You'll never guess where we will travel this summer!?!

The last blog highlighted some of the fun activities that kept us busy this spring. But we were a little restless, with nothing planned for the summer. We were in a bit of a traveling conundrum. We couldn't go RVing during those delightfully cool spring months because the motor home was sitting on a consignment lot. Likewise, we couldn't plan anything definite for the summer because we didn't know if we would still own a big motor home, or if we would be traveling in a smaller trailer. Those two different RV options would require two different kinds of camping strategies. So as the temperatures started rising this summer, we were making local trips in the heat to places like the "Field Station:Dinosaurs" park in Derby, Kansas. We used the Kansas Sunflower program that provided free tickets for Kansas children and two adults into a nice list of summer activities. On this warm summer day we walked through a herd of life-size dinosaurs that swung their heads and roared as we walked by.

Even though we would like to spend part of Summer 2024 somewhere cool in the mountains, we couldn't make any plans or reservations. When the motor home sold, we didn't want to rush and buy a different RV without doing due diligence on what would be best for us. So suddenly we didn't even have an RV to make that summer trip to the mountains. So we sat looking at the summer calendar, with no plans. Where are we going to travel this summer?

Well, one thing we could do was to help with our church's vacation bible school. We had assumed that we would be gone to the mountains in June, but here we are. So after passing the background checks, and personal reference checks, and going through the training, and passing the exams on the computer, we were approved to help with the elementary children. Volunteers have to really want to help with the children's programs to go through all that! It was a fun week, and Carter loved seeing Gram and Grandude during vacation bible school.

The summer was really heating up and we were still sitting in Kansas City. Then we got a very interesting phone call from a dear nephew and niece that we have traveled with before. They started the conversation with something like, "We know you always have plans, and this is really short notice, but would you like to go to Europe with us this summer?" Usually we would have had plans, but it was perfect timing to accept such a unique opportunity. We didn't have to think twice about heading across the pond with their family!

This was a special treat because they were making the plans and the reservations. We would be traveling with their family of six, and we know their four children well. We were hoping to help keep the adult-to-kid ratio evened out at 4-to-4. But since the two oldest are 16 and 18, we sometimes feel like we are probably on the kid side of the ratio. Their family was going to tour around Europe for two weeks, and then they would have to get back home for church camp and work. But they suggested that we could stay longer if we wanted. So we started looking at options to fill out a month-long itinerary. Suddenly we were very busy planning for the Summer of 2024!

So instead of sitting in a woeful conundrum of what to do for the Summer of 2024, we were super excited to look at the endless options ahead of us in Europe. After a little planning, we would meet them in Houston to begin the European adventure. Stay tuned to see where it took us!

Spring 2024 highlights (and way too many pictures of our sweet family)!

 As we looked at our 2024 calendar, we realized that even though we no longer owned a motor home, we had still been on the move. We were away from our new-to-us house the entire month of January. We were gone ten days in February, and left to go cruising for ten days in March. We were away a couple weeks in late April/early May when we visited relatives and went to watch our youngest son run the Oklahoma City Memorial half-marathon. We don't mean to brag, but he finished in the top 1% of the runners that were in the race. He finished the 13.1 miles in one hour and 27 minutes, and finished #46 among the 7,380 runners in his race. We're proud of you, Blake!

Also this spring we made a trip to see more of our neighboring state of Missouri--famous for its caves.

Because we were traveling with a 3- and 6-year-old, we opted for the drive-thru tour at Fantastic Caverns.

After reading some books about caves, Carter was excited to be inside this fantastic cavern. She enjoyed wandering through another of God's wonders with us!

We spent the next day in Springfield, Missouri's "Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium." Situated adjacent to the Bass Pro Shops national headquarters, it is a nationally acclaimed museum with an impressive display of live animals. Their web site says that it showcases 35,000 live fish, mammals, reptiles, and birds . . .

as well as some impressive dead animals like skeletons that included scary shark jaws.

We ate at Lambert's Cafe, where this side of the booth was all smiles after catching some of those throwed rolls. Eli loved eating at a restaurant that throws warm yeast rolls the size of a softball to customers across the room!

We love our time in the Kansas City area because we get to spend so much time with our oldest son's family. We celebrated Carter's sixth birthday party at a riding stable with eleven kindergarten girls. We purchased Carter (and Gram and Granddude) season passes to Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun for a unique birthday present. So we made lots of trips to ride the rides and splash in the water at the local amusement park.

We also celebrated Mark's birthday this spring, and he got a fire pit for our back porch for his birthday present.

We love the almost-daily visits by our three-year-old grandson, who has a wide open schedule since he hasn't yet started school.

We are solid fans of the spring soccer season games at the Garmin complex where are granddaughter plays . . .

and we are quickly becoming Kansas City Royals fans as well. We bought family tickets so that all six of us attended a game together this spring.

Even when we're not traveling, we keep very busy thanks to this sweet little family that lives just two miles from us now. When we found that a local farm planted millions of tulip bulbs, the girls went to the Tulip Festival in the spring.

In case you would think that we are no longer hiking, we can report that we are happy with the local trails. We are especially happy with the local hikers that sometimes accompany us. Even though he's not quite ready for rugged trails, Eli's t-shirt says "Hiking Buddy."

Carter is training to go on longer hikes, so we took her to the nature center and made the 3-mile loop more than once.

Spring 2024 has provided many highlights--and way too many pictures of our sweet family!

Our 2023 RV Travel Map

We know that this is soooo late, but we enjoy seeing a good map of where we've been. 2023 was a crazy year with purchasing a house and coming off the full-time road. But just to be consistent, we have to include a map of the camp sites where we stayed in the motor home in 2023.

We started and returned to the panhandle of Oklahoma, where both our mothers still live. We spent part of the winter in the south, visiting Bentsen Grove Resort in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. In the spring we headed west and north for a return trip to Big Bend National Park. It can be hot and crowded during Spring Break at this popular national park, but it's a great place to visit a second time. We took a national park route to Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park as well. Our summer travels headed north for a stay in Badlands National Park and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Custer State Park is nicer than some national parks, with lots of God's wonders within its borders. We were also pleasantly surprised with the mountains of northern Wyoming as we made a slow trip through the Bighorn and Bear Tooth Mountains. We saw more moose and elk in the Bighorn mountains of Wyoming than we have in all our travels. What a nice surprise! We made another stop in Wyoming's Snowy Mountain Range, which is another great place to visit a second time. Then we headed south into Colorado, where we spent the month of August near Buena Vista, Colorado. What a cool August, with hikes and kayaking and burro races at high altitude! We headed back to the panhandle of Oklahoma earlier and faster than expected when both of our mothers ended up at the hospital emergency room on the same day. We ended our travels for the year earlier than ever before, as we were back in Oklahoma by Labor Day.  

Each spot on the map is a camp site where we spent at least one night in the motor home. We traveled in nine different states and stayed at 47 locations. We think that is the smallest yearly numbers since we started full-timing nine years ago. Even though the font is quite small, the name of each of those spots is listed below:

Even though it's very late, it feels good to get that 2023 summary up on the blog. Thanks for coming along for another year!

Did the Motor Home Sell? and What do we think about PPL RV Consignment?

 

This is a trip down memory lane, as we repost pictures of our motor home, and a few of the places it has taken us in the last nine years. If you missed an earlier blog, we decided to try to sell our motor home. We delivered it to the PPL consignment company near Oklahoma City at the end of February. We signed a contract that explains that PPL will get ten percent of the selling price of the RV--if it sells. Ouch! We had put it in God's hands. We would be fine if it sold. If it didn't sell we would pick it up after the mandatory 90 days, and continue traveling in it on a part-time basis. Did the motor home sell, and how was our experience with this process?

When you put your RV on the PPL lot, they appraise it. The price of motor homes is down based on a saturated market, and it's hard to get good information on the value of used RVs. They assigned a value that we agreed to, and they put it on their lot. Within a week, it showed up on the RVTrader web site and of course the PPL web site. 

We also had to bring the title, and sign all the papers to transfer it to any new owners. The buyers never have any contact with the sellers. We also had to sign documentation of the lowest price that we would accept. We didn't like that.

Their written instructions said that the motor home was to have a full tank of fuel when it was delivered to the lot. They explained that was to be sure it had enough fuel for test drives. That's a lot of test drives! At the high price of diesel and a 100 gallon tank, that was a big expense. We didn't like that.

They also tried to charge us a cleaning fee, and a fee to clean the motor home each week to keep it in top condition. We had spent a couple days cleaning, so we refused to pay their cleaning fees that were around $500. They didn't much like that.

They told us that they would stand firm on our agreed appraisal price for the first 30 days. We checked on their web site, and were surprised that they started dropping the price after only two weeks. In fact, they lowered the price several times--all without talking to us. They didn't contact us at all to let us know how things were progressing. We didn't like that.

Later, we found out that the motor home sold during the first month. But the buyers couldn't get a loan. PPL has several options for financing, that depend on the qualifications of buyers and the size of the loan, etc. We liked that they could handle that step, but we didn't like that they aren't always successful with financing.

When a motor home sells, the buyer pays for a very detailed inspection. Anything found must be fixed at the expense of the seller. We thought everything was working, but they found two running lights on the outside that were out. Mark could have fixed that for $22 in parts bought on the internet. But they charged labor and a garage fee and $80 in postage and handling that brought the simple fix up to over $250. That was $84 more than the inflated estimate we approved. We certainly never approved $250! We didn't like that.

We were in Oklahoma City, and we stopped in with cleaning supplies to make sure that the motor home was still gleaming. It still looked really good. We walked through several other competing diesel motor homes on the lot, and agreed ours was the best. Of course, we weren't partial. None of the motor homes were plugged in, which is hard on the house batteries when they get drained. We didn't like that.

We planned to spend part of the summer in the cool mountains, and we knew we needed reservations. But would we need a big camp site for our big motor home? Or would we need a smaller spot for a little trailer? What kind of trailer would we buy? Where would we buy it? Or would we not buy it at all because we would still own a motor home? So we couldn't make any plans for the summer. We didn't like that.

After getting no information from PPL for over two months, we started calling them. We often waited for days to get a returned call. We didn't like that.

As we neared the end of the 90 days, we found from one of the phone calls (that we initiated) that they had an offer on the table. We did some jockeying on price, and it looked like it would sell. But there still was the inspection and several more steps. The process took longer than they said it would, but the new owners picked up our motor home shortly before the 90 days was over. Denisa was a little sad, while Mark seemed to be relieved. 

We found that getting our money took several phone calls and more time than usual. The branch office blamed the main office and vice versa, but we waited for close to two weeks for the money to land in our bank account We didn't like that.

This is the first time we haven't owned an RV for the last twenty years, and it seems a little strange. But we love RV travel too much to not buy one soon. We're open to advice as we start doing more research on our next purchase. In the mean time, we hope the new owners of our old motor home enjoy it as much as we did! We would like that!