New Rig, One Week In

Well, we’re closing in the on end of our first week out with the new rig. It’s been a good time, even if the heat has been rough.

Barnie “poses” with a bench on the Beaver Lake Trail at Pocahontas State Park in Virginia. Don’t worry, he looks a little tired, but he’s fine.

We spent our first night at McIntosh Lake RV Park, a small, nice, clean park on a small lake. We’ve stayed in the area before, on the other side of the lake at Lake Harmony RV Park. You may have noticed something in the names. They are indeed on the same small lake. Google Maps doesn’t name it at all, so who are we to decide which park has the right name?

We pretty much had the park to ourselves when we arrived, turned out we were there on its first day of the season. While we certainly enjoyed our stays at the park across the lake, the next time we’re looking for a stop in the area, we’ll probably do McIntosh again. One reason is all their sites are pull throughs, so for a one or two night stop, it’s nice not to have to disconnect now that we really can’t back up with the toad attached.

On of our only two neighbors at McIntosh arrived before we did. Note the nice grass and spacious sights. The owners say it will fill up soon.

The next night we stayed at South of the Border’s Camp Pedro. We planned to stay at a state park that night, but since we were already delayed and would only be staying the one night, we decided to stay at SOB because it’s on the interstate and the site we were going to be staying out didn’t have electricity, something we didn’t want to deal with in this heat wave. Sure, we have an onboard generator, but we didn’t relish running it constantly at a state park to power the air conditioner. That being said, we did enjoy out stay at Camp Pedro, especially since we used our outdoor television for the first time. It was everything I thought it would be.

The family watching a Rays game at Camp Pedro in the new rig. We love just needing to open a hatch to watch.

We don’t watch a lot of TV outdoors, but we like do like to watch daytime sports outside, as long as doing so doesn’t go against the park’s vibe. In our old rig, there was a place on the outside that we could mount a TV, but it could only be there when we were stationary. So we had to make the decision to take the TV down off the wall in the living room and move it outdoors, then hook it up if we were using cable or antenna. Now, we just open a hatch and – boom – TV! Its truly a wondrous age in which we live.

Us watching TV in May, 2022, in our old rig at Indiana Dunes State Park. After watching, we needed to take the television back inside.

The next stop got us back on schedule. We stayed four nights at Pocahontas State Park in Virginia. It was nice to be at a park for more than one night. We try to avoid one-night stands, but we had to catch up, so we did what we had to do.

Pocahontas is a very nice, well staffed park; the only real issue we had was the site we had was chosen before we bought the new coach, so we were fitting a bit of a square peg into a travel trailer-shaped hole, but we made it work. The park has lots of trails. Barnie and I went on the Beaver Lake trail; its good, but not great, but it was real nice to get back out there. Also, with our new coach, we’re able to bring our bikes with us. It was nice to be able to ride our bikes while camping. I can’t remember the last time we were able to do that.

So, to sum it up, we are really enjoying our new ride. Barnie is even starting to get used to it.

New Coach, New View

New Rig!