Born To Be Wild

We wanted to get out into the wilderness a bit on this trip and not have to rely on staying at proper campsites every night.  Campsites are OK but they cost money and although there are some really nice ones, at the cheaper ones you occasionally have to mix with trailer trash and rednecks that live there full time, as well as morons from abroad who don't have a clue what they're doing.  Wait, that's us.

Fortunately there are other camping opportunities to be had, which let you be a bit more independent.  So far we've stayed at all of these locations:

Visitor's Centres

Some of the more historic towns that attract tourists have visitor's centres with RV parking that let you stay overnight.  Ultimately I suppose you're sleeping in a car park but trust me, if you manage to haul your 30ft ass through the local streets of a town without crashing into anything around (or above!) you, you don't really feel like leaving any time soon!

This is probably not a good option for anyone who sleepwalks, or anyone who forgets to get dressed before walking around in front of the windows first thing in the morning.  But it's enabled us to check out some cool places without having to try and get public transport in and out of the town.  And of course not having to drive anywhere after exploring has its benefits:

Home Depot / Walmart Car Park

This sounds even more bizarre but basically, a lot of the big stores will let you park overnight as they have huge car parks that never get full, and you're likely to pop in and buy a few things while you're there.

As a frame of reference for UK people, this is essentially like camping in B&Q's car park.  Yes, it feels weird and you're hardly out there with nature, but it can be handy if you're just trying to get from one place to the next and don't want the hassle of finding a campground.

National Parks / National Forest

This is where it gets a bit more interesting.  In a lot of the National Forest areas you can drive out into the middle of nowhere, find a spot and just wild camp for the night.  Here's where we decided to sleep the night after we bought the RV:

Any camping like this in a remote, rural area is known as "boondocking".  I was geeky enough to look this up so let me save any fellow geeks the trouble:  It comes from an old Filipino word, "bundog", meaning "mountain".  US military men serving in the Philippines at the time used it to describe any remote, rural areas.  Now it basically gets used to describe wild-camping.  Don't say I never teach you anything!

This is a pretty fun way to see the country and we plan on doing as much of it as we can.

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He Ain't Heavy....

Everyone knows it's not too hard to find a good meal in the USA.  And it's no secret that I enjoy a good meal.  Sharon and I have both been to the US many times but for some reason this time more than ever, we've really noticed the constant barrage of food adverts on billboards and TV.

The TV ads are not even timed to coincide with meal times.  You can be sitting there at 5am, awake because of jetlag and not even entertaining the idea of food when BLAM, you suddenly know all about the best philly cheese steak sub in the world and your life won't be able to continue until you hunt one down and cram it into your face.

As I sit here writing this at midnight, I have no doubt that tonight I will be dreaming about the latest Dunkin Donuts turkey sausage breakfast sandwich because I've seen the ad about 5 times today already (in about 2 hours of watching TV).  I know, turkey sausage from a donut shop, wtf.

But what can you do when you stop at a simple diner and order a quick snack, and end up with this on your table:

I don't know how she ate all that (I obviously just had the soup).

Maybe we're thinking about it more because we know we're here for a year so we have to integrate ourselves into some kind of daily routine, rather than just being in holiday mode the whole time we're here and not caring.  It could also be because we've been in Florida most of the time so far; there does seem to be more of an emphasis on food there than in the other states that we're now starting to explore.

Most people's first reaction when I told them we were going to the States for a year was along the lines of "You'll be the size of a house by the time you come back!".  I think most people think we're travelling in an RV to save me the embarrassment of having to be extracted from the roof of some hotel with a crane after consuming my own bodyweight in cheeseburgers.

Back home I use our garage space as a gym.  That's obviously not an option now, but I've managed to put measures in place to offset the Man Vs Food style eatathons.  I bought some dumbells to work out with, and a weighted vest that seems to be causing some amusement when I describe it to people we meet.

Basically, it's impossible to do bench press without a bench.  And I can hardly carry a bench press around with us for a year.  So this lets me do pushups with enough extra weight to make it worthwhile (as well as weighted chinups, squats, etc).  It weighs 140lbs at full weight.  Here I am modelling it in style:

I thought it made me look a bit like Bane without the mask.  Sharon has kindly informed me that it makes me look more like a twat.

Sharon's exercise of choice is running, something which I fail miserably at, partly because it does my knees in and partly because it requires a concentration span of longer than 30 seconds.  So she's going it alone on that one.

Whatever happens, hopefully neither of us will have to purchase two seats on the way home at the end of the year...

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Planes, Trains and Pickup Trucks

Since we got here we haven't had much downtime because we've had to focus on boring, trivial things like not being homeless for the entire year.

But we've made the most of any fun time we could grab.  RV dealers don't generally open on Sundays, except for the massive ones, so on the first Sunday we headed over to Daytona beach on the east coast of Florida:

It's ridiculously long, over six miles I think.  They've basically set up a couple of lanes on the beach itself so you literally drive down the beach and park up in the first spot you find.  From then on you're free to chill for the whole day and marvel at the many sights (and I mean that in every conceivable way) that can be seen on the beach.

With a car full of luggage but not a beach towel in sight, we were pretty unprepared to be honest so we didn't stay long.  We sat on the boot (or "trunk" to us natives) of the car, enjoyed the sun and watched the other cars cruising for a while, then headed off.  Which reminds me, I have to quickly mention these:

Pickup trucks.  I reckon I've seen close to 300 of these since we've been here.  Guess how many actually had anything loaded in the back?  One!  What are these people using them for, transporting bodies in the middle of the night?

Last week we went to Edward Menard State Park on the outskirts of Tampa, to break up the day while we negotiated the purchase of our RV down at Camping World.

It's kind of in the middle of nowhere and quite tranquil, and the weather was amazing, so we got a welcome reminder of what we came here for.

A while after we took that picture, having talked about dipping our feet in to cool down, we walked further around the lake and saw that there are a load of huge wild alligators living in there.  We decided not to paddle after all.

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Luck Of The Irish

Well, we've been here a few weeks now so it's high time we started this blog.

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since we arrived and actually fairly stressful.  No doubt everyone back home is full of sympathy!

We didn't get off to a great start, with our connecting flight from Dublin being delayed by four hours after the plane was deemed unfit to fly.  Bad omen number 1?  Suffice to say that Aer Lingus are about as useful as a bacon sandwich at a Jewish wedding.

Anyway, we made it to Florida in the end.  I'm not sure when it finally sank in, but we definitely spent the first few days alternating between "oh my god we're here!" and "Christ on a bike, what the hell have we done?!".

Basically, our lives since we arrived in Orlando have revolved around eating copious amounts of food and looking for RVs.  I uploaded a screenshot from my GPS logger which shows the ground we've covered.  Might not look like much but we've been back and forth along the same routes multiple times as more coaches appear online for us to look at.

One good thing about all this driving is that I got used to it in a nice small hire car before being unleashed on the roads in an 8-ton death machine.  Although I was disappointed to find out within about 5 minutes of leaving the airport that "No Left Turn" signs don't just apply to the locals.  Apparently driving the wrong way down a one-way street is not the done thing.  Hopefully I'll get used to this country's weird customs eventually.

At one point in our seemingly never-ending search for an RV that was fit for more than being launched off a cliff or blown up on Top Gear, we got stuck in a huge traffic jam and eventually saw that the tailback was caused by an up-turned motorhome on the side of the road surrounded by police and fire trucks.  Bad omen number 2.

We probably looked at about twenty vehicles and came really close to buying on three occasions.  It's a pretty long-winded process and we'll do a separate post about the logistics of buying an RV here as a foreigner because a couple of people asked us about this before we left.

We finally found the perfect coach at a place called Clearwater, on the west coast of Florida near Tampa.  It was pristine inside and out and was in our price range.  An older model than we were looking for but low mileage and in great condition.  It's a Tiffin, which is one of the most well respected names in the RV world.  Here she is:

Looks pretty decent?  I thought so too, until I test drove it and the brakes failed halfway through the test drive, leaving me freewheeling haphazardly down the interstate in an 8 ton shed on wheels.  With a stopping distance of about half a mile and the distinct smell of boiling brake fluid coming through the air conditioning, suddenly this didn't seem like such an attractive prospect.  Bad omen number 3!

At this point we considered the old saying that bad luck comes in threes.  Figuring that we'd made it this far and were still alive, we raised our middle fingers in Fate's general direction and carried on looking.

By now we were running out of options but we stumbled across an advert we hadn't seen before for an Airstream Land Yacht.  Airstream are well known for their stunning travel trailers but their fully motorized coaches like this one retain all the style, while suiting our purpose better.

Unfortunately by the time we arrived to check it out, another couple had already expressed an interest and were literally about to take it for a test drive.  I gave the salesman my number and he said he'd call us when he knew whether they were taking it or not.

Now most people would have probably gone for lunch or done some sightseeing while they waited for the callback.  But we decided that the appropriate behaviour would be to hide around the corner for a while, watch for the RV leaving the dealership and then follow it when it went for a test drive.

We must have looked pretty shady because the police soon came and moved us on from our first hiding place.  Our second spot had no line of sight to the RV, and we almost missed it as it went past in the mirror.  A quick wheelspin and a few dodgy maneuvres though and we caught up.

As unnecessary as these antics sound, seeing how the vehicle drove from the outside did actually give us a unique perspective that you don't get on a test drive.  The other couple ended up loving it and buying it though, so we were back to square one for seemingly the thousandth time.

Fast forward another couple of days of looking and we found another great candidate and eventually signed on the dotted line.  She's a Winnebago Sightseer, 30 feet of pure class on wheels as I'm sure you'll agree:

We drove a pretty hard bargain and managed to get about 35% off the list price, and it ticks all our boxes (including working brakes!) so we're happy.  Sharon has already given her the nickname "Winnie", partially because it's a Winnebago but also in honour of her grandma Winnie who helped to make this trip possible.

So, things learned so far:

1.  Obey the US Highway Code
2.  Brakes are underrated
3.  Sell "RV Wars" idea to Jeremy Clarkson for huge profit.  Or MTV if he doesn't want it.

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