Hello Dolly!

We are now in Sevierville, Tennessee, the birthplace of Dolly Parton. They even have a statue of her on the courthouse lawn! We are next to Pigeon Forge, where Dollywood is located, and the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We drove through Pigeon Forge at dusk yesterday and it looked like a small southern Las Vegas strip! It's a very touristy area and we plan to indulge in as much of it as possible. It rained all morning, but if you buy tickets for Dollywood after three in the afternoon, you can use them the following day for free! We bought our tickets at about 3:01 or so and will be back tomorrow to hit the roller coasters that we missed and a few rides we didn't find the first time. The wooden roller coaster at Dollywood is awesome, not horribly rough, really long, and extremely fast. There was another coaster there that looked fun, with a really slow inverted section, the two vertical climbs and vertical drop however were completely hidden from the innocent victims boarding the ride. Tommorow will tell if my (Porter) neck survived.

We are trying to get the dogs used to us leaving them alone in the RV as we have been either taking them with us everywhere or only one of us goes out at a time. Not acceptable! We've left them twice now and the only harm has been extreme nose painting on our windows and unbelievable excitement when we return. We will update as anything happens. Stay tuned for Friday's review of Dolly's Dixie Stampede dinner show! Keep in touch everybody.

Lots of rain and Geocache

We searched for our first geocache today. The gps attempted to have us drive off road through private yards and properties, but we resisted and went our way (which really upset the gps lady). After about three hours and a very confusing lesson in coordinates while tangled in the deep woods of a West Virginia state park and being in the midst of a mountain bike race, success! We found the geocache! We were both tired, grumpy and very sweaty, not to mention that Rodeo was off lead for about five minutes and managed to find a big pile of stinky dung to roll in, but just as we were about to give up for the day, the clues all fell into place and we found the lock box. So on the way back to the Jeep through the woods, we rinsed Rodeo off in a stream crossing the trail but he still stunk to high heaven. The thunder storms here are driving us crazy! A hard hitting thunderstorm every day! This morning the winds picked up and we watched the awning get torn off of the camper in front of us. Can't wait to get to more stable weather and more level ground...

Almost Heaven

Well, once again we miscalculated time and distance so the trip to West Virginia took much longer than we anticipated. We have been averaging between 7.26 and 7.60 miles per gallon in terrain that is less than ideal for fuel mileage. We were pleased considering we are towing the jeep which only gets about 14 mpg or less on trips like this. I figure the jeep is getting about 1,000,000 mpg while being towed... not bad! The road leading to this campground was scary as hell, one lane, gravel, steep, and extremely twisty with no pull offs if someone should come from the other direction. It actually taught me a bit about the terrain we can handle with this rig.
After we got in and got set up, my sister Alison stopped by to spend the night. She brought the coolest pre-built foil pack meals to be grilled, chicken, onions, carrots, potatoes and zesty italian dressing wrapped in foil and cooked low and hot on the grill. Delicious! A word of caution though, do not dump the hot liquid on yourself when removing from the grill... Alison and her husband Allen gave us the most amazing little grill/cooker called a Cobb grill, we used it tonight, amazing! You can cook almost any meal with only 6-10 pieces of charcoal.
After Alison left, Vicki noticed the water pressure was almost nonexistent, (the toilet wouldn't even flush) and when I filled the dog bowl from an outside spigot, the water was bright orange. It turned out that there was a problem in the cistern last night and a lot of basic rusty crud was stirred up. It plugged up our water filter enough to stop the flow but after a good rinse and flush all is good again. Thank goodness for filters as our interior water was always crystal clear.
No sattelite reception again due to tree placement so I guess a portable dish is in our future. We do have 4 local channels though.
We are looking into geocaching, a sort of gps scavenger hunt for adults that looks like fun. Well, enough rambling, I'll post again if something interesting happens... Porter and Vicki

WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!!!

We arrived at Fox Den Acres campground in New Stanton Pa, today, otherwise known as the swamp... Hopefully it will drain well after the rain today. It is a nice little campground with a lot of attention paid to ducks and nice little ponds. There is a wild tom turkey here that has learned to beg from campers and will eat out of your hand. Vicki had some cheese on wheat crackers she didn't want and decided to try feeding the Velociturkey... She put a few crackers on the ground and the killer bird was more than pleased. Vicki then fed the Velociturkey by hand and he was still pleased. Then the crackers were gone and Vicki was still outside with a killer Velociturkey. Upon realizing Vicki had nothing left to offer, he decided the best way to get more food was to attack! He ran at her and chest bumped her leg twice before attacking with his spurs. Vicki escaped with a twelve inch scratch on her leg and was held captive by the watchful attacker for at least another half hour in the rv. The brochure says not to aggravate the birds... go figure.

Rodeo in Lake Erie after a storm.

Rodeo loves to retrieve sticks in water, but he gets overly ambitious at times with some success. The water was murky in these shots due to a previous storm.

The water heater is leaking!!

This morning we realized that the carpet in the bedroom was really wet. It's been raining here for two days, so we were sure that we had a ceiling leak. We did an inspection and discovered that the water heater was leaking under the bedroom drawers and onto the main carpet. We also discovered that we don't have the tools needed to cut an access hole through the 3/4 inch plywood to even reach the area of the leak. One trip to True Value Hardware later and we had access. Apparently I misjudged which tools we would need on this journey. We reached the leaking fitting and started to remove it when it promptly snapped off inside the water heater. It wouldn't have been a big deal if it wasn't 4 inches from the wall and accessed through an 8 X 4 hole two feet above it... 56 Miles later, courtesy of Home Depot, the cheap plastic fitting is gone and replaced with a metal one. It did take three attempts to seal all the fittings(it was a combination of fittings with four connections) before everything operated correctly and stayed dry. It was a long damn day, beer is my friend... Porter

Enjoying life

The water cleared up completely today and the campground manager took care of our no tv reception issue with a free standing dish that is not behind a tree. We spent the morning on the beach with the dogs, they are allowed to run off lead there and really enjoyed the water. Vicki was soaking up the sun and reading after filling a trash bag with things that blew onto the beach while I spent the time trying not to hook a dog while fishing. The dogs cannot for the life of them figure out where the fish go once you put them back in the water. Well, tough day... Porter

Made it to Lake Erie... Beautiful!

Farther than we thought and we learned a few things about planning and distance and dog bladders... all was good, they told us it was time and they got to go for a walk in the Allegheny State Forest while the rv sank into the soft shoulder. No problem, it didn't fall all the way over and drove out without a problem. I've been working 5 hours to get tv reception here with no luck, one tree next to us must be between the satellite and the dish. It is beautiful here and the dogs are thrilled with the dead fish on the beach! (Great rolling for supurb odor) Check out the photos, tiny campground, fantastic location!

July 6, 2009 Kutztown, Pa.

This is our last day in Kutztown. Tomorrow, we head to Westfield, NY to a beach on Lake Erie. The campground sounds lovely, but we can't find any reviews online. I guess we'll have to write our own. We will be there until the 21st of July.
This is just a test posting to see if people can actually access it! Let me know everyone!

Vicki