And So We Move Again...

I continue to be amazed at the "Catch 22" situations we end up getting into with club memberships. We were staying at Potlatch RV Park which is a reciprocal club with both RPI (Resort Parks International) and ROD (Resorts of Distinction), both of which we have memberships with. They both have a rather strange rule which provides that you may only stay 7 nights -- instead of the usual 14 -- at any resort within 125 air miles of your home address. I guess it kinda makes sense if you are a part-time RVer -- they don't want you hanging out at a nearby camp-site all summer.

However, if you are a full time RVer, what difference does it make where your mail (and address of record) goes? They also have another rather obscure rule (at least the camp manager here had never heard of it before!) that you cannot combine the days you have with RPI and ROD! or use them one after the other!

What it amounts to is that Potlatch RV has several empty sites. We cannot move to our new campsite at Riverbend RV until August 4 when they have an opening (unless one guy moves out this weekend like he's been hinting to the managers...). We would have liked to just stay at Potlatch -- and pay for the extra days -- and the manager would have liked to fill one of his empty slots. But, both the ROD and RPI reservations people on the telephone told him that he would be voiding his contract with them (though one of the operators had told us that the campground could waive the 125 mile rule...) if we did so...

So we packed up and moved a half hour or so down the road to park in front of Daughter Mary Mae's house. It isn't ideal since it's a pretty narrow dead end road. Fortunately, there is only one house on the road beyond theirs, so we're not inconveniencing too many people. We have an extra 50 amp extension cord -very heavy - that we store here so that we can plug in at the end of the house.

 Son-in-law Scott and Granddaughter Claire are off tonight to Blackrock/Rexville Amphitheatre for another performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. MM is the stage manager, so she went along as well to deal with any emergencies that come up as well as last-minute details for tomorrow's Iron Man when the troupe will perform all three shows starting at 1 PM.

Niagara Lazy Lakes RV Resort

We got an early start this morning, but it was still hot when we arrived at Niagara Lazy Lakes. We spent most of the drive on I-90, paying another $24.35 in tolls. We bought diesel at a Flying J in Pembroke, New York, paying $3.97 per gallon (using the RV Plus card 8 cent discount). That's the most we've paid for diesel in quite a while! I understand that New York has very high diesel taxes...

Niagara Lazy Lakes is a very large RV park. I saw Site number 378 on the map, but I'm not sure that's all there is. We had made reservations through our Resorts of Distinction (ROD) membership a couple of weeks ago, but the fellow at the Security Booth had no record of it! I showed him the confirmation email on my iPhone, but he said there was no confirmation number... Then I showed him my ROD card and the whole situation changed. He became very affable and welcomed us and assigned us a site. Turns out they have been having trouble with their Lazy Lakes members just showing up without reservations and expecting a site "like they used too, before we got so big...!"

The price is right -- you can't beat zero -- but, they only have a few sites with sewer hook-ups and of course, all of them are full. Since we are staying here a week, we'll either have to pull out and go dump, or pay $7 to have the honey wagon come empty our tanks.

These are long back-in sites and we first set up way back. Then discovered we did not have a good shot across the next row of trees for the satellite, so pulled up the jacks and moved forward about eight feet. Forry thought at first it hadn't been enough, but the dish finally latched on and we are getting good reception.

We will probably lay low tomorrow, then start exploring the Niagara Falls area. I can hardly wait!

Back to New York

LOTS of miles today! Probably many more than we had really planned. It was $4.95 ($4.50 for Auntie Violet and another  $.45 for the Toad) for the hour or so of driving it took to leave the state of Massachusetts. Then we paid another $31.60 for the tolls in New York!

We were still driving through lots of trees.

The country seems to be a little more open, with more small farms and some fields of corn.

We are staying at Bass Lake Resort near Parish, New York. It's part of our Resorts of Distinction membership, so the nice thing is there is no charge. We'll be here tonight and the next two nights before we move on to the Niagara Falls area.

We drove right at 300 miles today, which is way more than we like. Forry is really tired tonight and I'm sure we'll be sleeping in tomorrow!

Making Reservations

Forry and I usually fly pretty much by the seat of our pants. We're not real in to making reservations, partially because we don't like to plan that far ahead. But, we realize we are in unfamiliar territory at a very busy time of year. So the last week or so, we've been looking through the various directories looking for where we might want to stay during December.

We have some friends in Tallahassee that we'd like to visit, so we were looking for a place near there. Through our home resort, Neskowin Creek in Oregon, we have memberships in both Resorts of Distinction and (ROD) Resort Parks International (RPI). ROD only has a couple of parks in Florida, but RPI has quite a few. We finally decided to try Pine Lake RV Park near Fountain. Unfortunately, while it is an RPI park, it is not an RPI Preferred park.  Which means we could only stay there one week using the $10 per night rate (plus their $5 per night electricity charge!) instead of the usual two weeks.

But, that will work. If we leave Styx River on December 6th, we would be at Pine Lake until the 13th. Then we want to be somewhere fairly close to our friends Bill and Leslie who are settled in at Mouse Mountain RV Park near Disney World. I spent some time on the Internet checking reviews on RV Parks in the Orlando area. A couple of the ones we looked at in the RPI directory had some very poor reviews. It seems that many of the membership RV Parks are old and in need of renovation! (We've run into that several times!)

We finally made reservations for two weeks at Bee's RV Park near Clermont. It had some pretty good reviews and the pictures on the Internet looked nice. We'll stay there until the 27th and then most likely start heading down the towards the Keys.