Getting Ready

Wednesday March 20 

Rick and I are back on the road. We're heading west with Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona as our primary destinations. I just re-read my last entry from the end of our last trip and realized how much our plans have changed. Because of family commitments and events, we don't expect to be away for more than 4 or 5 months tops and we'll be covering much less ground. Nonetheless, we're excited and ready to get on with it.

A lot of planning goes into a trip of this length. The house needs to be readied: storm shutters put up, pool and lawn service in place, neighbors help enlisted to "keep an eye out", etc. The mail has to be forwarded to our mail forwarding service, the newspaper cancelled, the house cleaned, water turned off, refrigerator and freezer emptied. 

Brevard County has many "snow birds" who come south for the winter where they stay at their second homes or condos before returning north when the weather warms. The local cable company, Brighthouse, has a wonderful program where folks who will be gone for more that 3 months can suspend their service during that time without having to return the equipment. For a onetime fee of $30 and $15 per month, we lose our cable, phone, and internet bills. That should pay for a few tanks of gas!

Florida summers are humid and hot, so the air conditioner needs to be left on to keep the mold at bay. Our energy provider suggests an ingenious program for our programmable thermostat. During the day the temperature is set for 88 degrees. But at midnight the program reduces the temperature to 70, raising the thermostat back to 88 at 4:00 am. This results in the air conditioner usually only running for 4 hours a day and then only during the 4 coolest hours of the day. We tried it last summer and it worked well.

We left home at around 1:00 pm. While preparing to leave I caught our mail lady putting mail that was supposed to be forwarded into our box. I reminded her about the forwarding order and she put a post-it note inside the box to remind the person who works on her off days that the mail was to be forwarded. After we drove the short distance to our first stop,  Orlando, I received a call from my good friend and neighbor, Betty. Betty wanted to know if we were missing a set of keys. Sure enough, I had dropped a set of keys in the driveway while loading the RV. Great security...leave keys to the house in the driveway and a note in the mailbox saying "we're out of town"!