Panama City Beach, FL
We finished up with the window maintenance on schedule and headed for Panama City Beach, where we'll have a short, serendipitous family visit before continuing our chilly trip west to Arizona.
As it got later in the day on Tuesday, I started wondering if we were going to get the window back in. The manager had told me it would take 3-4 hours. Hmmm - is that 3-4 hours in a row? I went to the office to check and they said they were almost done. Sure enough, a few minutes later, down came the cardboard and in went the window. 20 easy and 2 very difficult screws later, and it was all done. The two tough screws are simply an access issue, since they are tucked into the lower front corner of the window, and partially covered by the side of the dash panel. As is usually the case with situations like this, where they do a lot of these window repairs, they have a few different hand-made tools and special techniques that they use, so it was tedious but didn't require dash removal.
Since it was late in the day, we settled up but didn't leave as we had a 300+ mile drive to our next destination and it was already almost 5:00 PM. A few more coaches did pull in later in the evening, and we even moved ours about 2 feet to one side so someone could park next to us We appreciate the "free" - nothing's free but rather built into the price of the repair - place to park for two nights, but they are really packed in tight, almost touching slide-out to slide-out. Sometime during the evening, we noticed that there was a problem with the power (since the generator went on by itself), and a couple of quick checks showed a) we had high volts on one leg and low on the other and b) it was impacting everyone, not just us (there's a natural tendency to assume anything that goes wrong is "our" problem). No problem for us since we were leaving in the morning. I just unplugged, stored the cord, and ran the generator for a couple of hours to top off the batteries.
We were up early and on the road "on schedule" (I usually pick a target for departure that makes sense based on the day's travel plan) Wednesday morning right at 8:30 AM. We took the "scenic route" along the Florida Coast, traveling US-19 north out of Hudson and then US-98 generally west all the way to Panama City Beach. We saw several signs indicating that we were on a designated "Florida Scenic Highway", but there wasn't a heck of a lot to see. So be it. We had an uneventful drive. I saw a few BBQ and seafood places where I might have stopped if there was room to park, but there wasn't. We arrived at the selected park just before 3:00 PM. After a little confusion over site selection (we were originally assigned a spot where the cold weather had ruptured the water line), we were settled in.
Today, we finished up our preparation for the rest of the trip home. Geri knocked out two loads of laundry and whipped up a couple of prepared meals (not "leftovers") for us to reheat while we're on the road. It rained over night but then turned sharply colder. We've been putting the front slides in at night to reduce the amount of space we have to heat (kind of like closing off unused rooms in a traditional house) and could tell that there was some ice on the shaded side this morning, so we left one slide in today. Temperatures might dip into the teen tonight and tomorrow night. Yowza...
1 comment:
We both need to head for warmer weather. For us, that's 10 days from now. For you, sooner !
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