Indiana, St. Paul-Hidden Paradise Campground

 

This quiet, well-kept country campground has been our home for the past 18 months.  We’ve really enjoyed our stay here.  The camp owners Ernie and Lynn Pahl and their family work very hard to make Hidden Paradise a nice destination for family campers. 

 

Our site was 31A.  We had our choice of sites when we pulled in on Thanksgiving Day 2011 because even though the campground is open year round, no one else was there.  So, naturally we picked the best one.  For most of that first winter we had the campground to ourselves.  In fact, I had it to myself for almost a month while Greg spent time in Pennsylvania on business.

That first winter was pretty mild.  I can’t say the same for the winter of 2012.  The campground winterizes several sites so the water and sewage is always available.  But, you still have to do some winterization from the hookups to your RV.  Greg has gotten very good at that process—he hopes to never have to use that knowledge again.

We’ve met some really great people during our stay here, but we have to make special mention of Barbara and Ann who have occupied the site next to ours.  What great ladies they are! We thoroughly enjoy talking and laughing with these two sisters from Tennessee.  We hope to meet up with them in North Carolina in July.

 

The Flat Rock River runs right next to the campground making for some great riverside campsites.  Rafting on the river looks like fun but since I don’t swim I would be hesitant to try it.

Dream Lake, a former stone quarry, is the place for swimming.  Life jackets are provided for all swimmers and all kinds of inflatable docks and slides are set up during the summer.  Since the quarry is deep, a lot of people come out to use a special area marked off for scuba diving.

If you are into hiking, there aren’t any challenging trails, but a walk around the campground will get you a good mile. 

2013 Ride to The Wall

 

On May 23, 2013 we took off for our fourth Ride to the Wall with Rolling Thunder of Indiana Chapter 1, that’s us third and fourth from the left in the second row.  We do this ride to meet up with hundreds of thousands of other riders in Washington D.C. on Memorial Day weekend to participate in a demonstration ride.  The demonstration is to bring attention to the lack of focus on bringing home each and every one of our MIAs or POWs.  In Indiana alone there are still 51 missing from the Viet Nam era.

This year’s ride was very uncomfortable.  Temperatures didn’t get out of the 40’s and if you figure in the wind chill at highway speeds on a motorcycle, you end up with temperatures in the 20’s.  I kept reminding myself that the discomfort I was going through was nothing compared to what soldiers who are held captive or are missing in action have or are going through—and that was our mission, to bring attention to their plight.

I did get a very fashionable pair of jeans as a result of the trip, I rubbed my legs so much with my gloves that they are now threadbare.  Since we didn’t need our leather jackets and chaps for the prior three trips we decided not to take them this year since they take up so much space if we aren’t wearing them—not one of our better decisions.

On a sad note, we lost a friend from our Rolling Thunder chapter in an accident while we were in Washington, D.C.  Sam Hillis died as a result of injuries he sustained when he was struck by a car that ran a red light.  

The Decision to Fulltime

Greg and I married late in life in 2009, the kids were grown and raising their own families in various parts of the country and we were in the pre-retirement discussion stage.  I asked him one day, “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted after you retire”?  He said, “I’d buy an RV and travel”.

His answer kind of worked right into my “wish list”, a list of 20 things I wanted to do that I had been working on for over a year before we met.  One of the things on my list was to “visit someplace special in all 50 states”.  However, I was planning on hotels and room service to be a part of the plan when I traveled as a single woman.

Greg had camped and traveled in an RV earlier in life.  I had camped in a tent once-it was a disaster.  Since he had convinced me that getting on the back of a motorcycle for long road trips was a good idea, he was sure he could convince me that traveling in an RV would be a good thing.

We spent over a year going to every RV show we could get to, researching RV layouts on line and reading websites and blogs of people who were traveling fulltime in RVs – I started to get very interested.  We decided to go to a rally for people who are interested in the fulltime lifestyle put on by Howard and Linda of RV Dreams.  Life got in the way and we had to put off going to the seminar but we continued to talk about the “what ifs”.

In 2011 things fell in place almost too quickly.  We put our house on the market in July thinking it would take a couple of years to sell.  In August we found the RV we wanted and went to Texas to pick it up.  In November we accepted an offer on the house and agreed to give possession December 1.  Now we were homeless.  We decided to move into our RV since that was the future plan anyway.  On Thanksgiving Day we moved into Hidden Paradise Campground.  On December 1 we had a household auction.    We sat through the whole auction and honestly didn’t have one regret, we were now ready to move on to the next chapter in our life together.

In 2012 we were finally able to attend that seminar to find out about fulltiming and we found out we had made a lot of the right decisions.