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!

A Driving day

Not a particularly exciting day for Katahdin, or us for that matter. We took our time packing up the Fredericksburg campsite, set off at 10:30 and drove pretty much straight through for 343 miles to the KOA campground at Florence, SC. Got here around 5:30 after driving in rain most of the day, and set up in a heavy drizzle. Even the dogs were tired and ready to just chill out when we got here.

The Wilderness

This was basically a rest day, after nearly 800 miles on the road the past two days. Didn't do much in the morning except read, do computer "stuff" and entertain the dogs. They loved the campsite, and even Dudley did several hundred yards of exploring.

     Did some interesting touring in the afternoon. We traveled about 30 miles to the National Park office for the Chancellorsville and Spotsylvania civil war battles, and that office similarly covered the battle of the Wilderness nearby.
      A friendly Park Ranger helped us research Tom Palmer's great-great-great granddad (hope we got the generation right!), BGen Leroy A. Stafford, CSA out of Louisiana. He was killed in the battle located there in Stafford County (by coincidence), by Union soldiers out of New York. We then drove to the specific location where his unit was, and Jim walked out on the trail and took photos of the views from both the CSA and Union sides. Of course, there wasn't any snow then in May of 1864. Made for a very interesting afternoon.

Princeton and on to Virginia

Drove from Freehold up to Princeton where we visited our favorite grocery store, Wegman's. Loaded up on groceries, then headed to our favorite local Chinese restaurant "Ya Ya Noodles". Actually went there to meet Becky's good friend Mary Wasserman, who not only treated us to lunch but agreed to pose with our mascot, Katahdin the Moose! She also was kind enough to take the enclosed picture of our intrepid traveling group.

     Instead of spending a second night, we decided to travel all the way to Fredericksburg, VA.  We took the circuitous route through Delaware and Maryland, used US301 and traveled via the Bay Bridge. It rained most of the way, and we didn't get there until 9:30pm. Dogs were thrilled to be able to get out in the cold, snow, and mud! There were only 4 RV's in this KOA park, so they pretty well had the run of the place.

First Night - Pine Cone Resort Freehold NJ

     Here's a photo of Becky with Katahdin on our trip out!

     We had a long first day traveling 460 miles from Southport to Freehold. Easy and uneventful drive, dogs were angels and enjoyed their pit stops. Got here at 6:30pm last night, and hooked up in the dark. Ice and snow all around. Ordered pizza in for delivery, and had a nice cozy dinner with two dogs drooling and hoping for a bite!

     A pretty but cold morning; Dudley wanted up at 6:10. Got our first "lesson learned" with a frozen water line into the RV. We know now we should have filled the tank last night and disconnected, but will from now on when it's cold! Learned a few more things about the RV we didn't know, like running the engine when we want to put the bed "slide" in and out.

     Everything is nice and cozy here, and as noted before the dogs are being real good and seem to be enjoying themselves.