FINALLY ON OUR WAY

Once we had everything packed, the house clean, and the refrigerator empty, we realized we don’t have any food in the house and would have to start “camping” in our driveway until we left….so, we left a day early and decided to have dinner with our daughter Julie in Clarksville, TN.  Unfortunately we didn’t get to see our son-in-law Marc because he was on-duty with the Army.

Leaving home behind.  A big thank you to our son Thomas and our friend Jerome for collecting the mail and keeping an eye on our home while we are gone.

The vet cleared Sugar to travel…she’s all better.  We picked her up from the vets on our way to the scales to make sure we are legally under the 10000 pound GVWR for our truck. 

As you can see, we are “legal” to travel, but only have 60 pounds to spare…weighing in at 9940 pounds.  That is after we removed the back seat, the metal rails that hold our 5^th wheel hitch, the luggage rack on top of our camper, and replaced the wood board that we had for the truck bed with a foam pad.  The water tank was only 1/3 full and we had a full tank of gas.  I don’t see how some of the truck campers that have slide outs stay legal after they add their personal items and gear to the camper.  One little quirk we’ve run into, is our turnbuckles that hold the camper to the truck are annoyingly squeaky.  The number 1 priority today is to find some WD-40 to correct this problem.  (I just hope all our problems this trip will be as easy to fix.)

We had an uneventful trip to Clarksville, TN, but traffic was heavy.   Nickajack Lake was especially pretty just north of Chattanooga.

Our daughter Julie had fixed a very nice spaghetti dinner.  Her 2 big dogs and our Shiloh were playing outside in their fenced backyard while we ate dinner.  We had a nice visit with Julie sitting on her front porch watching the hummingbirds work the feeder.  The weather was perfect.  When we were getting ready to leave and were saying our goodbyes, somehow, all 3 big dogs bolted out the front door and started running through the neighborhood.  It was like herding cats to get all the dogs back to the house.  Shiloh got enough running in to last her the entire time.  She made sure we got our exercise too!

The temperature is 56 degrees, partly cloudy skies at 6:30AM.  We are currently in Kentucky traveling to Topeka, Kansas.