2023 Estelline Trip

[JEBar]

we are happy to see that Love's has joined the TSD Logistics Diesel fuel discount and feel certain that we will take advantage of their discounts during our coming trip .... two days of pretty much steady rain have complicated our trip preparations .... with an 80% chance of rain tomorrow, a 70% chance on Tuesday and us due to pull out Wednesday morning, we no longer have a choice about waiting .... rain or shine, tomorrow we have to get serious about packing ....

[markiver54]

we are happy to see that Love's has joined the TSD Logistics Diesel fuel discount and feel certain that we will take advantage of their discounts during our coming trip .... two days of pretty much steady rain have complicated our trip preparations .... with an 80% chance of rain tomorrow, a 70% chance on Tuesday and us due to pull out Wednesday morning, we no longer have a choice about waiting .... rain or shine, tomorrow we have to get serious about packing ....

FYI, it's dry and sunny over here now Jim.

[JEBar]

dry sounds good .... if all goes as planned we should get back to the East Asheville KOA Wednesday afternoon

[JEBar]

well .... our last day before heading west has most certainly been a busy one .... it included buttoning up the house as well as getting the camper and truck ready to pull out in the morning .... the good news is our revised travel schedule includes fewer miles and, consequently, fewer hours per day ..... historically our self imposed effort to hit the road daily around 9AM has been moved to 10AM or later ..... we believe Maureen's new pet Zena will prove to be a good traveler .... just how true that may be should quickly become obvious

[JEBar]

well, we have arrived and are pretty much setup in Estelline .... sorry I haven't done a better job of posting daily updates .... while in no way a bad trip, its been very different in some unexpected ways that have taken and still are taking time to sort out .... hopefully I can get a recap posted within the next day of so

[JEBar]

we've pretty well settled on the site in Estelline, SD where we plan to spend this summer .... thankfully our 16 hundred+ mile drive out here went without any major issues .... that isn't to say we didn't have to deal with some unanticipated stressful issues .... the major ones revolved around our Garmin GPS .... the route we followed out here is shown in post 1 in this thread .... after our first night, all of the campgrounds we visited were ones we've not used often and one was our first time .... it dumped us in heavy residential/commercial locations twice .... if it hadn't of been for a city employee who noticed us parked in an area where rigs like ours aren't usually seen, I don't know what we would have done .... he literally lead us in his city truck out of town, back on the interstate, and right to the campground entrance .... the next day when the Garmin tried to take us back into town I pulled over at a truck stop and called the CG .... they gave us directions that enabled us to get there .... another time the Garmin got very hot after I disconnected it so as to take it into the camper in prep for the next day's drive .... multiple calls later to Garmin customer service, the cause remains a mystery

[dave77]

Looks like a nice shady site. What are the black/grey bottles in the last photo? Looks like a pretty complicated hook up.

[BigAl52]

Not the first nor will it be the last time a GPS takes one on a less desirable route. The drivers at our company said more than once a GPS took them on a route they had no business on.

[markiver54]

Not the first nor will it be the last time a GPS takes one on a less desirable route. The drivers at our company said more than once a GPS took them on a route they had no business on.

Yup...been there done that.
Glad Ya'll are settled in Jim.

[JEBar]

Looks like a nice shady site. What are the black/grey bottles in the last photo? Looks like a pretty complicated hook up.

they are water softeners .... the water here is very clean but it is also very hard .... the system is pretty basic .... water flows from campground source to our water filters ---- from there it flows through a water softener ---- from there, directly into the camper .... we have to rotate the softeners about once a week .... one in use, one being recharged .... it takes a standard 1 lb container of regular table salt to recharge a softener .... we started using "FLOW/PURWATT Watts RV PRO-1000 Portable Water Softener" back in 2002 .... we had to replace the first two back in 2015 and are still using them ====> https://www.amazon.com/FLOW-PURWATT-RV- ... 7e17e03685