Great times in New Hampsire - followed by Our Very Bad Day!

Sorry, I've been out of touch for a while so this one will be a bit long.

We arrived at the lovely lake home of our friends Greg and Linda in Laconia NH on Lake Winnepasukee last Wednesday evening. We were able to back into their side driveway and tuck the moho right up alongside their house. On Thursday night we watched the Bears and of course our local friends helped us cheer. The next few days flew by in a flurry of good times with great friends. On Friday Greg took us to Boston and we got the tour of the town - we stopped at Fenway, the Old North Church (one if by land, two if by sea...), Beacon Hill, and the Prudential tower. Then we popped into Cheers, where everybody knows your name. So get this - true story - we walk into Cheers and Bill said to the host at the door, "I'm testing an urban myth - what's my name?" Without batting an eye, the guy replied "Bill". No, he wasn't prompted - Greg was parking the car and Linda was with us. So I asked him, "How about my name?" His first guess was "Kathy" and the next was "Linda". So ok, he didn't get "Dee" until we prompted him for the 4th letter of the alphabet but still, pretty good. And we did have a Linda. I should have gone for "Daniela" - we'd probably still be standing there!  Anyway, the weather was perfect and we had a great day in that beautiful city.

On Saturday we went to a pumpkin festival with the New Hampshire Parrot Head club - we worked a booth helping kids make their own scarecrows. It was very popular and lots of fun to be involved. After the festival we were warmly welcomed to a bonfire at the home of Heather and Shawn, along with several other members of the club. As always, when you're among parrot heads, you're among family. It's nice to feel at home!

Sunday was spent watching the Patriots with old and new friends - of course we returned the favor by cheering for the home town team and it must have done the trick because they won. (There may have been some eviserating...) All in all, what a great weekend. It was sad to say goodbye but we'll see Greg and Linda soon in Key West. Thanks to them both for awesome hospitality and a huge shout out to the New Hamphire Parrot Heads.

But that brings us to Monday morning and...

Bill & Dee's Very Bad Day:

Holy cow, what a Monday we had. First problem - the moho wouldn't start in the morning. We called our roadside assistance and they sent out a tech who found a bad battery. No problem - battery replaced.  Oh, if only that had been all. But after the battery was replaced we found we had no 12V, which in non techie terms means that we're fine while we're running and we're fine when we're plugged into power. But in between, we have no power. So if we stop for lunch on the road, we have to keep the moho running in order to be able to use anything that requires power, like lights or the water pump. Not a huge deal but annoying. A troubleshooting phone call to Tiffin tech support yielded no results other than we need to get it serviced somewhere. Ok, we can live with this slight inconvenience until we are somewhere for more than a day. And we do have an extended warranty.  So we got on the road by noon or so and right off the bat we ran into traffic...and then more traffic...and still more traffic. So it was a long stressful day of driving. Then at one point I found my credit card to be missing. A frantic search yielded no results so I called the credit card company to put a 48 hour hold on it. No sooner did I do that when Bill asked if I was wearing the same clothes as when it went missing and I remembered that I had taken off a hoodie - so I went to check it and lo and behold, there was my credit card in the pocket. Yay. So I called the company back and got the hold removed. At least one problem solved. Traffic issues continued, along with horrible roads, construction and at least a couple of accident delays. We stopped for the night somewhere in Connecticut but I'm damned if I remember where. It was a whole day ago.

Today we had a better day - no major traffic issues and we're in a nice KOA in Jonestown PA. We did find that Pennsylvania has the worst imaginable roads in the history of roads - I-84 to I-81 was pretty much washboard off and on most of the way.  Lots of things in the moho hit the floor but luckily nothing was broken. We're enroute to Charleston SC but taking a bit of a wide swath around in order to -  avoid New York City and Washington DC - this route added about 150 miles to our trip but totally worth it to avoid any major cities. We hope to be in Charleston by Thursday evening. I'm meeting up with Teresa and Cheryl there to see the Zac Brown Band on Saturday - yippee! Bill was invited to join us but he said he preferred to have a nice day of computer gaming to spending hours on his feet and going "Woohoo!" with the girls. Fair enough!