Florida, Tampa - Sunday, January 19, 2014 - RV Super Show

This is the last day of the RV Super Show.

 

The weather is beautiful here.

We looked through all of the class A coaches that would compare in size to what we have now – a 43 footer.  We didn’t really see anything that we would have traded for.  A couple of them that were over $600,000 were really pretty to look at, but they lacked some of the storage we have now and I’m not sure if I could have really kicked back and felt comfortable in them.  At $600,000 it was a non-issue anywayJ.  What we have is home.

As we were walking through the displays this afternoon we ran across Howard and Linda Payne of RV-Dreams.com.  It was their website that got us interested in going fulltime back in 2009.  We went to one of their rallies in Kerrville, TX right after we moved into our coach in 2011 and haven’t looked back since.  We’ll be going to another of their rallies this Spring in Tennessee.

The refrigerator is cooling, but not quite like it was before.  We put some pork chops in the freezer and they froze, but the ice cream bars didn’t.  The fridge part seems to be doing ok.  We’ll pick up some more groceries tomorrow, we decided to go easy on purchases until we were sure it was going to work like we wanted.

Tomorrow we’ll be moving into the Tampa East Campground for a couple of weeks.  We weren’t able to get into Tampa South like we wanted – too many snowbirds there already.  We’ll be making a stop on the way to visit Wade RV which is located on the grounds of the LazyDays complex.  We want them to look at a spot we need to have repaired on our passenger chair which was dinged by a runaway screwdriver.  Greg was doing something at the dash to get the Sirius radio working when he dropped a screwdriver and it bounced up and hit the chair.  We also want to see what they can do to revamp some of the entryway.

We came across some of the work that the folks at Wade RV do in some of the top of the line coaches, then we found their booth.  We've found that talking with the exhibitors provides us with some valuable information.  We had several good discussions as we made our rounds.

Florida, Tampa - Friday, January 17, 2014 - RV Super Show

First off, I need to say Happy Anniversary to my Mom and Dad, I think this is #66.  Lots of love to both of you.

We left Jacksonville with a working fridge about 10:30 this morning.  It takes about 48 hours for the fridge to get to the maximum cooling level.  Right now the freezer is fine, the fridge is getting there.  The good news was we didn’t owe any money for getting this thing fixed.  After all the trials and tribulations Norcold agreed to pay for the part and labor and shipping.  We have an extended warranty that would have paid for most of the repair but we originally thought we would have at least our deductible to pay.

We stopped to pick up some groceries that we hadn’t been able to get for the past couple of months – fish, berries, salad.  Our stomachs will probably revolt against eating healthier again.  However, I can truthfully say that Hormel’s canned beef and gravy is really pretty good.  After the grocery stop we stopped at a small Walmart for cleaning supplies, etc.  While we were in there all of the lights went out.  By the time we were ready to check out the computers were back up.

As we were heading to Tampa we saw lots of mowing being done.  This is certainly a sight we wouldn’t be seeing if we were still in Indiana.

 

 

Right now we are sitting at the Tampa RV Super Show.  We didn’t get here until around 4:30 so we haven’t been in to see any of the exhibits, we intend to make a day of it tomorrow and maybe Sunday.  We can stay in the parking lot for $20 a night, so we’ve opted to do that for a couple of nights.  After that we’ll go in search of a nice campground where we can stay for a week or so and get some cleaning and laundry done.