Jun 6, 2024 – Running to Vermont – Changing Views From Our RV

It takes us two days of driving to get to Florida’s panhandle when pulling the RV. First stop, Colt Creek State Park.

The last 10 days are a blur. I’m not sure what I was thinking except that we had six nights reserved in Vermont campgrounds that I did not want to give up, especially given that campgrounds were few and far between. Reservations had been made and I wasn’t about to give those up. If not for the fact that we have been living without a working oven since December, getting to Vermont would have been more leisurely and required a shorter route. As it were, we went 365 miles out of the way so that we could get an oven issue resolved.

And a couple days later, we had a visit to one of Florida’s many springs, this one Ponce de Leon in the panhandle.

It all started last October on our way back to Chokoloskee Island for the winter season. Every year, we stop in Florida’s panhandle to take the RV to Great American RV Superstore for its Forever Warranty service and last year, to have the broken microwave/convection oven replaced with a new one. I didn’t mind so much that the faulty microwave/convection oven was replaced mistakenly with a microwave because I’ve been happily using the gas oven ever since the first microwave/convection oven stopped working four years ago. I was quite content with the new microwave, and as always, continued using my gas oven – that is, until it decided to stop working in December. That’s it – we needed to get our oven-less kitchen back to normal.

Three’s a charm, our third microwave/convection oven. Thanks to Warranty Forever, appliances are replaced or repaired at no cost to us, except for driving 345 miles out of our way.

A service appointment was made and for the life of me, I am not sure why it was scheduled on May 31, but it was. This gave us one week to get from Florida’s panhandle to northern Vermont. But it all worked out in the end. With a repaired gas oven and a new microwave/convection oven, we were on our way north.

Enjoying our first night out of Florida at Gunter Hill Campground near Montgomery, AL before the deluge of rain.

At last, surrounded by bucolic rolling green hills that pass as mountains and where a very large lake shares its shoreline with New York, Vermont and Canada, we settled into our temporary Vermont home and eagerly planned our days ahead. All things Vermont was on our mind including maple syrup, cheese and ice cream.

One of our many campgrounds along the way, that welcomed us with cooler temperatures and surprisingly, very good wifi!

We love Harvest Hosts, and here we are at Antietam Brewery in Hagerstown, MD. 90 degrees outside and no AC!

But that’s OK, because I spent the remaining hours of the day right here.

Meanwhile, we looked back on the last 10 days that began on Chokoloskee Island and ended 2000 miles and seven states ago. Yes, it’s all a blur. The 95-degree temperatures in Florida seem like a lifetime ago and so does our rain-soaked campsite in Alabama, the two overnight campgrounds near the interstate in Tennessee and Virginia where the AC never needed to be turned on, parking behind a brewery in Maryland while enduring 90-degree temperatures that oddly snuck up on us with unfortunate timing, and again back to moderately cool temperatures while walking briskly up and down the grounds of a very large pond-ladened campground in New York. All this before entering Vermont.