One of things you have to be flexible on is your plans, things are going to happen around you with family and friends that you want to try and help out.  Since we are retired, it is a little easier to say, let’s go here and see what we can do to help out when things happen.  This year we have mostly stuck to our main plans with some minor tweaks as we traveled up the west coast into Canada.  We are heading south to Joshua Tree to spend the month of September near my Mom & Sister’s house and celebrate my Mom’s 89th birthday.  Our kids will be coming out to celebrate with us which is going to be great.

After that our plan was to work our way east through Albuquerque NM for the Ballon Festival and then head to Florida for the winter.  But a few things have come up to make us change our plans.  One is our Daughter, Erin and her Husband Alex bought a house in Harrisonburg, VA and we want to stop by and help her out with some projects.  I love working on houses and am looking forward to it. Cathy needs to head to the Northeast in mid Sept to support her sister who is having some major surgery and she wants to help out during her recovery.  I also need to get some maintenance work done on the RV.  So with all this in mind, here is what we are planning from now until the rest of the year….

Sept in Joshua Tree, Cathy will fly to New England on the 12th when our kids also head back home to VA.  On the 26th, I am going to start heading east in the RV, with Frank (my Nephew-in-law who is a retired Marine ) as my driving partner along with Laya and Phoebe.  We are going to skip the balloon festival this year so we can get east quickly, stopping at Walmarts along the way.  Our plan will take us to Red Bay Alabama where I’ll get some routine maintenance work done on the coach over a few days and we will tour the Tiffin factory.

After the maintenance work, we will head to Nashville where I’ll drop Frank off at the airport so he can fly back to California.  I will continue on to VA with just an overnight stop needed and should be in Harrisonburg on the 6th of October.  That is the current plan, which we can change as needed.

Cathy will be helping out her sister for a few weeks and then heads to Myrtle Beach with other sisters for a girls week at our Marriott timeshare, and will get from Myrtle Beach to Harrisonburg by some undetermined means (still need to figure out this piece…)

After spending about a month in Harrisonburg, we plan to drive to Lake Norman in November and visit some family and maybe DC friends who have a house at the lake.  After that we plan to spend a weekend with some RV friends, Charlie and Kelly at Mountain Falls RV resort in the southern mountains along the NC/GA border, before we head to the Jacksonville, Fl to spend a month visiting with my brother and fitting in a Disney World trip with them for a few days.  We will end 2017 in Pensacola, Fl.

I have updated our spreadsheet in Google Drive that I share, if you want to have access to our trip plans, shoot me an email and I will add you.  Other than that, we still expect to spend 2018 touring around the middle of the country, hitting key sites such as Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, Moab, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Tetons, Lake Louise in Canada, Black Hills, Badlands, some Jeeping in Silverton CO, then back to Joshua Tree for Mom’s 90th birthday before we start working east and end 2018 along the coast in Texas assuming it is still there after the current hurricane Harvey passes that way in a few days.

2019 we plan to spend the entire year on the east coast visiting family and friends.  I have just a rough plan and will work more of it once we get into 2018 as I like to get reservations started a year in advance.

Ok, so that’s the latest update and I’ll do a post from Joshua Tree once we get settled in.