midwest. Tropical Storm Debby said “Not so fast, buster.” She dumped 12.25 inches of rain on us at Honeymoon Island State Park in Florida. And then she couldn’t get her act together and move out of the area.

We left and drove through the feeder bands all the way north to Macon, Georgia, where we parked for the night in a Walmart lot. That was 400 miles of the trip. We were up at dawn and pushed on through Georgia, coming into Tennessee and finally stopping exhausted for the night in Kentucky.

The next day we passed through Illinois and crossed the mighty Mississippi at St. Louis, passing the iconic arch alongside the river. We promptly took a wrong turn in the city and had a fearful job of maneuvering our way back onto the Interstate and eventually being squirted out on the northwest side of the city. The dealership was in Moscow Mills, Missouri and we arrived on the third day in searing heat – 108 degrees, breaking all records.

We spent the next two and a half days, in the same blistering heat, transferring all of our stuff from our old Holiday Rambler into the new Alfa. At some point, the generator on our old rig died and we were left with no air conditioning! We asked the guys at the dealership if we could take up residence in the Alfa since the alternative would be two dehydrated bodies and two cats lying in the dust. They were very nice about it and we moved in.

The dealer, however, was nervous about the generator dying. I, however, found some problems with the new rig’s four-door refrigerator-freezer. The freezer seemed to be working, but the fridge was useless. We agreed to call it even. I would fix the fridge. He’d fix the generator.

All the time we were carting stuff between the two rigs, I was on the internet or the phone with Ricky in California. The check was late in being sent out via FedEx. It arrived on Friday morning, however, and we transferred ownership and keys.

We headed out to make the return trip at a slightly more leisurely pace. Now we have a very powerful diesel motor at the rear of the coach, instead of our Chevy truck engine up front. We are able to talk and listen to the radio as we travel. Because of the severe heat, we are travelling along with the heavy-duty diesel generator running. This allows us to cool the coach better than with only the dash a/c units.

As I write this, we have just crossed the Illinois-Kentucky state line. Jo is at the helm, the cats are prowling around, sitting atop the big slide in the living room area. When it is retracted for travel there is a high shelf available to them which they think is the cat’s pajamas.

If all goes well, we will be back in our slot at Honeymoon Island State Park by July 3 in the afternoon.

Looking aft from the entryway. 

New Life at the Beach

The killdeer is just to the left of the single orange cone.

A nervous killdeer hovers near her nest of three eggs in the parking lot at Honeymoon Island State Park.

Two delightful things happened during this week: a loggerhead turtle swam ashore, made her way up the beach to the high water line, scooped a hole in the sugar-fine sand, and dropped a clutch of eggs into the nest. She covered up the eggs and made her way back to the Gulf of Mexico… all before the dawn broke.

A ranger discovered the distinctive marks of her flippers in the sand, the first time this has occurred in Honeymoon Island State Park in two years. After consulting with the park botanist, it was decided the eggs needed to be moved farther inland by 25 yards so they would have a better chance to hatch in the next 57 days.

In the process, the rangers have installed a protective mesh enclosure so raccoons can’t invade the nest and steal the eggs. The tiny hatchlings will have a hard enough time surviving when they break into this world in just under two months.

And the very same week, a killdeer (that’s a small bird with a couple of stripes around its head) decided that the Oasis parking lot was the “perfect” place to lay her eggs. She picked a high spot in the grassy verge. She scraped a slight indentation in the rocky soil and plunked down three eggs with black and white spots on them.

The rangers have put orange cones up in the parking lot to provide a tiny amount of protection for this momma. When I drive through the parking lot, I stop to watch her spreading her wings as she sits on the eggs, protecting them from the heartless beating down of the brutal sun. She also has to worry about marauding gulls which might see the three eggs as a delightful appetizer.

Last night, Jo came with me on my final rounds of the night and we photographed the killdeer as she hopped off her nest and trotted round the nearby parking lot. We sat very still. In a minute, her mate arrived on the scene. He danced around for a few seconds. She darted over to him. He mounted her and had a quicky coitus and then flew off. Mmmm. Interesting behavior, old boy.

Late last week, we had a wicked storm pound the park and the neighborhood. Much rain fell and the angry Gulf of Mexico was roiling with the wind, casting up destructive waves on the shore. I had stopped on my morning rounds to enjoy this angry version of Mother Nature at her best… and worst.
I was carrying our iPad and, while I sat there on the shore, I was moved to write these words:

Be still, my heart, and listen to the surging sea.
She pushes forward, surging and sucking, surging and sucking.
She knows just how far she can come. Up and onto the land. Wave one, then two, three and four. A small retreat. But waves five, six and seven push in, inexorably, and here comes the eighth wave, pounding and spreading  its foaming richness. Now retreat for nine and ten. A pause for eleven, twelve and thirteen. A small retreat, just a moment, then with a great heaving and sighing, in comes the fourteenth wave, pushed ever onward by a bustling and almost angry fifteenth. A sigh. A moment to catch its pounding breath. And now the cycle begins again.
Be still my heart and listen to the insistent roar. Does it come for me? No. It is unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring. It is the never-ending sea.