Getting Settled in Palmetto

We've read a few blog posts lately from folks that gush about the comforts of home after months or years on the road.  We certainly appreciate a place to reassess what we are carrying with us and to prepare for next year's adventure.  But for me, the most welcome aspect of living in a house again is simply that I can once again have coffee ice cream on occasion and fresh cantaloupe every day.  And Alea is enjoying a bit more variety on our daily menu, and it is also nice to know that an occasional cold or rainy day has no real consequence for us.  Aside from that, we've enjoyed our time in our Camp Inn trailer and are anxious for warmer weather up north, so that we can once again get rolling.

Seemingly every morning there is a feeding frenzy off the dock.

Our immediate concerns, now that life has slowed down a bit for us, have been to get our finances in order, estimate our income tax for this year and figure out our health insurance for next year.  We've also detailed our van, getting it thoroughly waxed so it is easier to keep the tar, bug splats and tree sap off of the paint.  Yesterday we performed a thorough cleaning of our camper, including polishing up the woodwork.  We've emptied everything out of the camper, assessing every item that we are carrying.  Worn out things are being discarded and unneeded items will go to Goodwill.

The camper - emptied out...

And being aired out.

We've slowly been getting to know our new neighborhood, including finding a bicycle route into Palmetto that avoids the main highway.  The only store in the immediate vicinity is a General Dollar store.  In the Midwest and South we would often pass several of these stores every day.  It took a while before we ventured into one, but since then we've found that they provide a number of items that we use routinely at prices below what we pay at Walmart.  Plus they offer smaller sizes of some household items, which helps us conserve space that can be used for other items which we need to replenish more frequently.  Since they are so conveniently located, we'll likely be shopping there more often in the future.

Earlier in the week we got the new cap seal installed on the galley bulkhead.  It was causing water to get inside the galley on one side of the hatch ever since Dauphin Island, AL in early November.  It failed because it was incorrectly installed at the factory, as shown in the pictures below.  The cap seal is supposed to come straight across the top of the bulkhead, ending just short of the outside wall.  When correctly installed, the galley hatch seal should be shorter, butting up against the cap seal.

How our cap seal was installed.

And how a proper installation should look.

This morning I installed new mud flaps on the van.  We were having water entering the cabin of the camper via the condensation drains on the door windows, a problem that we did not have with our previous tow vehicles.  The low, boxy rear end of some tow vehicles (ours included) happens to send road spray shooting at just the right angle, straight up into the window drains.  The mud flaps are the recommended solution to stop this from happening.  Now we are hoping for some rain, so that we can see if it really works.  We'll leave the bed out until we are able to tow in the rain, as it will be easier to determine if any water is still getting inside (and to dry things out if this fix isn't successful).

Tomorrow we finally get our front windshield replaced.  It received an irreparable ding a couple of days after we had driven off the dealer's lot, and a replacement windshield was not in stock in either Boise, Tacoma or Grand Forks, so we decided it was easier to wait until now to get it replaced.  The thing that made it difficult to find a replacement was the integrated QuickClear defroster, which seems to be more common here in Florida.

With all of our pressing issues slowly being resolved, before long we will be shifting gears and planning next year's travels.  That should be up the Atlantic Coast to Maine, then west along the Northern Tier to around Chicago and then along Bicycle Route 66 to St Louis.  From there we'll drop down a short distance to the Trans America Trail, which we will follow to somewhere north of Nashville, and then it will be back down the Natchez Trace to Louisiana.  If we can time things right, from there we hope to follow the Southern Tier to San Diego.  But we might need to find a place to park for a while, in order to have the best time of year for crossing the southwestern deserts.