http://www.sportsmobile.com/inventory-details/?inventory_id=325
My heart is still breaking but the van is now offered for sale. See the link above for the listing.
They chose not to use my version of the write up so I will answer questions you might have about the van itself but all sales questions need to go directly to Sportsmobile. Thanks for understanding that.
TTYL,
Linda
Some RVers, especially those who stealth camp in small vehicles, differentiate between day camps and night camps. I very rarely hang around one place during the day that is not the same place where I spent the night. But I recently did that.
I spent a Saturday night at a Cracker Barrel. Sunday morning is a very popular time for locals to eat there so I felt a need to vacate their parking lot. But, I was too close to my destination to want to move on there so early in the day. So, I moved to a Cabela’s parking lot to spend a few hours.
I don’t know if you are all familiar with Cabela’s. It is a huge sporting goods store. With huge parking lots. Most of their customers are, of course, sports people. Some of whom arrive with dogs. So Cabela’s offers dog pens where you can leave your dog outside your vehicle since we all know leaving them locked in a car while shopping is not a good plan in most weather.
Some of them also offer horse corrals. I’d never seen a horse in the corral, though. Until this stop.
Maybe it’s because I am in Texas?
Linda
My good friend Tammy, of http://peanutonthetable.com, said she needs an update so I thought you all might want one as well.
I am parked for the night in a rest area along I-10 in Texas. Not all states let you do that but Texas does. Since I was driving west when the sun dropped below my windshield’s visor and right into my eyes I decided this was a good place to call it a day. This will be my last night of boondocking in this rig.
Tomorrow I will take it to a truck wash for the last time so at least the outside is all shiny and new looking.
Then I will drive to my last RV park where I will spend the next couple of nights.
In the meantime, Dave is driving the car down from Minnesota to meet me. We will stay in a motel while we pack some of the things to take home into the car. Then we will ship home the rest of the things from the RV. I had hoped to sell a bunch of it when I spent the last week at the Escapee’s RV park in Livingston, Texas, but they said no yard sales–no commercial dealings of any kind. I never thought of a yard sale as being commercial but it is what it is.
Then the RV will go in for one last service appointment. It does not quite have 20K miles on it which is when the next service is due but we prepaid for those checkups so we might as well get the thing into the best shape we can for the next owner.
Plus we will do what we can to clean the interior including dumping and flushing all the tanks before we turn it over to Sportsmobile Texas to sell for us. The ad is, of course, not up yet but when it is ready it will appear here: http://www.sportsmobile.com/preowned-sportsmobile-texas-inc/
While they are doing that, we will drive the car back to Minnesota where I will stay just long enough to get caught up on laundry, prescription refills, computer updates, hugs from Dave, and similar items.
Then I will fly back to Structure House to begin the next phase of hiding out from winter in one of their apartments while doing my best to get healthier.
So that’s what I am busy doing right now.
Along with grieving the loss of the RV way of life.
TTYL,
Linda
When I went to Structure House my goal was to get healthy. It is hard to admit what that means because it shows you just how weak I got but here are some sample smaller goals:
To be able to stand at the stove long enough to cook a stir-fry.
To be able to buy groceries pushing a cart instead of riding one.
To be able to open my own screw top bottles.
To be able to do two household tasks on the same day.
To be able to cut my own toenails without having to take breaks.
See–just basic everyday activities of daily living.
I had come to depend too much on Dave to do things and it scared me to realize that if I lost him I would have to move into an assisted living facility.
So off I went to Structure House to gain strength and ability. Losing weight would be part of the process.
So I made a commitment to stay until I got that strength or until the weather got bad enough to threaten to freeze my pipes.
So which one of those two things caused me to leave Sunday?
None of the above.
Yes, it got cold. But not cold enough to freeze my pipes.
Just cold enough to freeze me. I needed to run my furnace. A lot. Evenings. Nighttimes. Mornings.
My furnace runs on diesel and I had plenty of that so no problem, right?
Wrong. My furnace FAN runs on electricity.
And I wasn’t plugged in.
And we were having too many rainy/overcast/mostly cloudy days for my solar panels to keep up with the demands of that fan.
A couple days I went driving so my alternator could help charge my house batteries. But the second time I did that my batteries still only got up to 84% full. And that was not going to be enough to carry me over to the next time I would have time to drive without cutting classes.
So, I left.
I am on my way to Texas.
To sell my RV.
I simply cannot do this anymore.
I will go back to Structure House to continue my struggle to get healthy.
But this time I will rent one of their apartments.
Where I don’t have to worry about having enough electricity.
Or whether or not I can pull the dump valve when my tanks fill up.
It’s time I focus on what’s most important.
TTYL,
Linda
Food is fuel. If your vehicle needs diesel and you put in gasoline it will not run well. We need to feed our bodies the foods that have the nutrients we need. Which means getting healthy is not just a case of calories in–calories out.
But calories do still count. There is a formula for determining how many calories your body needs just to keep you alive. This is called your resting metabolic rate. If you eat fewer than those calories your body will begin to eat itself to keep you alive. If it is eating stored fat that’s OK. If it is eating muscle that is not so good. To make it even more of a challenge if you do not eat enough calories your body returns to it’s hunter/gatherer survival skills, assumes there is a famine happening, and reduces your resting metabolic rate. That means you can eat fewer calories to stay alive. It also means you NEED to eat less which can make it harder to get all your nutrients in without overeating. So you want to eat neither too much nor too little food.
When it comes to exercise function is the most important. If you cannot walk to the gym don’t waste your time on the exercise classes there–go for a walk! A little bit the first day, then a little further and a little further until your body can take you the places you want to go. Then you can make the gym your destination.
Learn to listen to your body to determine when it is physically hungry. We in the USA eat for things other than nutrition. Food is not entertainment. Food is not a drug to cope with our emotions. Food is not something to eat just because you can’t think of anything else to do. We need to find new ways of entertaining ourselves and others. We need to learn to feel and process those emotions that scare us. We need to plan our days so we are doing things that help us get into the flow so we don’t even notice time is passing.
Structure House is teaching me all that and much more including ways to meet those challenges. Who knew you could have fun learning to do karate while sitting in a chair?
TTYL,
Linda
