Happy Trails to You!

We're doing the get caught up thing this week...go to the dentist (Eldo today)....go to the eye doctor and get the glasses fixed...(Eldo), run errands (Eldo), go grocery shopping (Eldo and Jeannie), do a little Christmas shopping (Eldo and Jeannie), get a haircut (Eldo looks G-O-O-D!)  Tomorrow, it's my turn...go to the dentist, go get a haircut, do a little Christmas shopping, have lunch with a school chum, get an oil change...etc. etc...We've got a full schedule...I'm sure most full timers when they head back to their former home base have a lot of catching up to do and appointments to take care of. Since we have not been away from our home state of Indiana for a long time yet, we've been kinda hanging around taking care of these things before heading out for points south, then west after Thanksgiving and Christmas....going to the dentist always makes me worry about what would happen if out on the road if I broke a filling, broke a tooth, a cap fell off, etc. I'm one of those people who would panic to have anybody else but their hometown dentist work on their teeth, but I guess I would just have to trust the opinion of a local resident wherever we were to get a tooth fixed. Eldy says some people, if they are in the south or close to the border, go to Mexico. Heck, I'd be worried about getting BACK from Mexico, I wouldn't even be worrying about my teeth at that point!

The high today in Goshen was about 41 degrees. It's supposed to get down to 22 tonight. Earlier today we unhooked the water, drained the hose, and put it away. Although our bays are heated, the water hose would freeze at the campground tap and down the line if we didn't disconnect it. So we are self-contained totally this evening for water and sewer to prevent frost/freeze damage. We ran our heat pump today instead of using propane fuel as the temperatures were above freezing and that really helped save on propane consumption. Those heat pumps are a nice feature on the Tiffin Phaeton. Tomorrow Eldy takes the motor home up to General in Grand Rapids to get the levelers checked out, to get a dining chair replaced, to get the right vac system equipment (hopefully!), and our stove burner fixed before returning back to Goshen. We won't be hooking our water back up until our freshwater tank gets low, and then we will only hook up to the campground water supply to fill the tank as it is going to be in the 20's at night the next few nights.

Despite the cold, I hopped on my bike today to check out the Pumpkinvine Trail in Goshen near the fairgrounds. I just wanted to see if anybody else was a polar bear today and out on the trail...They weren't. Just me and the chickadees...I biked for about five miles total and really enjoyed it! Not much to see but the muskrat lodges in the farmers' ponds and lots of squirrels with nuts in their mouths. I did not know that some of the countryside you pass thru on your bike on the trail passes through the third largest Amish community in the United States. If anyone is interested in learning more about the trail, you can click on this link, Pumpkinvine Trail.  I guess the cold kind of froze my thought processes after I got back because as I was walking around the coach to get into one of the bays, WHAM!!!! I hit my head so hard on the corner of the slide, I thought my front teeth were going to fall out. What is it about slides that you can't see them until you are brutally reminded that they are there and so many of us bang our heads on them on a regular basis? I guess the tan paint job on ours blends in with the side of the RV so well that it's not so easy to see it sticking out. I swear our slides stick out further on this one than they did on the old coach. I'm going to have to ask Santa for some swim noodles to put on the RV slide corners after I take some aspirin for my headache and go lie down. I hope I didn't loosen my front crowns! (I've had those since second grade when I fell on the ice teeth first, trying to learn to skate backwards. There's a visual for you! That's where my dentist trauma/fear comes from.)  Good thing I'm going to the dentist tomorrow so he can check them out. I may be singing that Christmas song, "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" after tomorrow (arrrrgggghhh--I really don't like that song!)....See you later.....

Self-portrait of a winter biker