Temporarily Downsizing

I’m writing this blog the day after we put our RV in storage. The time we have been talking about and dreaming about for years is upon us. We will begin our Appalachian Trail thru hike attempt in a few short days. If you have subscribed to this blog to receive notifications when a new post is made, you may want to go over to our sister blog and do the same there. You can get to it via the top menu of this blog under Backpacking or just click here. This will be the last RVing blog post until we are done hiking.

Since our last post just after New Years, we’ve been working our way east and north in preparation for this moment. Our first stop after San Antonio was in Conroe, TX, a place we’ve visited a couple times before. We chose to go through Conroe in order to avoid going through Houston. One of our favorite places to visit when in Conroe is B52 Brewing. They have a wonderful location with lots of outdoor seating in a wooded beer garden. This was actually the first time we were able to enjoy the outdoor seating because it had been too cold during our previous visits.

From Conroe, we drove to another favorite location of ours, Tickfaw State Park in Louisiana. One of the reasons we liked this state park so much was the many trails through the swampland. Unfortunately, hurricane Ida did a number on the park and all but a few hundred yards of trail are still closed. We anticipated wearing our backpacks and hiking the trails for training but that wasn’t going to happen. The good news for our week in Tickfaw is that our good friends, Jim and Corinne, were joining us for the majority of it. We shared some meals, got caught up, and Jim and Dan even got the chance to enjoy a local brewery. It was these fine folks that helped hook us up with awesome storage for our RV.

From Tickfaw, we moved into Alabama and stayed at a couple COE campgrounds. The first, Foscue Creek COE, was a new location for us. It was a very nice small park on the western side of the state. It rained most of the time we were there but would not mind returning again to enjoy the area in better weather. From there we moved 80 miles up Route 80 to Gunter Hill Campground just outside of Montgomery. While we were there, we had dinner with new friends we met at the New Years Hangout, Joyce and Mark.

Next up was a few days in Americus, GA to visit Amy’s folks. They live in Andersonville, GA, about 30 minutes from the KOA in Americus. We had stayed in the town RV park in Andersonville in the past. That park was a very short walk from Amy’s folks house but the conditions of the park the last time we tried to stay there were questionable. We did walk over to the park to check it out and things have improved. We’ll have to make a decision for our next visit as to where to stay.

From here we ventured to Mistletoe State Park north of Augusta, GA. It was here that we were able to do a short shakedown hike. You can read about that over on our other blog if you haven’t seen that already. This, too, was a nice small state park but access to the sites were tricky and many were not level. We had a gorgeous pull through site on a dead end road with a turn around too small for our size. We ended up backing our way out of the road and that was not too difficult. We would love to return and even occupy the same site. If the weather had been warmer, we would have spent a lot of time enjoying the location outdoors.

Ebenezer Park is a lovely county park in South Carolina just shy of the North Carolina border and the city of Charlotte. We stayed here for 8 days before moving north of Charlotte to the I-77 KOA near Statesville, NC. It was at Ebenezer Park where we first met up with Gary and Cheryl, our first trail angels (trail angels are people who help you out on the Appalachian Trail). They live outside of Charlotte and have graciously agreed to take us to the trailhead. We will fly into Charlotte on Monday, February 28 and they will drive us to Amicalola Falls the next morning. On top of all that, they bought us dinner as they helped us celebrate our 37th wedding anniversary. We can’t thank them enough.

We monitored weather from the KOA off I-77 and determined that we could get the rig into storage (located south of Cleveland) on Monday, February 21. We left to KOA on Saturday and spent two nights in West Virginia at Blue Heron Landing, a relatively new campground near the Ohio River, before heading to storage. Getting the RV into its garage was a challenge due to the 90 degree back in with reduced access caused by snow banks. After a few adjustments backing in, we got the angles right and positioned the RV as close to center as we could hope. After a couple hours of final prepping for storage, we hit the road and landed at our daughter’s house for a few days visiting the grandkids.

From here we will go to Maine to leave the truck with Dan’s sister, Becky, and brother-in-law, Joe. Joe will take us to the airport in Portland on Monday. They will look after the truck and drive it occasionally so that it will be ready for us when we finish in Maine sometime in August (hopefully). Like Gary and Cheryl, they are early trail angels as well.