RVing With a Purpose

Saturday February 11, 2017

First, HAPPY BIRTHDAY Mama Ruby!! Celebrating 93 years today with our wishes for many more. We miss being there with you today but want you to know we have been thinking of you and hope it was a great day.

Sorry – no sunrise pictures today. Don’t blame us – it was very cloudy and we never saw the sun until we were many miles down the road from Maumelle. We hated to leave Maumelle, but really look forward to the disaster rebuild project in Elmore City. We left the park at 7:25, and stopped at a rest area down the road and had breakfast. Interesting rest area.

Can’t say we have ever seen a cemetery on the front lawn of a rest area before. We continued to follow I-40 west, crossing into Oklahoma and stopped at the Oklahoma Welcome Center. There we found our first geocache in the state of Oklahoma.

Before reaching Oklahoma City we turned south, taking state roads to Elmore City – population 697. We look forward to exploring the area and getting to know the people here.

Our team leaders Gary and Gwen greeted us when we arrived a little after 3:00 and assisted us in getting settled in the “RV park.” We are at Luster’s RV park which is in the parking lot of Luster’s Grocery Store in downtown Elmore City. The view out our windshield is a little different than back in Maumelle. Gwen and Gary invited us over for dinner and tonight we shared a wonderful evening with them having a delicious dinner and time of getting to know each other. Gary and Gwen are such a fun, sweet couple. This is going to be a great 3 weeks!  Can’t wait to get started.

When we signed up for this project in Oklahoma in February a number of people thought we were a little crazy. Certainly it would be quite different from wintering in Florida. We were cautioned about how cold it gets here in February. We came prepared for cold. Warmest sweaters, long johns, coats and RV antifreeze. Well, God once again just showed us his sense of humor. It was a bright sunny, hot, 87 degrees at 5:00 tonight.  I think that was about 20 degrees warmer than home. Don’t you just love it. It is predicted to be a little more seasonable tomorrow but we will remember the sense of humor.

Thank you all who are reading, following and commenting on our blog. It’s makes doing this fun, knowing you are actually reading it. Tomorrow we plan to go to church and then explore the area a little.

Friday, February 10, 2017

Today started with another beautiful sunrise. Sorry to bore you with another one but there is just no better way to start the day than watching a beautiful sunrise through the big windshield of your RV, while you do your daily Bible reading and devotion.

It was also cool because the past two days even the half of us who is the night owl has been up to see, enjoy and photograph the sunrise. It was a very nice start to a very nice day. After breakfast there was house cleaning to be done. Don’t know about the rest of you RVers but it always seems to rain when we are loading out. That means everything gets tracked in so you start the trip needing to clean. So today we cleaned inside, then washed the road grime off Fred and the truck.

Not a very interesting Friday but a nice one. After that we did a little geocaching in the park. We discovered some really nice trails and ended up hiking most of the afternoon.

It was a nice sunny day with moderate temps but the wind was still really blowing at times. Even gave us a chance to relax  by the river for a few minutes and take a selfie. Really don’t enjoy all the wind we are having and we have been told to expect more wind in Oklahoma. Oh well – guess we will adjust. At least the forecast for next week in Elmore City is for moderate temperatures.

We have said previously what a nice park this is. Vicki, one of our NOMADS friends, mentioned in her comments on yesterday’s blog, the medical sites they have in this park. We had noticed those the first day we were out walking but this afternoon while talking to the people in the office we found that those sites are full hookups (unlike the remainder which have no sewer). They have an arrangement with University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to reserve these sites for RVers with long term health problems requiring them to stay in the area. RVers undergoing chemo or radiation treatments and the like can have their patient advocate at the Medical Center send a letter to the Ranger requesting a site. Then for $24.00/night – $12.00 for those with National Park Access or Senior Pass – the patient and family can stay in their RV in the full hookup sites for the duration of their treatment. We were told that last year all 10 of these sites were frequently in use. What a wonderful option for RVers to have when faced with serious illness. Sitting in the comfort of your RV looking out over the Arkansas river would be a nice environment in which to recuperate. RVing is growing in popularity and with more and more people living fulltime in their rigs it would be nice to see other campgrounds start a similar policy.

There are many birds in this park along with some fat squirrels. This afternoon we had a visit from a crazy acting possum. It made some of the people in the park nervous so we took some pictures so we would have some “wild life” photos to include in the blog for you to enjoy. The possum actually made it all the way across the road alive. That’s about it for today. We will be heading out early in the morning for Elmore City, OK. Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Wow – it got cold last night. We checked the forecast just before going to bed and with a new predicted low of 29 we decided to put the light in the basement to keep things from freezing. It was 32 degrees this morning with an absolutely gorgeous sunrise over the water.

Thank you God for a wonderful start to our day! It did not warm up very fast so we stayed in and just really enjoyed looking through the windshield out over the Arkansas river, watching boats go by, and all the squirrels and birds playing here in the park. We also worked on initializing this blog. It took a little while since for several reasons we decided to move to WordPress instead of continuing with Blogger. It took us a while to learn how to make it do what we wanted and we will probably be tweaking it for a while. Eventually we will probably move our previous blogs to WordPress as well but for now there are links on the right side of this page so if you ever want to revisit any of them they are there. There is also a comment link on the left side of the page. Let us know what you think.

After the blogging, we rested, surfed and read. We did get out during the warmest part of the day and got our walking/exercise done. This is such a pretty park. It is very easy to forget that we are only about 5 miles from I-40. It is so quiet and peaceful here. God bookended our day with a beautiful sunset.Tomorrow is predicted to sunny and a good deal warmer. We hope to do some more exploring of the park.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

And on the blog again. We have had several people request that we restart the blog, so today with the start of another trip we will restart and see how it goes. Our purpose will be to share our travels and life with our family and friends. Remember you can leave comments/ask questions and we will respond. If we have a particularly “boring” day we may take that time to update you on some things we have done since we last blogged at the end of our Alaska trip in Sept of 2014. Wow – sounds like a long time ago but also seems like yesterday. Absolutely yes, we would love to go back but there are also many places in the lower 48 we still need to visit – lots of national parks/monuments/historical sites yet to be seen.

So, yesterday afternoon we pulled Fred to Aunt Helen’s and plugged in for the night. We spent the night there so we could pull out early today. However, when the alarm went off at 5:00 this morning we were under a dense fog advisory and it was very foggy and drizzling. We waited until 6:25 to leave allowing a little of the fog to clear and it get a little lighter.  Traffic was heavy getting to I-65 but no problems. Then onto I-22 all the way to Memphis. We stopped at the Mississippi Welcome Center and had breakfast and then we stopped at Sherman RV to visit and see about topping off with propane. No propane there so will probably top off Saturday before we get to Elmore City. If we have a full tank of propane we are much less likely to have really cold weather. From Memphis we took I-40 west.

We complain sometimes about our roads at home but man there were some rough interstates in MS, TN and AR. We stopped just west of Little Rock at Maumelle Park, a Corps of Engineers campground, about 4pm.

Maumelle Park was where we had planned to spend the week before our NOMADS annual meeting last September but we had to cancel those plans. It is a really nice park with really nice volunteers working registration. Beautiful setting, with large sites and nice spacing between. We would definitely stop here again. We plan to stay until early Saturday morning when we will move on to Elmore City, OK for our next NOMADS Project. It should be a nice little break before beginning our new work. We enjoyed a beautiful sunset and settled in for a quiet although very windy evening. A very nice day to start another year of travel and work.