Rosie's perspective on the trip and a long drive to South Carolina

     Rosie wanted to tell everyone about what a dog's life is like in the RV!
    " Every morning, Dudley sounds the wakeup call around 6, and after we go out for our morning potty break Dad goes back to bed. At 7, without me even urging him, Dudley starts whining for breakfast and dad gets up. We then get our first morning walk, "taking care of business", and then we wait for our parents to eat so we get lap their cereal bowls. We watch as they pack up the RV, and then we get a long nap for a couple of hours as they drive off to our next adventure. Fortunately, they let us stop every couple of hours to stretch our legs. Dudley finds it hard to stretch out, given that he covers about 1/3 of the floor space, but he's pretty good at angling around corners. Once in awhile he sits up so he can watch out the front window, and at the same time get his chin rubbed. As I can't see out when he does that (I've been comfortably lounging on one of my two sofas), I have to climb up on the table to see what's going on. Mom tells me I look like a mountain goat, of all things! When they occasionally get out, I take over the comfortable front bucket seats as you can see in this picture. Then it's lunch time, and we get our daily dog biscuit."   To be continued.........

      It was cold in Florence this morning, about 32 degrees but at least sunny. We set off about 915am and traveled down the interstate to the KOA PointSouth campground about 25 miles from Beaufort. Fought heavy sidewinds most of the way, about 135 miles. Lots of traffic, and probably 1000 motorcycles heading south to what we presumed was some sort of rally. Most were being trailered, or pulled in "toy haulers" as closed trailers are called. Kind of an interesting note. When we bought the Itasca, we were told we could expect about 15 miles to the gallon out of our Mercedes diesel engine. We've now driven the RV 3589 miles since we bought it, and have averaged a true 15.5 miles per gallon. We're pretty pleased with that, and in the last 3 days of highway driving got 16.2, 17.2, and 15.0 mpg respectively. The 15.0 was in spite of the heavy winds we experienced today.

     After checking in to the campground, we headed off to Beaufort to see the city. It's an old, deep south city with a huge USMC presence. MCAS Beaufort is here, and Parris Island is only 8 miles away. We stopped in a Marine Corps souvenir store (surprised?) and Jim got a nice polo shirt and a trailer hitch cover for the Sienna. As the temperature was only in the mid to high 40's, and very windy, we elected to stay in the RV to do our touring. The old town is filled with small shops, many antique ones, and the drive along the water (it's on an island) is populated with beautiful old southern mansions (think "The Great Santini", which was mostly filmed here). We drove over to and around "Ladies Island", then ended up restocking food at Walmart. Nice to get back to the campground at a reasonable hour.

     One encountered problem--we have a noisy water pump that rattles when we open a faucet, so we'll need to get it checked out.

     Katahdin's excitement for the day was riding the back of an aluminum mermaid at the front office door of the campground. You've probably seen animals in different cities that become their symbols, where local artists paint them up (think elephants and donkeys in DC, horses in some places, cows etc). Here in the Beaufort area it's mermaids, and we say several downtown plus the one out here at PointSouth. Anyhow, the attached picture is of Katahdin riding her!