Every year Tom Johnson Camping Center in Marion, NC has a huge customer appreciation rally at their dealership.  We went the first year we had our popup back in 2002 but have not been back until this year.  Tom Johnson Camping Center is a very large dealer and recently won the Dave Altman Award as the Nation’s Premier RV Dealer.  The people are supper friendly and not pushy at all.  All the campers are open and you can browse without a pushy sales person on your heels.

The event is very family friendly and is completely free.  There are hundreds if not thousands of people that attend every year.  It starts on Friday afternoon and goes through Sunday morning.  Each night there is live bands, campfires and games for the kids during the days.  They also raffle off hundreds of prizes.  We won a 50amp to 30amp cord:)

We spent most of our time there looking at larger fifth-wheels.  We were doing a lot of research on the size that we may want if we decided to go full time.  We spent some time talking with Floyd our sales person about our needs.  We left with some good information to think about.  We had a great time.

Every year we go with my mother to North Myrtle Beach, SC for a family vacation.  My mom has no interest in camping so we stay in a condo owned by a friend of ours.  This is something we look forward to every year and has been a good way to relax and take a break from our business.

Our plans for this week are typically to do as little as we can.  Sleep late, hit the beach early, back in when it gets hot for an afternoon nap, then back out to the beach later in the afternoon.  The women have to do a little shopping and I will take the kids to do something.  I will typically in the afternoons try to fly my 2 string kite for some excitement.

The week came and went pretty fast leaving wanting more.

In an effort to document some of the camping outings we have done I will go back a little in time.  The biggest and most probably life changing one was our trip to Key West, Florida in March 2008.

Starting in February Polly and I decided that we wanted to take our camping adventures to another level ( read “Our Story” for more details).  In February we decided to sell our Coleman Popup for a travel trailer.  The combination of the new (to us) camper and the new (to us) truck gave us all the tools we needed for a longer more complicated adventure.

I have always wanted to go to Key West.  We had talked about it the year before but just didn’t want to go that far in a popup.  With the new camper it was time to go.  We had no clue how we would do spending 11 nights in a 29ft camper with two very energetic boys.  I never dreamed that this trip could CHANGE my life.

Now about the trip.  Our plan was to to spend 2 nights on the way, 7 nights in Key West, then 2 nights coming back.  While we had the nights in Key West booked we had no clue where to stay the other nights.  We would just drive until we got tired.

The first day we drove from Fletcher, NC (our home) to St. Augustine, FL.  We were amazed that we when that far in one day actually.  We stayed at a nice little RV park called the Stage Coach.  We parked and quickly went out for dinner and some shopping at the outlets in town.  The next morning we got up and went (camper and all) to downtown St. Augustine.  Zachary loves history so this was a dream.  We spent all morning sight seeing and learning about the history of this very beautiful town.

A little after lunch we headed south on I-95 until it started getting late enough that we knew we needed to find a place to stay for the night.  There was to be no boondocking on this trip!  We actually got a little scared when we learned that many campgrounds close around 6:00 pm.  We were scrambling to find an open place that had space.  When in doubt, KOA comes to mind so we started trying to find one anywhere near us.  Finally we got lucky and was heading to West Palm Beach, FL.

We arrived at the Lion Country Safari KOA just before dark which allowed us to get setup for the night before it got to late.  This KOA is part of an animal park which borders right up against the campground.  It was very cool waking up in the morning to the sounds of lions roaring in the background.  But there was no time to visit the safari park as we had to be in Key West by night.  So off we go.

Back to I-95 and due south.  Being from North Carolina we are not use to toll roads.  We quickly learned that paying by the axle gets expensive so we bypassed a lot of these roads.  We finally started to enter the tip of mainland FL and the excitement was increasing.  Unfortunately it was pouring rain so the scenic drive into the Keys was a little “washed out”.  Even so, it was still cool.

After over 1,000 miles and probably 20 hours of driving we finally made it to the Blue Water Key Luxury RV Resort.  Let me tell you now to be clear, this place is NOT roughing it.  This was basically like RVing in a tropical island paradise.  If you ever wanted to take someone camping for the first time to see if they would like it this was the place.  We arrived in our 29′ travel trailer ( I think 25′ is the minimum to stay here) which looked extremely out of place.  It was like putting a KIA beside a BMW.  Yes, we had the KIA in this illustration.  The place was full of buses and very large and expensive motor homes.  We definitely felt like tourist.  Needless to say there were not a lot of kids here.

The rest of the week was what I would call the incubation of a life changing experience.  We filled our days with fishing, swimming, sightseeing, eating, playing and simply being lazy.  This was true and real family time. No stress, no mouse making you run around while they steal your money (Disney vacation if you didn’t get it:) This was a different type of adventure for us.  Since we usually end up at theme park type places on vacation.  Something about this was starting to feel different.

It would take several pages to go into detail of everything we did in Key West that week.  We did a lot but since there was little rush it felt like very little.  It felt like HOME (more on this later).  With most vacations towards the end of the week we are usually so tired we are ready to go home.  But this trip was different and none of us had any interest in going back to our traditional life.

The week came to an end and we packed up and said goodbye to what we thought was our best vacation ever.  We headed back North and stayed in St. Augustine again the first night home.  Then headed to Hilton Head Island to the stay at the Hilton Head Harbor RV Resort for the night.  We had never been to Hilton Head before so this was going to be a treat for us.  Unfortunately we were not in Key West anymore and the tempurature dropped quickly to just above freezing.  On top of that we had our first major RV problem when our single slide broke.  The cables that bring it in and out snapped into.  So after paying a mobile RV service $100 to tell us there was nothing he could do we spent the last night of our trip with the slide in and about 8 inches of space to walk to our bed.  But not even that had any negative impact on this overly positive trip.  The next day we simply got up and went home to the mountains of North Carolina.

While this post has been pretty long I have tried to simply it the best I could.  This trip was so important because it was a complete eye opener into how life “could” be.  There is no doubt that this trip to Key West (which it could have possibly been anywhere) could possibly be a life changing experience for our family.  It was certainly the trip that taught us that life could be different than it currently was and that change was doable if we were willing to take the risk.To learn about how this trip changed our prospective on life then read Our Story.

This is the first post of our new blog.  This is actually quite exciting as we have been talking about doing this for a while.  Over the next few postings we will go back a little in time to document some important trips this year that have lead us closer to our dream of some extended time away.  Please be sure to read “Our Story” to learn more about was is leading us in the direction of potential full time RV traveling.

Please stick around as we try to document the ups and downs of planning and executing change in our lives.