Thanksgiving in Lafayette, LA

We stayed the week around Thanksgiving in Lafayette, LA, Tim's hometown.  We are going to do our first review of the Lafayette KOA Holiday plus update you on our Thanksgiving activities and all the friends & family that we got to see.  We finally got a few days of the weather that we signed-up for in retirement, clear skies and shorts/t-shirt weather.

...but did have one BIG rain storm.

After running several errands, we arrive at the campground in the dark...AGAIN.  We are still working on our schedule to get to our destination on time.  Since we don't have a car, we try to do the grocery shopping and other tasks during our relocation trips.  We have planned shorter trips in the future, so we hope to get our travel days into daylight soon!  It was not raining for setup this time and we were pretty efficient.

Review of the KOA campground in Lafayette

We had actually stayed at the Lafayette KOA one night when we moved the RV from storage in Florida to storage in Texas so were generally familiar with the layout.  Our site last time was along the east side of the large pond but this time we were on the north side which was parallel with I-10.  It was amazing how much louder the traffic noise is when you don't have the buffer of several other RVs between you and the highway.  We turned our phone white noise apps (Pat had planned to get a new battery-operated alarm clock but he added the noise machine to the features he wanted).  This campground is pretty large with 185 sites.  It has a very nice pond (almost a lake) in the center with kayaks and paddle boats available.  They even have a miniature golf course along with the other children's playground equipment.  Our site had a concrete slab to park the rig and gravel for the picnic/gathering area.  The laundry is larger than most but there is only one, so some campers have to drive to it.  They have a few "store" items in the office but not a real store.  They have propane gas available, and we filled up for the first time as we left.  We would definitely recommend this campground but suggest sites 115-124,  144-151 or 171-177 to avoid the traffic noise.

Thanksgiving Activities

We got to do lots of organizing around the RV since we were in town for a whole week.  Our first Thanksgiving traditional activity was the Camellia Crossing Gleaux Run on Wednesday night.  Before the race we got to visit with Tim's childhood friend (best man at our wedding), Steve, who was in town for his family's Thanksgiving.  Tim has retired from running this race and Pat retired from running at birth, so we staked out the post-race gathering spot with our nieces, Lexie and Cierra, and waited for the competitors.  Our nephew, Brandon, arrived first after running his personal best 5K.  He was followed by Tim's brother and sister-in-law, David and Jessica, and Tim's sister and her best friend, Christine and Adam.  We ate and drank until the restaurant closed and even ran into our friends Lindsey and John out with their family celebrating Lindsey's 40th birthday.

On Thursday, in addition to the racers, a few more family members were at Tim's mom, Sugie's, house including Sugie's brother (Uncle Bobby), more of Tim's siblings (Cindy & Brian), lots more cousins and spouses (Toby, Barry, Brandi, Joel, Blaine), our nephew, Josh, plus our great-niece, Hope.  The menu included lots of roasted and fried turkeys, ham, roast beef, rice dressing, cornbread dressing, mac & cheese, cranberry sauce, corn, green bean casserole, rolls and a bunch of pies.

Sugie had all five of her children there!

Setting Up Our Home

On Friday, we went to our storage unit in Baton Rouge to pick up things that we moved in the moving van that were RV useful and store a few things we forgot in the van and had to pack in our luggage for our "last" flight from NYC.  It was a long exhausting day and Tim was sure that we would never be able to fit all these items in the RV comfortably.  The RV felt a lot more like home once we got these items in place.

We went to Sugie's for leftovers every night and even have some turkey in the freezer now.  It was great to see all of the family, we are still overwhelmed with all the organizing/packing but are starting to feel the transition from assembly/organization to actually living in the Windsport.

The Journey Begins

We are on the road and living in our motorhome (Tim prefers “RV”)!  Pat and Tim differ on the actual start date of our full time RV travel. Pat’s position is that we are visiting family for the holidays until 1/1/2023 when we will start our adventures in Florida.  Tim’s position is that we have been in the RV full time since 11/18/2022 when we spent our first night in the Windsport as full-timers.

We plan to do reviews of campgrounds, national/state parks, historic sites (especially state capitols and presidential libraries) as we travel; and talk about the people we see and spend time with along the way.  We started this blog so that family and friends who wanted to could follow our adventures (without inundating Facebook daily for friends who just want the highlights).

 

Pre-RV

 

We had taken many tent camping vacations to national parks when our three sons were kids.  We really liked to drive.  We even had season tickets to LSU football games when we lived in Carrollton, Texas; a 14-hour, 900-mile roundtrip.  So, before we knew it, we were seriously considering full-time RVing in our retirement. This set Pat on one of his obsessive planning furies to create a path to see all 50 states in their optimal weather. We went to an RV show on September 14, 2018; and picked out all of our favorite features in an RV, which narrowed down the list of models we were interested in to about six.

 

Tim retired on February 28, 2021.  In early 2022, with Pat set to retire in November, we began to track our favorite models’ selling prices.  Others had advised us to buy a used model, about 3-5 years old with less that 20K miles, because people buy new models and then sell them within about three months because they realize that RVing is not for them.  Sadly, even for used models, prices skyrocketed during the pandemic; but as fall 2022 approached, prices were starting to look a little better.  Suddenly, in August 2022, there was a listing for a 2022 Thor Windsport at an RV Dealership in Sanford, Florida, which met nearly everything on our wish list.  We flew to Florida, liked what we saw, and had it inspected.  There were a few issues that needed to be fixed, so we left it at the dealership and returned to pick it up Labor Day weekend 2022.  We spent the weekend in the RV and then put it in storage in Wildwood, Florida, for six weeks.  We returned to pick it up the week before Halloween 2022, and drove it to Houston, Texas, stopping in Ponce de Leon, Florida, and Lafayette, Louisiana, along the way.  There the RV remained until after Pat’s retirement. 

 

The Move from Apartment Life to RV Life

 

Many people have asked us how we moved from living in a Brooklyn apartment to living in the RV.  The transition began with deciding what furniture and other belongings we wanted to keep and what we would do with everything else.  We rented a moving truck from Budget Truck Rental and filled it with the things we would keep; some of which was ultimately going to the RV and some of which was going into our storage unit in Baton Rouge.  Tim drove the moving truck from Brooklyn to Lafayette, Louisiana, on November 2-4, stopping along the way in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

 

Pat’s last day of work was November 16, 2022, and the next day we flew to Houston to begin our journey.

 

Sugar Land, Texas (November 18)

 

Our first full-time campground was the Sugar Land RV Park. But it is really hard to review them since it rained almost the entire time we were there.  We used none of their facilities, we didn’t even go to office to check-in.  We had to set up the RV in the rain (put down the jacks; plug into electricity, water, and sewer; and extend the slide).  We then worried the entire time that we would get stuck in the mud or that we would become unlevel and unable to pull in the slide.  When we were ready to leave, we had to tear down (pull in the slide; unplug from electricity and water; dump the sewer; and pull up the jacks) in the cold and rain (the temperature stayed in the forties almost the entire time). 

 

The highlight of the trip was spending time with our son Tod, his wife, Leah, and our grandchildren, Ella and Alex.  It was Alex’s first birthday, and he was loving the attention.  We also got to spend some time with our son, Kevin, on this trip, since he was also at Alex’s birthday party.

 

On to our next stop on November 21^st, hint it’s a week in Tim’s hometown for Thanksgiving with the Blanchard family!