Onward To New Digs... And All That Entails

January 15th 2014 -

In our last post, we mentioned that we were leaving our friend Cindy's place near the Florida state line and heading for the Cartersville, Georgia KOA for our winter work camper job. We never thought 320 miles to the northwest part of the state would make that much of a difference... label us now educated.

As all of you know by now, this winter has been a crazy one, weather wise, and Georgia has not been exempt from it. The morning we left Cindy's house, the entire eastern part of the U.S. was experiencing it's coldest arctic blast yet of the season. The day before we trekked north, Cartersville experienced a low temperature of 5 degrees - even at Cindy's house, the thermometer crept down to 24 degrees. Schools, state wide, were cancelled because of the cold. Being from Maine, we found this hilarious, but apparently this was a big deal in these parts (as stores do not sell winter clothing). We pondered the thought of spending an additional night at Cindy's to ride out the second night of cold, but being the Maine ruffians we are, we decided to head out - we can handle this.

Traffic was light up I-75 and even through Atlanta. People who have traveled through this metro area know that traffic can be a nightmare. Not for us - we breezed through city traffic even though it was mid-afternoon. Numerous friends stated that we were very lucky on this occasion. Perhaps the cold worked to our advantage here as well. We checked into our RV space and did one additional errand. By this time, the sun was going down and the temperature was already dropping below 25 degrees. We started entertaining second thoughts that maybe we should have spent a few more nights at Cindy's...

We found out that one of the other work campers, who is in a neighboring site, was also from Maine. We settled in for a day or two, before our bosses could meet with us for our orientation. Both were on sight - they just had other emergencies to deal with - like a campground full of angry campers because the water would be shut off for an second night due to the cold. Water pipes inside various RV's were either frozen, while a couple even burst. Fun!

Upon orientation, we went over our job responsibilities with our managers. One thing we have going for us is they are fairly laid back and are easy to get along with. We have also become friends with our fellow work campers and have met quite a few of the long-term RV'ers. We're getting some ideas together for some possible camper fellowship and will toss them by the managers. This campground doesn't have many of the activities that we became used to at other campgrounds. Being winter, people have a tendency to hibernate. The way we see it, regardless of the season, camping and RV'ing is supposed to be fun. Not staying in your 40 foot tin can all day. 

The first few days of our new jobs went well - Jills' co-worker, Marie, showed her the ropes while Daves' co-worker, Stillman, gave him the ten-cent tour. Conversations ran the gamut. For example, Jill mentioned to Marie that she was domestically impaired. Marie asked half jokingly, "then why are you doing this job?" The way we figure things, we had to start somewhere. This next 2 1/2 months will get our feet wet in the KOA world, pay for the space where we rest our heads and put some money in our pockets.

By the end of the week, the cold weather even departed and it warmed up to 70 degrees by Saturday morning. We actually felt like we were getting into our groove - with our schedules, work duties, and fellow employees - when the Nomad decided to make things interesting. At 6:00 a.m., Jill and I were abruptly awakened by the CB in the cab of our RV blaring a loud noise for about 5 seconds... and the CB was off. It repeated this drill, about every five minutes, three more times. In between the 2nd and 3rd blast from the CB, we heard substantial rumbles of thunder in the distance. After the 3rd blast, Dave turned on the CB's weather band and listened to the latest forecast - NOAA issued severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings - and we were right in the line of fire.

Within fifteen minutes, the fast moving front was right overhead. The rain (and penny size hail) was so loud on the Nomads' roof that we could barely hear the tornado siren going off. We weren't sure if the siren was going to hold up through all of this as it sounded like a cross between a sick cow and an old dog howling at the storm. We quickly looked out the windows and saw that none of the other motorhomes or 5th wheels were making a break for it, so we hunkered down in the Nomad to ride things out. By now, it was almost 7:00 a.m. - adding insult to injury was our alarm clock beeping as if we weren't already awake. Fortunately, we're parked at the top of a small hill in the campground with just a few trees surrounding us. Although it was loud at times, the storm did pass and all that was left by 9:00 a.m. was some moderate rain. The trees survived as did the Nomad - no damage what so ever. Our RV is over 36 years old, but this is the 2nd significant storm it's weathered us through - label us impressed yet again.

Until next time,
The "Fair Weather" Happy Campers,
Jill & Dave