Daley Travels

As much as I love my husband and daughter, I am also a person who values 'alone' time.  It's one of the reasons I have no problem with Mike taking his 2 or 3 week motorcycle trips and leaving me home.  Just means when I want to take off alone he can't say a word about it (not that he would anyway...).

After going-on 6 months of living on the road in our motorhome, it's time for some of that 'alone' time for me.  And thanks to KnitPicks and my pattern sales there, I will be spending an entire week - alone - in a condo on the beach in Crescent Beach, FL come mid-October.  To say that I'm excited would be an understatement.  :-)

I have great and glorious plans for the week - and I'm sure I will accomplish a fraction of what I'd like.  The time will fly by and it's already crossed my mind that I may want to do this on a regular basis.  Of course, money is always an issue, so there's even more reason to continue to work on my pattern designs and continue to expand the reach of Pam Daley Designs!

I'm hoping to finish up SEVERAL patterns that are currently in process, develop some specific ideas for new ones and - maybe - find time to work on this website.  I've wanted to redesign the layout to make it a bit more user-friendly and Mike came across another site that is set up exactly how I want.  It's a major job though - one that almost requires taking this one down completely and starting over.  After 3+ years, there are a lot of posts, pictures, journals here at Daley-Travels and I don't want to lose them.  So even if I were able to get the new format up and working, it would take some time to add the older content back in.  But I really would like to do that.

After I finish up just a few more patterns...

We are settled in at a campground in Statesboro, GA for the long holiday weekend.  I thought the extra traffic this afternoon was because of that but it turns out there is a BIG college football game here tomorrow.  And let me tell ya - they LOVE their college football in Georgia!  When we got here the guy in the office told us not to plan on going out to dinner tomorrow night - might be a little difficult finding someplace not totally packed with excited football fans.  Which would be okay, but I think I'll pass.  Sounds like a good excuse to not go ANYWHERE tomorrow and just relax with the air conditioner running full blast.  It was 97 here today and more of the same expected for the weekend.  And here I was hoping for a little excitement - or at least rain! - from Earl.  Oh well.

Last night we stayed in Cross Hill, South Carolina at the Moon Landing RV Park & Marina.  Not a super fancy park with the biggest, fanciest bathrooms, an enclosed rec room with 90,000 video games, or a gigantic flat screen TV.  But I'd stay there again in a heartbeat - and if we hadn't had reservations here we would have just hung out there for the weekend.  Why?  Pure Southern Hospitality and friendliness, that's why. 

As soon as we drove into the park Mike (the owner) came out of the office building to say hi to my Mike.  Asked if we had reservations, when we said no he waved us on in with a "we'll find something for you". 

By the time the 2 Mikes had walked around the park looking at the available sites so we could choose one, I'd had time to talk to the owner's wife and daughter in the office.  Lots of ideas for places to see - locally and in Florida.  Directions to the local grocery store, repeated offers for us to stop in for whatever we needed and I'd never felt so welcome!  We had a great spot - level, easy in and out, close to the laundry room (thank you!) and fantastic wifi. 

But that's not even all - Lake Greenwood is right there and they offered to let us use kayaks to explore the lake a bit.  If you know me you know there was no way I'd be getting in a kayak, but Mike and Sarah did!  Yup - little couch potato Sarah paddled a kayak around that lake!  No extra fees - just some of that Southern Hospitality I mentioned. 

If you find yourself in the western park of South Carolina and need a place to park the RV, check this place out!  You have to drive past several other campgrounds to get there - but don't be tempted by them, trust me.  It's worth following those country roads around for a while to get to Moon Landing.  While you're there do some fishing - they've even got a live bait vending machine!  And don't forget to tell them the Daley's sent you!

In just a few days we will have officially been full-timers for 5 months.  On one hand I can hardly believe it's already been that long, but at the same time Colorado seems like SUCH a long time ago.  Already the campgrounds are blending together and it's funny the things that stand out in my memory.  The campground with the ice cream social night - the one with the weird owner who smoked a stogie - the one that charged high KOA rates but forgot they weren't a KOA anymore - the one with the pet buffalo.  Stuff like that. 

Along with these random occurrences and memories come some well-learned truths.  As we were driving from somewhere in Michigan to Van Buren, OH today I thought about some of them:

• No matter how much time we plan on taking to get from Point A to Point B, it's not enough.  Even if we think we've built in lots of 'putzing' time, it's not enough.  Double the travel time estimate.
• Even though no one west of the Rockies uses cash for anything except possibly illegal drug purchases, in the midwest it's not uncommon to find campgrounds and stores that don't accept credit or debit cards.  They'd rather take a check from someone who lives 5 states away than to take credit cards.

• Campground ratings in the directories aren't everything.  We've stayed in high rated ones with really rude people that no amount of fancy bathrooms could make up for.  Conversely, we've stayed in lower rated ones that had spacious sites, friendly folks, and were just fine.  BUT....if the directory says they are a combination 'trailer park and RV campground', RUN the other direction. 
• Just because some places say they have free public wifi, it doesn't actually mean you can access it from anywhere other than the front doorway of the office. 
• Campground laundry rooms with large washing machines and dryers, that don't charge extra for hot or warm wash water, and that have dryers you can use for just 10-15 minutes for touch-up drying are not to be wasted.  If the campground has them, DO WASH.  Doesn't matter if you just did it 2 days ago, do it again. 

Personally I've also learned that I brought too much stuff.  I won't speak for others in the family - they need to come to terms with their own pack-ratness on their own.  But when we head to Alaska next year I will be off-loading a few things I thought were necessary this time around.  Not yarn though.  :-)

After our week on the shores of Gitche Gumee, we moved up the road to Sault Ste. Marie – Michigan side.  We’re leaving here tomorrow and once again I’m wishing we could stay longer somewhere. 

As Mike has posted before, we like just about every town we visit and usually can imagine ourselves living there.  But I think this little city is top of my list.  There is just something about this place that makes me feel comfortable.  The town is easy to navigate (aside from the summer plague of road construction), they have a local yarn shop (The Happy Hooker!), the retail stores I prefer (in other words – something other than Wally World), a cute downtown area with all kinds of interesting looking shops and these REALLY big freighters that cruise the St. Mary’s River and navigate the Soo Locks.

As we were driving around yesterday we also spotted all these yellow ribbons on utility poles up and down most of the streets.  Turns out the local 1437^th Engineer Battalion (Army National Guard) is coming home from Iraq and the town has turned out the welcome mat.  I know it’s hard to see in the picture, but there are ribbons on all those poles down the street.  Trust me, it looked very cool in person. 

I’m hoping we have an opportunity to come back here and hang out for a few months – preferably not January, February or March though. 



I needed to visit the local post office this morning to mail off an order for my Etsy shop, so I decided to also check out one of the local yarn shops - Uncommon Threads.  I don't know why I do that to myself.  I walked around with several skeins of yarn, putting this one back, picking up that one - all the while hearing the siren call of some other skein across the room!  Those of you who knit or crochet know the feeling - you spot a skein and as you pick it up, feel the softness and imagine the how the colors will blend into stitches you tell yourself "this would be BEAUTIFUL as a <fill in the blank>!!"  Never mind that you've already got so many projects in your queue that you could go a year without buying another piece of yarn. 

While I have the wonderful built-in excuse that I'll be leaving the area so if I want this, I have to get it now; I also have the built-in limiting factor of space.  So while I imagined all kinds of cool things I could make today, I only walked out of the store with yarn to make my granddaughter her birthday present.  I did good.  :-)

On my way back to our RV park I deliberately missed the turn onto the highway and explored the town of Marquette.  It's a cute downtown area and I would have enjoyed exploring it a bit on foot, but I have to say that the parking sucks.  When you have a dirt lot across the street from the Ramada Inn for visitor parking there, you know they have some work to do to make the area more 'user friendly'.  They do have a wonderful new development right along the lake - big fancy condos and such.  They'll have a gorgeous view, that's for sure.

We have one more full day here and then we'll be heading up the road to Sault Ste. Marie.  The city sits right on the border between the US and Canada so we may walk across just to say we did.