Hope You Had a Good One!

I hope everyone had a good July 4th holiday. We went camping this weekend, by ourselves, in our new motorhome. Not really new, but new to us. Actually, it's 12 years old. But it's our first one.

The resort business is what brought us to NC many years ago. Greg was in the timeshare/camping business for 10 l-o-n-g years. He was at Forest Lake for 5 of those years, and served as the East Coast Regional Manager. Thousand Trails has campgrounds all across the nation, from East to West Coast. That was pre-kids era. They would have loved it. I liked it. I would just lay out by the pool while my hubby worked. It was a weekend/holiday type of business, though. Being in the private sector of the resort business is not always so fun. When one has a paid membership to a certain locale, they seem to complain a whole lot. Nothing seems to satisfy them. It sort of turned us off from ever wanting to camp. Thousand Trails even offered to give us a FREE camper, to which we declined, swearing we would never be campers. Well, here we are, 10 years later, eating our words. You do that a lot when you have kids. Sooo, we just had the motorhome delivered right before Greg went out of town and haven't had a chance to do anything, so at the last minute we found a KOA campground off of I-77 that had the hookup we needed. Nothing fancy, but a great place to go and try everything out.

There's lots to learn about a home on wheels. How the sewer and water work, what works from the generator and what works from electricity, et cetera, et cetera. We have lots of friends that camp, by tent, pop-up, tag-along, and no matter which way you slice it, there's lots of loading and unloading that goes on. But that's any time you go on vacation, hotel or camping.

We had several criteria when it came to picking out a motorhome. It had to be used, as we never buy anything new; it had to have lots of storage; electric jacks; and it had to sleep six so if the kids' friends wanted to spend the night, or my parents wanted to tag along to the beach, they could. So here's a sneak peak, keeping in mind I cannot take a decent indoor picture, as you all know ~










A shower that Greg can actually fit in. That's always a plus :)



See what I mean, everything in your storage bin ends up on the porch!!! We cooked all of our meals outside, and ate outside the whole time too. To me that's the best part of camping. Nothing smells better than bacon and pancakes cooking outside first thing in the morning.

It was an all American weekend! Before we left I went to my friend's dad's house. He has a produce stand set up under the shade trees in his front yard and has quite the business. With good reason too. I bought the sweetest watermelon I've had in a long time, the biggest whopper of a tomato, you know the kind that takes up the whole sandwhich, blackberries for blackberry cobbler, and the sweetest honey ever from his honeybees. Me and the kids got to watch him make the honey. It was really cool. And we took it all camping with us. It was a hamburger and hotdog and homemade ice cream kind of weekend as well! All of our favorite 4th foods.



It was a small campground that we stayed at so the kids got to ride their bikes all over the place. We were literally 20 feet from the pool, the store, and the playground, so they could play while we cooked and piddled with the motorhome. Greg is actually loving it. I never thought I would see it. But it will sure make great memories for our family. Every family that I know that has camped or does camp loves it, and has great memories from it.

I suppose it will be a National Lampoons Vacation from here on out.

Happy Trails to you ... until we meet again ...