NOMADS 2024 Annual Meeting

September 26, 2024

Well, it’s been one month since our last post.  When we last posted, we had returned to Randy and Debra’s home at the completion of our summer trip to New York, Michigan etc.  It was a wonderful trip.

We spent almost three weeks in South Carolina enjoying family time.  We caught up on some chores like changing the oil in BB and helped Randy and Debra take down some trees in their yard but mainly we just enjoyed our time together.

We departed SC in BB on Thursday, September 12, with our first overnight on our property on Pine Mountain in Alabama.  Max drove BB and Anne drove the  truck loaded with tools.  When we stopped at the Alabama Welcome Center we saw a new Beyond in the parking lot and we met Jeff and Susan the owners.  We enjoyed visiting with them for a little while especially since they were just two hours into their second trip in their new Beyond.  Great to see Beyonds in the wild and quickly make new friends.

Shortly after leaving the rest area Max began to feel  something was wrong with one of our tires and we stopped by our Ford dealership on the way back to Pine Mountain.  So glad we did, because we discovered we were having tread separation on both our front tires.  Several of the Beyond owners on a Facebook group we follow have recently had tire problems at about the same mileage (34,000) and their posts were one of the reasons we stopped so quickly to check the tires.  The interstate is so rough sometimes that you don’t know if the problem is the road or your vehicle.  End result, we replaced all 6 tires. Thank you, God, for your protection and thank you Beyond owners for sharing your information.  Because of their posts, we probably avoided some significant damage to BB due to blow outs.

Thursday evening we visited with friends and left the truck on the mountain.  Friday, we drove to Shreveport, Louisiana and overnighted in the Cracker Barrel parking lot.  It was a quiet night, a good breakfast Saturday morning and we arrived in Mineola, Texas around 10 am.

We had never been to Mineola and found it to be a very nice, friendly, cowboy town and the Civic Center/RV park was a great place for our meeting.  Saturday evening, we drove to Canton, Texas to have dinner with some Switch It Up friends.  We were so excited to see them that we forgot to take any pictures.  It was great to spend time with Mark and Debbie.  Hope we see them down the road sometime soon.

Our NOMADS Annual Meeting began Sunday morning with our worship service.  From then on we were busy with classes, meetings, great food, great entertainment, our fund raiser charity auction and most importantly, great time renewing old friendships and making new friendships.  We think this was one of the best annual meetings we have attended. The Board and committees did a great job and deserve a big thank you.

Next year the meeting will be in Tennessee.  We left Mineola Thursday afternoon in route to our next adventure which will be the topic of our next post.