johnny July 7th, 2008
We just finished up a week long stay at a commercial campground with Jenn’s family. The entire week was a blast. There was good food, good company and plenty of kids to keep things interesting. However, after spending the prior month in the middle of the national forests, we had a bit of culture shock coming back into ‘the city’.
It started as we came into Pigeon Forge, which is about as big a tourist trap as Myrtle Beach. Six lanes of traffic, giant signs on both sides of the street and lots of useless shops and attractions. Thankfully, we got out of the Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg areas and back into the National Park lands for the last few miles.
However, as soon as we arrived at the campground, we ran into the owner who quizzed us about pets and whether or not we were planning to ride our moped in the campground. She then pointed us at the site we were to occupy; it was, in fact, next to the creek, but the creek was very low. It was also thirty feet from the entrance to the campground and as close as you can get to the road. At least, we had three sites together, so that we only backed the truck camper in halfway, turned around the pop-up camper on one side with the class A on the other and had the creek to form the fourth ‘wall’ of the compound.
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campground,
family,
gatlinburg tn,
holiday,
pigeon forge tn
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jenn June 28th, 2008
If I had an oven, I would so make you a cake! I know, I am supposed to be using the solar oven, but babes, it wouldn’t be very effective here in the rainforest anyway. Oh, and the fact that we used up all of the sugar and eggs feeding the local folks pie doesn’t help much either.
That’s our new life hun. 
I hope you’re loving it as much as I am.
Glad to be spending another birthday with ya. I am sorry that all I have to give you is this stolen birthday card.
xoxox Happy Birthday, Baby! xoxox
Tags:
family,
holiday,
unix geek
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johnny June 6th, 2008
We have finally left Myrtle Beach. We stayed a lot longer than we had anticipated. Staying longer gave us a chance to order and mount a new front hitch for the scooter. But, after 2 days of 100+ degree heat indexes, it was time to go!
We had planned to head to the smokies where we hope it is cooler. We didn’t quite make it that far. Since we didn’t get out of Myrtle Beach until the late afternoon, we wouldn’t have made it until well after dark. We are not big fans of trying to find a boondock spot in the dark. So, we stopped over in Columbia and met up with Johnny’s brother, Bear. He took us to a Bluegrass show at El Burrito in Five Points. They were pretty good, would have been better if there was a banjo, but still very good. After the beer ran out, the college kids all left, and we were able to hear the music. We had a great time. It also reminded me that we need to make plans to hit the Bluegrass Festival in Yeehaw Junction, FL this winter.
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Tags:
beach,
boondocking,
family,
festival,
five points,
myrtle beach,
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scooter
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johnny May 28th, 2008
Well, our house gets about 14 mpg on flat land such as Florida. We got more in the neighborhood of 12 mpg in the Virginia and North Carolina mountains.
I know everyone has been screaming about fuel prices lately, and I’d rather not get too terribly sidetracked other than to say that in less than two weeks while we were at the Bike Rally, we watched fuel prices go up 12% across the street from us.
I know these prices probably look low to many of you, but we are currently in one of the least expensive ‘fuel zones’ according to this map over at gasbuddy.com. The last I heard, diesel prices in Mexico are about half of the prices here in South Carolina. I guess it pays to be a country that is exporting oil and have state run petroleum companies. Hopefully we’ll make it into Mexico in the next year or two and brush up on some very rusty Spanish.
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beach,
bike rally,
campsite,
family,
fuel,
mexico,
north carolina,
scooter,
south carolina
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johnny March 17th, 2008
Talk about a long time between posts, eh? We have no real excuse other than laziness. Anyway, here’s a quick run down of the past month or so.
I quit my job! Jenn is still working a bit longer to try and meet some of her own financial goals, but I am now a lazy, unemployed slob. And not a moment too soon; the new company has become more stifling every day… which became increasingly hard to deal with knowing we already had everything we needed to hit the road.
We went to the Renaissance Festival over in Tampa during opening weekend. It was kind of rainy, but not enough to really worry about. We stayed in the camper for the first few hours when the rain was coming down, then headed into the festival… which was pretty empty due to the weather. We had a pretty good time watching the shows and hitting all of the beer tents.
We camped in a Wal-Mart parking lot the night before the Renaissance Festival, then when we saw that they had annexed a fairly large corporate parking lot across the street, we camped there Saturday night. The only other RV on the lot left, but a couple of vans stayed overnight, so I think we weren’t the only folks sleeping on-site. Thankfully, we could leave the slide out which we couldn’t at Wal-Mart. That makes life in the camper so much more bearable.
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campground,
family,
festival,
jobs,
parking lot,
rvs,
sleep,
vans,
weather
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