Amish Country and Amish Buggies

 Twin Mills Campground is in Howe, IN. We are about half an hour from Elkhart, IN.  It's 37 miles to Best Buy. Sparky has an Apple computer with a malfunctioning keyboard/spacer bar. Looks like we will head there today to see if Best Buy geeks can fix it. (The Apple store is closed.)

Back to Twin Mills...when we last left you, we had pulled into (BACKED in) a very challenging site with the help of our new RVing friend, Larry. He's a great guy, and a wonderful reminder of why we enjoyed being out on the road the last time...RVers are helpful, friendly, and you make almost instant new friends...There's no shortage of wonderful, helpful people out there when you get into a jam. Here's our beautiful site...Tight trees on the other side.

We made it in, and as we said, we ain't movin' for two whole weeks. 

The campground is gorgeous. The pines are HUGE!

Twin Mills has 551 sites...seasonals, full hookups, a nice pool, cabins, and a beach on a decent sized lake, 30-50amp, and all kinds of activities you can imagine. Not all of them are running because of Covid, but there is lots to do. There are some little hiking trails that wind in and around the park. We love all the shade provided by the trees, but it can be a challenge with big rigs getting into a site as we have mentioned. This is a park you want to drive thru to the site in a car first to see if you can get your rig around and in. Check out all the activities and amenities thru the link mentioned above. 

Twin Mills is in the heart of Amish country. You are 20 min. from the Shipshewanna Flea Market and auctions, about 20-30 min. from the Elkhart RV Hall of Fame and museum and some terrific Amish restaurants and donut shops. (Rise and Roll for one...) We have been shopping for Indiana sweet corn, tomatoes, and other fresh vegetables from Amish market stands. Indiana sweet corn rivals any sweet corn in the rest of the country, in Sparky's humble opinion. 

Sparky loves seeing all the Amish buggies and the little kids riding in the wagons, or even fishing boats being pulled by horse and buggy! They even have hitching posts at most of the grocery stores and hardware stores for the Amish.

Sparky got to thinking about Amish buggies... Did you know....???

Shops buy LED components and assemble the lights based on a turn signal system developed by Lancaster, PA Amish builders over 50 years ago. Bulbs stay on low beam during normal use, but turning on the turn signal activates a brake-light style system that turns on the high beams. To power the lights, there is a single 20 volt/6 amp battery, the kind that powers an electric drill. There may be a marine battery in the back under the seat to operate the signals.You gotta be careful driving around in Amish country. Share the road and go slow when encountering buggies and wagons. 

The main part of the body of the buggy is fiberglass. Aluminum parts are added to the buggy that get a lot of wear like door sills. Everything else is oak or ash wood framing that gets upholstered. If a buggy has the latest technology, it has thermally modified wood. That's wood that has been cooked or heat treated down to about almost 0% moisture. That stabilizes it and makes it really hard to rot.

Some buggies have propane heaters, cupholders, and/or speedometers. Average cost of a buggy is about 8-10 thousand. The most common buggy is the two seater, designed for four people. Amish families usually have more than one style of buggy, each for different purposes. Buggies are sturdy, well built, and last a long time, as much as 20-30 years. Some trade their buggies in every 5-8 years. Some buggies will get rebuilt and still be running 40-50 years from now.

Amish traffic jam!

Most buggy wheels are fiberglass and have rubber linings. The rubber lining can blow off just like a flat tire and needs replaced about once a year.

So there ya go...probably more than you wanted to know about Amish buggies.  We are REALLY enjoying the early fall weather. Unusually cool at night for August in Indiana...in the fifties! Tomorrow, Sparky heads for the Pumpkinvine bike trail...a wonderful trail thru Amish farm country....see you there!

Back Home Again in Indiana

 We left Tennessee last Thursday, and because it was a long drive and we are older now, (Sparky isn't afraid to admit it these days with all her aches and pains), we stopped off and spent the night at the Indianapolis KOA campground in Greenfield, IN. Beautiful campground, very friendly staff, sites are spacious, and yes, KOA is not cheap. Our pull thru site was 67.00 a night with taxes...above budget, but when you are tired, and ready to stop, one night with amenities is ok.....They will even deliver Hunts Brothers Pizza to your RV site. We almost did that....

On to Indiana...short drive to Twin Mills Campground in Howe, IN, a Thousand Trails park. With our TT membership, our two weeks stay is "free"....no sewer hookup but water and 30 amp electric. That means you can only run one AC (this rig has 2) and you have to be careful with the electric load. This park was to be our first back in attempt with the fifth wheel, and Eldo had been nervous about it for two weeks. And rightly so....because 1. the campground is heavily wooded

with massive pine trees, and 2. the site the campground picked for us had trees close together and little space to work with....when you have a Thousand Trails membership, the majority of the time, the park gets to decide where you are going to be, depending on your size. But they will work with you. The office guy took one look at our rig, and said he thought he'd better go check out the assigned site. He came back and said, "Nope, that's not going to work." He picked out another site.....what you can't see is there is a very narrow park road in front of the site with thick hedges, so you can't go very far forward. LOTS of backing up, going forward, and backing up.

A half hour later, with the help of a super nice neighbor in a cute little red Minnie Winnie--that's a small, cute Winnebago travel trailer, (a big shout out to Larry with a BIG thank you,) he guided us in, and we are staying put for the entire two weeks. The rig ain't going nowhere, because it was a doozy of a tight spot to get into. We can't get our awnings for 4-6 weeks, so it's ok that the rig is going stay put. We asked Larry if he was going to be around when we are ready to pull out. He thinks he is. What a guy!

Well, Blogger is acting very funky right now...Sparky was going to tell you all about the park, but it will have to wait till next time...See ya!

Bottoms Up! the Jack Daniels Distillery Tour

Before we left the Texas T campground, we decided to do the Jack Daniels Distillery tour in Lynchburg, TN. It was about a 30 mile drive one way from the campground to the distillery, but well worth the drive! 

Beautiful Tennessee hills and valleys, so much greenery and trees after living in Florida which is beautiful in its own right, but this Indiana girl misses the forests and lush greenery. We got to Lynchburg right when Jack Daniels opened at 10:00 AM. They had just started the tours up again, the day before, so no crowds and we were the only ones on the tour! There are a couple of different tours, a tasting touring a walking tour. As we are not whiskey drinkers, we took the walking tour, which was 15.00 a person. Because of Covid, there were no inside the building walk throughs except for a couple of videos inside small rooms or walkways, and a trip inside the tasting room where lots and lots of barrels line the walls to the ceiling.

The tour was VERY interesting...some of the things Sparky remembers without taking notes were....Jack Daniels, a real person, was a rare individual for his time. He forged a strong friendship and partnership with an African American named Nathan "Nearest" Green. Nathan was the first African American master distiller. They remained friends and business partners for life.

Jack was a little guy, 5ft. 4" tall with a size 4 shoe. 

Eldy at the cave spring

Jack Daniels whiskey is distributed worldwide and the entire amount is made right there in Lynchburg, TN. which is a DRY county! The whiskey is made uniquely from a process of using their own charcoal made from sugar maple trees and a natural cave spring water, rye, barley, and corn, and a unique mellowing method. Every single bottle is made from the cave spring water. The recipe hasn't changed since Jack Daniels first started making it back in 1866. The whiskey is matured in uninsulated buildings. In summer, warm weather forces whiskey into the cracks into the barrels, and in winter, the whiskey contracts back into the barrel. This is how it gets the color and flavor. They wait FOUR YEARS. A TASTE tester checks the whiskey, if it's not ready, back it goes for more time. It gets tested again at ages 5 and 6 years. (Wouldn't you like to have THAT job? asks Eldo.) Maximum maturation time is 8 years. Before it is barreled, the whiskey is filtered through 10 FEET of sugar maple charcoal, kind of like a Brita water filter pitcher. The charcoal is made from pallets soaked in unaged whiskey and then burned to make the charcoal. 

sugar maple pallets

The barrels are very cool...cured sugar maple as we said, and an experienced barrel maker can make up to 250 barrels a day! Each barrel is used only one time, then recycled. You can buy a barrel of whiskey for $10,000 a pop. Anybody who buys their own barrel gets their name engraved in a special tasting room at the distillery. The biggest spenders? Members of the military.

It's the only distillery in the world that has its own fire department.

burning the pallets

Jack died from kicking his safe with his foot. True story! He injured his foot when he got made because he couldn't remember the combination to his safe one morning. The toe got infected, and they had to amputate it. They couldn't get rid of the infection, so he then had his foot cut off. The infection continued to rage, and he lost his leg up to the hip. He died from complications of the last infection of blood poisoning at 61. 

visitors center

The tour guides are excellent, the visitors' center is beautiful, and so are the grounds. If you didn't want to take the tours, the visitor center alone gives you tons of information.....We highly recommend this tour! 

The town of Lynchburg is a cute little town...just a little town square with lots of Jack Daniels memorabilia and cute little shops selling the usual variety of tee shirts, handicrafts, and ice cream. Hope you enjoyed this tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery. We found it fascinating.

beautiful visitors center

Tomorrow....it's Hoosier Time! Time to head for Indiana! Sparky and Eldo's home state...Sparky's home city is South Bend/Mishawaka, and Eldo's home city is Elkhart/Webster IN. We will see you there!

Our Second Mishap....

They say things happen in threes....Was that supposed to be good things? Sigh....We got our awnings taken off at the Alabama COE park and we were on our way the next day.

We get to Tennessee and unhitch, and here we go with the leveling system. It's automatic leveling on a Jayco Pinnacle 5th wheel....not a problem until today...Front jacks down? Check. Rear jacks down?  Check. Middle stabilizer jacks down? Nope. Three times we tried, and kept getting blinking code red flashing on our leveling system pad. Did the old "if all else fails, reboot" too. Calls in to Jayco and Lippert (the manufacturers of the jacks) and it looks like it's repair time. Jayco is in Middlebury, and we are headed to Indiana at the end of the week, so we will try to get our jacks straightened out and the awnings replaced. In the mean time, we can have our slides out as the front and rear jacks are ok, so we are settled in for two nights at the Texas T Campground in Cornerstone, TN. Great reviews for this park and really nice staff.

It's a small park,  40 sites, gravel and level, and big rig friendly. If you are over 40 feet like we are, you are automatically assigned to a premium site which is longer and a little more money. Nice spacing between the sites. Nice picnic tables, great, friendly staff. We are here for two nights while we visit with Eldy's daughter and family. They have several discounts available, and with Good Sam's discount, we paid 67.43 before sales tax and occupancy tax, which is charged in TN. (Our campground goal is under 40.00 a night or lots better.) We used to be able to stay in decent campgrounds easily for under 30.00 a night, using commercial campgrounds and our Thousand Trails membership package as much as possible, but campground costs have increased in the last few years since we were full timing before, 8 years ago. (For anyone new to RVing, electric/water and sewer are part of the campground site charge.)

There is decent wifi, too! A little road noise from I-65 behind us, but no problem with AC's running plus a small fan we always have running all night long. They have a tiny laundry room--one washer, one dryer, and the dryer wasn't working very well while we were there. 2.00 to wash, 2.00 to dry. We don't have a washer/dryer on board, even with this size rig, so we are at the mercy of campground laundry facilities.We don't mind, rather, SPARKY doesn't mind, because the laundry cabinet sans washer and dryer, is her craft storage. Isn't Eldo a nice guy for not minding? Everybody nod their heads, please. :-)

PS. We are winning the war with the ants. (see previous post about ants marching.) We left the Alabama campground yesterday, haha!

See you next time at the Jack Daniels Distillery for a tour!

Our First Major Mishap....

We have been at Gunter Hill Corps of Engineer park for five beautiful days. The weather has been very very hot, but not as humid as Florida.  We spent the days researching where to go and getting reservations for future sites, planning for Labor Day weekend, sitting outside and reading. We decided to head into town for a bite to eat. You really have to drive 15 miles one way to get to a ton of places to shop and eat, but we don't mind. It helps break up the day a little bit.

We had a terrific early dinner at Jim 'n Nick's Bar B Q in nearby Prattville, AL. It's a chain, but a VERY good one. They have the most delicious cheddar biscuits that melt in your mouth, and fantastic potato salad as well as decent BBQ.

We came back home to the rig, Eldo went inside, Sparky went for a bike ride. On the way back from her ride, here comes Eldo in the truck, yelling, "STOP! STOP!" By the urgency in his voice, Sparky thought something had happened to one of his kids or Sparky's kids, or somebody died.

It turned out that our awnings had taken a huge hit from a falling pine tree limb next to our site. A 15 foot limb came crashing down and took out both awnings. Eldo was sitting inside and he heard it. Sparky had just left for her bike ride. It was a perfectly calm day...zero wind.  A rotten limb just decided to let go and caught both our awnings. 

 It looks like we will be delayed in leaving now, until we can get the insurance company to let us know what to do. The metal braces are destroyed. We can't zip tie anything. We can barely open the front door. We are so lucky that we weren't sitting outside in our normal spots a little further out from the door. We are so lucky that it's just the awnings. People from several sites immediately came over to see what they could do. A man named Michael Hall came over because he saw the limb fall, and climbed up onto the roof to see if there was any damage. Several others came over and said to please ask for help if we needed help clearing the limbs or taking down the awnings. It's a wonderful community of people in the RVing world. That's one of the things we love about full timing. You think it's just going to be the two you, but pretty soon, you are making friends almost immediately. And everybody pitches in to help in an emergency.

Just yesterday, we dealt with a water leak and had to call a mobile tech guy to come out. We looked and looked for the source of the leak. The water was in puddles in the storage bay, the water lines from the bathrooms and kitchen were dry. It turned out to be a combination of a little too high water pressure at our site, AND a leaky valve in the wet bay. If you are ever at Gunter Hill Campground and need a mobile tech, don't hesitate to call  CT Mobile RV, serving the central Alabama area. Tim Payne was wonderful, and really knew his stuff. He checked both toilets, asked thoughtful questions, and then traced the leak to the wet bay access panel. Thank you, Tim! We're going to call him to see if he can help us get the awning off....stay tuned and we'll let you know  how it turns out.  We are supposed to leave for Tennessee tomorrow, but that's probably not going to happen. We are still waiting to get an insurance adjuster assigned to us--two business days, Progressive said.

Bye for now.....

The Ants Go Marching Two by Two, Three by Three and More...

 We drove to our next destination, Gunter Hill Campground, a Corps of Engineer park in Montgomery, AL, which is part of the Alabama River Lakes area. We were here twice before, when we were full timing in our motorhome over eight years ago. 

It's a beautiful park, full of trees and wide open spaces for lots. Corps of Engineer parks (COE) are almost always near bodies of water or beside a dam. The parks are well thought out. The sites are very very spacious and easy to get in and out of. Every COE park is different of course, as far as amenities, so some have playgrounds and restrooms, full hookups, etc, but that can vary from COE park to park. The best thing about the parks besides their roominess and beauty, is the cost, which is half price with a senior pass. So we are paying 13.00 a night for this.....picnic table, grill provided, and a fire pit on site 49. But it's too hot for our first campfire, says Sparky. (Yet she went around collecting firewood anyway, laughs Eldo.)

Gunter Hill has 142 sites with electric hookups. Sites 1-75 are newly renovated sites with concrete pads and sewer. They have flush toilets, showers, drinking water, a dump station and laundry facilities. The showers and laundry are currently not available due to Covid. The campground is situated on Catoma Creek in a forest of hickory and pine. It's a little out in the boonies, the nearest town with plenty of shopping is about 15 miles. 

Because it's a mild climate here, the campground is open year round. There are no trails to speak of, but you can walk around this beautiful campground or ride a bike and easily get some miles under your belt. There doesn't seem to be a single site that would be difficult to pull in or back in the Catoma Loop of the park. 

But Sparky, what about the ANTS????? Well-l-l-l...what can we say? We are in a wooded campground and when we pulled into our lot and got settled, Sparky noticed a line of ants in front of the front door, and followed the line up the stairs and into the slides, OH, NO! It's an invasion....Tiny little ants, they look like sugar ants, but we're not sure...Off to the store we go for ant traps and spray....sigh....We'll keep you posted on who wins the infestation war....Bye for now! 

Keepin' It Real version2

Wel-l-l-l...we made it to the Panhandle our first trip out. What a day it was! We made some mistakes, nothing major, but boy, do we need practice and adjusted checklists!

Sparky made checklists, but they quickly went out the window for a variety of good reasons...we got hitched up ok, but had trouble getting the water pump to work once we turned off the park electric. It turned out that we had to switch over from city water to rig water by turning a configuration of knobs in the wet bay which are very well labeled inside the wet bay. Problem #1 solved...and we set out. Problem #2...our first diesel fuel stop at a LOVE'S truck stop. We pulled up in trucker lane, which we now need to use because we are so big. The pump had a previous purchase on it which wouldn't clear. Sparky kept going back and forth between the office about three times. They thought we were doing the sequencing of the pump handles wrong. FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later, they determined the pump was faulty.  Around we went to another pump. Success! We got our fuel and DEF fuel, which is a cleaner to clean our exhaust to make it more environmentally friendly. By the way, for any traveling RVers, DEF fluid is very corrosive and comes out FAST from the pump, so a word of caution when you are pumping it. If you spill any, you have to wash it off immediately.

Problem #3--we carefully had planned our route and campground stops along the way. Tonight we were supposed to stay at a park called A Stone's Throw RV park, just off of I-10, in Lamont, FL. We use a travel app called Trip Wizard which is excellent. The reviews did not mention any problems, and the park description said "big rig friendly". HA! It should have said, "smaller big rig friendly"! We weren't going to fit, it was too tight for us to maneuver through the small park, the sites were very uneven gravel sites, so we left. This was at 5:00PM. The great thing about technology is you can find RV parks and call them while driving down the road, that is, if you have a well charged up phone. 

Problem #4--Sparky is used to a motorhome. She forgot that some essentials were needed to be moved from the 5th wheel to the truck, because once you close up all the slides, you can't get back to access parts of the fifth wheel when the slides are all in. Guess what Sparky and Eldo forgot put in the truck? Phone charging cables....Sparky's phone was dying fast, and we had to find another RV park Sparky was starting to panic because Eldo was relying on her to find another place to stay. Eldo was being SUPER patient about it, but Sparky was about ready to cry. (I didn't know that! says Eldo) So he pulls into rest stop, and by the time Sparky got back from the restroom, he had another park lined up and it was a terrific solution! FOUR hundred miles later, much more than we had planned driving, we landed at the Hitching Post, a delightful, charming little park in Cottondale, FL.

We found this park using the RV Life app....it has discounts for all military, first responders, seniors, and summer rates. Free firewood! The owners are wonderful and super friendly. The sites are level gravel, and it's a small park with the old campground feel we knew as kids. There are pull thru sites up to 110 feet long. 24 sites, that's it, but full hookups, 30-50 amps on every site. Some sites have fire rings. The sites are spaced nicely.

There is a little lake with two little paddleboats for use, along with two dog parks with comfortable swings to watch your fur babies play. You can fish in the pond/lake for big mouth bass, catfish, and more, no license needed. They have a horse and donkey as well.....Who like to be fed.

The whole park is very charming...no amenities but Love's Truck Stop and McDonald's is right outside the park, along with highway 231, which will make for a little noise at night, but we didn't hear it with the AC's running.

Prices are very reasonable...Passport America accepted, Escapees, veterans, and RV washing is allowed! (That's a rarity).

We loved this little park, and would definitely stay here again....Today we leave for Alabama, for a Corps of Engineer park....off we go!