Looking Ahead - Distant Destination

 

Not much happening since last post other than routine life.  Doing things with the grandkids and old people doctor visits.  Except!

We have been applying for winter volunteer jobs for 2024/2025 and have been officially accepted as campground hosts for Furnace Creek Campground, Death Valley.  My first communications for this position date back to about three months ago.  There was a lot of waiting between the first few communications but the pace has really picked up in the last three weeks.  We have had phone interviews and signed volunteer agreement forms via encrypted communications.  And as of six days ago of this writing the medium level background checks were begun and completed.  We were told that they could see we had many background checks showing in the system from our past positions and that facilitated rapid progression through the system for this one.  All we have to do now is show up for our October report date.

Maybe "all we have to do now" was a little understated.  We're planning a month-long itinerary that is definitely not a straight shot from Asheville, NC to Death Valley, CA.  If we were being expeditious we would jump on I-40 and at our driving rate we would pull in eight days later.  But instead we are going to make stops to see friends and family, get a battery system upgrade and visit several national parks.  These stops will take us far south of I-40.

When we started planning this route I was very dubious about having access to campgrounds in the places we wanted to stop for the number of nights we wanted to stay.  When we last planned a trip in September of 2023 and some hotel excursions that same summer, we found accommodations a bit thin.  We, as a country, we just coming out of COVID conditions during which the RV crowd exploded and filled every campsite and the campgrounds that were open were sold out a year in advance.  We hopped and skipped our way from Utah to North Carolina picking up a one-night-only availability here and a cancellation there.

I was relieved, no, thrilled to find that I was able to reserve a site at every campground I wanted and for the length of stay I wanted.  The one exception was a Corps of Engineers campground in North Texas, Hickory Creek, which was underwater from prolonged flooding and is not expected to reopen until next year.  Of all our stops this is the one I was most hoping to not have problems with.  It is conveniently located near my brothers home and it has some campsites with really long driveways, as in 90 feet long driveways.  We stayed at this campground in 2022 and really enjoyed the whole experience.  Not least of which was easy parking of our caravan of vehicles.

Hickory Creek Campground, Corps of Engineers, North Texas

But a mantra for Zen in the fulltiming lifestyle is:  Be Flexible

So the hunt was on for a campground reasonably close to my brother's home and able to accommodate our equipment.  That's when we ran into the availability issue I was worried about.  Hickory Creek was not the only flooded campground in the area and the ones that were high and dry were seeing the demand that those campgrounds were generating.  But after about a dozen attempts it all worked out and we have a spot that made it possible to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law.

Nothing is carved in stone, we still have to be open to flexibility to adapt to unforeseen changes.  But the plan as of now is 2,900 miles with 15 stops/campgrounds over a 31 day period.