Our visit to Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House really amazes me. It is like a French chateau or maybe a manor house. My name for it is the Amazing Biltmore Palace. With plenty of money to spend and after traveling as a socialite among the rich in Europe, George Vanderbilt started construction on the Biltmore Estate, finishing […]
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Treasure in the Smoky Mountains is easy to come by. It has always been this way. Today the treasures are different but just as amazing. The treasure we find here in the Smoky Mountains may be harder to spend than the timber, gold, or coal our ancestors took, but what they left behind is still
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Ultra-Light Camp Chairs: Our new Cascade Mountain Tech Ultra-light camp chairs are new additions to our outdoor living space. They are new, and long-term testing isn’t done—actually, long-term testing hasn’t even started. They are our new back-of-the-car ultra-light camp chairs; we are taking them everywhere and getting lots of use out of them. Our new
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Smoky Mountain Vistas are amazing. We have had a wonderful visit. We spent the last twelve days camping off-grid in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Our stay in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has made it easy to mix it up a little. At our current location, we get to enjoy both of
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RV dry camping for twelve days on solar. Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Here are the results. Did our solar work for an extended camping period in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park? Did we have to use our generator? This is a numbers post about RV dry camping for twelve days on solar power.–
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Great Smoky Mountain National Park is wonderful. We are having a great time. We have been staying in the park on the North Carolina side. Blogging without the internet is hard. Thank you for noticing last week when the travel stuff didn’t post on Sunday like it usually does. I’m still writing the blog, but
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We have been knocking around Knoxville for almost three weeks and have a pretty good feel for spring in Knoxville. We really like it. Since tax day is around the corner, (we just filed yesterday) I am in a numbers mood — so in three weeks we have traveled 155 miles and been to five
I’m not sure where we crossed into Appalachia but we are surely here now. In fact, we may have been in Appalachia for a month or more depending on where the lines are drawn. It also depends on when and why the lines were drawn. As we crossed the Cumberland River Valley and started climbing
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We can get in but we can’t leave (the campsite). Well, I guess we could get back out if we back up more than a quarter of a mile. Really it was more than just a quarter-mile of backing up. There is a long uphill section, two corners, and a large downhill section. Scars in
Can’t Leave, what now? Read More »
This week we visited more Tennessee waterfalls. All were as good (or better) than last week. The waterfalls are all very pretty and most of them are easy to access. I promised last week that we are still hunting for more Tennessee waterfalls. This is partly because I had a few more pictures than I
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I had several titles for this post but Tennessee Waterfalls easily became the winner after looking at the pictures. The top photo was taken at Old Stone Fort State Park. We walked to this waterfall and the others in the park from our campsite. Old Stone Fort State Park was our second stop in Tennessee.
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Snippet: We are interrupting our regularly scheduled programming to announce breaking news, another win for the Foxes. According to a recent article on the Escapee’s website, we are in the top ten list of RV travel blogs. I don’t know why I am calling it another win… there wasn’t a contest. For me at least,
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Red Bay Makeover: Why go to Red Bay to remodel our RV? Why would we need to remodel our RV? Red Bay is the home of Tiffin Motorhomes. The people here have more experience with Tiffin Motorhomes than anywhere on earth. While here we performed our annual maintenance, fixed a few broken parts, and gave
In Mississippi storms (and mud) are part of life in the spring. We started in the south and are now just shy of the Tennessee border. We have traveled nearly the entire length of Mississippi — mostly on back roads. Our number one observation is how wet it is. Wet is everywhere rivers, lakes, ditches,
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This post is about wiring solar panels. We have installed eighteen Zamp Obsidian solar panels to recharge our lithium battery. This article explains the wiring of the solar panels so that they act as one panel. This year, because our system is so much more complex, I am going to go into much more detail
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The last time we did this was the summer of 2019. We are adding new states to our travel map and these are the first states not in the west. All last year we visited new areas in states we had already explored. Every state prior to this was in the west. We expected to
Best Burger… the Bulldog Burger is now on the all-time winner’s list for their great Mushroom and Swiss Burger and for their great french fries. Colleges and burgers go together, the Mississippi State Bulldogs provide the namesake for Bulldog Burger in Tupelo (and Starkville) Mississippi. They are masters of burgers and fries. In fact, they
Storming Arizona describes both our stay in Arizona and how we left Arizona. We have never traveled so far so fast. Now it is warm. I was telling friends that we were going to slow down when it got warm. The last few days were in the 70s, and then it was more than 80.
If you want to see Old Relics—like me—you should visit the Pima Air & Space Museum. It is in Tucson, just to the south of our campground on Davis Mothan Air Force Base. Davis Mothan Air Force Base is huge and home to the biggest military aircraft storage in the country. The museum is full
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Campsite Review: Fiddlers Cove is a military-only campground located on the Silver Strand south of Coronado Island east of California Highway 75. It is one of the nicest RV parks we have ever stayed at. Fiddlers Cove is easily the nicest military RV Park we have ever been to. Fiddlers Cove is also probably the
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Campsite Review: KOA Tucson Campground is located in southeast Tucson south of Interstate 10. It is a very nice campground / RV park. The joke is — the ideal location for a KOA is between the largest freeway and nearest train track — ideally, it should be near a major airport and in a light
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The Biosphere 2 experiment tried to replicate a proposed settlement on the moon, or on Mars. It didn’t work according to plan. But failed experiments are still results — just not desired results. Lots of people learned lots of things about life from the Biosphere 2 project and the experiments are still in progress. Now
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Campsite Review: Catalina Campground is located north of Tucson at Catalina State Park, east of Arizona Route 77. It is a very nice campground. At the campground, there are two loops with 120 well-spaced large sites with electricity and water. We like the back-in sites in loop A best because they are more private than
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Destructive Lithium Battery Testing — I guess I run with a pretty rough crowd, a friend of mine deliberately destroyed two lithium batteries while testing. He tested them to the point of failure. Smoke Check In the Navy, we used to call an electronic device that failed — smoke checking. If you hit a device
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Valley of the Sun, Valley of Fire, Death Valley, Yuma, notice a trend in our travels? All these places are hot, way too hot in the summer. Winter never really arrives in the Valley of the Sun and this is ideal for us and our RV travels. While every other state in the nation faces
Campsite Review: Picacho Peak Campground located just to the south of Interstate 10 about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. It is a very nice campground. No water is available at the campground… I will be saying this again and again. At the campground, there are three loops with 87 well-spaced large sites with electricity. We
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Campsite Review: Saguaro Skies Campground is a military-only campground located on Luke Air Force Base in Glendale Arizona. It is a very nice campground. This is a brand new RV park-style campground on a flat spot right behind the Commissary on Luke Air Force Base. In true Air Force style, this is a very nice
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Chasing 70 degrees – I don’t know who coined the term “Chasing 70 degrees,” but it accurately describes where we want to go and when we want to be there. The phrase “chasing 70 degrees” refers to the average temperature. The earliest reference to the phrase I could find was in 2009, more than ten
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Like water on Mars water is rare. We are north of Yuma in a red desert just like Mars except there isn’t water like this on Mars. We have a nice lake behind the RV. Totally unexpected and so very interesting. Actually, there are lots of nice places north of Yuma and Lake Martinez is
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Campsite Review: Gila Bend Campground is a military-only campground located on the Gila Bend Air Force Auxilary Field three miles south of Gila Bend on US Highway 85. After going through the gate (on 4th street) stay on 4th street by making the first right turn. The campground will be on your right. If you
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Humor from Spam: One of the unanticipated perks of having your own website is sometimes, you get some unexpected humor from spam. Sometimes it is a hoot. Why would people (computers) from all over the world go out of their way to provide such funny comments on this website? (Really I don’t know, the question
Campsite Review: Lake Martinez Campground is a military-only recreation area on the Colorado River, north of Yuma Arizona. It is a nice place to visit provided that occupancy is more than half-empty (it was). If every site were filled, the place would be too crowded to fit our RV. It is very rare to find
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San Diego is not a liberty port. In the Navy, liberty is something you can have (get to go on) after you get all your work done. When in a liberty port, you get to leave the ship. The term is used in a sentence such as “Did you enjoy liberty?” Of course, this question
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Southbound Interstate 15 – Bad Roads for RVs – Sunday afternoon between Primm Nevada and Glen Helen California is a bad road for RVs. Since this is an Interstate Highway, there are at least two lanes and a slow lane on all the steep sections there are two steep sections. Typically the temperature is either
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Dealing with stuff is hard. The last two weeks were hard. We were cleaning out our mini-storage. In it was the stuff that we haven’t dealt with until now. The last of the stuff is the hardest to eliminate. Don’t worry or feel sorry for us; we still have plenty of stuff. This has been
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Campsite Review Sweetwater Summit Campground a San Diego County Regional Park in Bonita California. It is a very nice campground. All campsites are in a small area south of Sweetwater Lake and spread out on a south-facing hillside near the California Highway 125 expressway (Tollroad). There are 112 sites on a sunny hillside in a
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Campsite Review: Guajome Park Campground a San Diego County Regional Park in Oceanside California, on Mexico Land Grant named Rancho Guajome. This grant predates the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the creation of the state of California. Prior to the land grant, the park was part of the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia founded
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Snippet: RV Parky “Route Planning” is my go-to tool for planning. RV Parky makes route planning very easy for RVers. We use it every time we plan our trips and refer to it daily, both for planning, and for a history of where we were, and when we were there. We even use it to
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Snippet: Campendium “Treasure Box” is a fantastic resource for finding campsites. We use it every time we decide on a new location. We use it both as a resource to find campsites and for us, even more, important than finding campsites we use it to evaluate campsites. It is the number one evaluation tool we
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Troubleshooting our Air Conditioner – I didn’t want to repair the air conditioner, I didn’t want it to break. If you own an RV (or any house) it will break. Here is how I fixed our RV air conditioner that broke as we left Las Vegas (where it worked just fine). This is not the
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Snippet: Lion Energy – manufactures one of my favorite RV products the Safari UT 1300 Lithium Iron Phosphate battery. They sell lots of products that are not just big batteries. I didn’t know how many different products this company offers to help people in their everyday life. Lion demonstration trailer. You can see in the
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Snippet: Passport America RV Discount Camping Club can save RVers lots of money for campsites. The campgrounds offer 50% off normal rates for members. It is easy to use and the annual costs are about the same as one night stay at one campground. So stay at two Passport America member campgrounds and the program
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Campsite Review: Lake Elsinore West Marina Campground is on the northwest end of Lake Elsinore, California. It is not a good fit for us. We are not going back. From Interstate 15 take State Route 74 west for two miles and then make a left turn into the campground. As State Route 74 passes under
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Campsite Review: Desert Eagle Campground is located on Nellis Air Force Base northeast of Las Vegas south of Interstate 15. It is a very nice place. Coming from Las Vegas go north on Interstate 15 and exit on eastbound Tropical Parkway. Then turn south on North Sloan Lane and turn southwest on Las Vegas Boulevard
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Can you run your RV Air conditioner on Solar and Batteries? We have the test results. The quick answer is yes you can. We have proved that it is possible. This update includes testing data with some surprises. These surprises are not encouraging and show how hard this is and why this is so hard.
Redirect Can you run your RV Air Conditioner on Solar and Batteries? Read More »
Lakes, mountains, and deserts. Since our last update, we have made a big move through Utah. We were worried about the onset of winter, but not anymore. We are now in the desert, and it is plenty warm (hot). Winter can come at any time in the higher elevations in Utah. For the last two
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Campsite Review: Quail Creek Campground is on the west end of Quail Creek Reservoir, near Saint George, Utah. It is a nice place. The best way to get here from Interstate 15 is to exit on Utah Highway 9 eastbound, then turn north on State Road 318, also known as 5300 West. The nearest city
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Campsite Review: Mountain Valley Campground is located on U.S. Highway 40, just south of Heber City, Utah. It is a very nice place. Starting in Heber City go south of the main intersection on U.S. Highway 40 for less than one mile and make a right turn into the resort. The reception has room to
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Parley’s Canyon – Bad Roads for RVs is on Interstate 80, east of Salt Lake City, Utah. It is steep and should be avoided in the winter. Of course, you could say that RVs should avoid traveling in the winter in the Rocky Mountains and I would agree. It goes double for steep roads in
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Provo Canyon – Bad Roads for RVs is on U.S. Highway 189, four miles west of Heber City, Utah. It is steep and should be avoided in the winter. Of course, you could say that RVs should avoid traveling in the winter in the Rocky Mountains and I would agree. It goes double for steep
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