#341 Hillsborough River State Park

We headed back to Hillsboro River state park and had a surprise when we arrived. We had forgot to latch the shower sliding door and when I walked into the bathroom I saw one section was shattered into a million pieces.

Clean-up is no fun but we survived The next day I started looking around for a glass company to get a replacement. The shower has three rolling sections so I took one as a sample and they were really helpful. They ordered the part and said it would take about a week. I was pleased later that I put Humpty back together again and we just had to learn from it like everything else.

On Saturday we decided to go to Bradenton near Tampa to see a speed boat race. It was a lot of walking and exploring and we found a cool grill and had lunch.

Their bathroom had some cool signs.

People were lined up along a bridge by the thousands so it wasn’t easy to see much racing but fun to try. The mood of the place was like a street festival with food trucks and exhibits. It was a nice afternoon out.

We looked at the UU service in Tampa for Sunday and it was a sing-along and this didn’t appeal to us so we went to a different UU in Lakeland 30 miles east. They had a great discussion before the service in adult education. Before it started someone put in a plug for a company that deals with whole-body donation. We were so impressed we decided to sign up. Death is no fun to think about but it is good to have a plan.

Here is the link

https://medcure.org/?gclid=CjwKCAjwzOqKBhAWEiwArQGwaE-SNtqhsNYDvXoA_U_KXHHQszUwEccBNYpM1uFlqPPo0cCbi8eoABoCk2wQAvD_BwE

On the way back I noticed Lakeland had not one but two cool drive-in movie theaters. For most people not all that exciting but I really liked it.

While at Hillsboro River I had decided to go up to Raliegh and help Ben move from his apartment to the bus permanently. I made plans to fly out of Tampa to Raliegh, get a rental car, and help.

Ben had talked a little bit about the time for him to move out of his apartment was getting close. He spent the last month trying to get everything out. Some items were donated and some to the dumpster and everything that was accumulated living at an apartment for about 3 years.

It had come down to a leaving date of the 16th of February and so he made arrangements to stay at the State Park in Durham called Rolling view starting on the 15th which is a Saturday. A lot of logistical things are required like having a friend or someone follow him out to the state park while he drove the bus there for the first time. He would need a ride back to his car so they could get the car out there as well. This would have to be done twice in about one weekend because there was only so much vacancy at the first campground which was closed for maintenance. He would need to move to a second campground in Durham called Holly Point on Monday afternoon. I spoke to him about the possibility of me flying up to be helpful he thought it was not practical. I thought about how we had worked together on this goofy bus for two years now and the quest that was in front of him was very overwhelming. It's probably a lot to ask of any particular friend as he doesn't have that many friends. For practical and emotional reasons I thought since I helped him work on the thing for about 2 years it will be like walking across the stage at graduation.

I convinced him it would be really good if I came up and he agreed. I got a flight and a rental car and all that and met with him at his apartment initially and then eventually at the storage facility where all the work had taken place on the bus. He was close to being finished with the apartment cleaning job but not quite. Eventually, we went to the bus and did the 1 million things that it takes to get it ready to move for the first time.

I stayed at an Air BnB and it was perfectly fine but I just wasn't that comfortable being in someone else's home. The next day Ben and I moved the bus to its first landing spot at Rolling View at Falls Lake. I was driving behind him providing him some interference between himself and the police as he had no good license plates, insurance, or even a clear title. Just getting from the storage facility to Rolling View without getting pulled over by the police would be a successful day. Being right behind him would keep his bogus license tag blocked from view. Driving the bus was of course still very new to Ben and being behind him I had to tell him you're driving horribly. He was holding to the right white line so hard that he almost ran off the road sometimes. He said it was because it looked as if he was going to hit oncoming traffic and he was trying to stay to the right. I told him that when you drive that way the police are going to pull him over because you look like you're drunk. Of course, it was not easy to hear that and it was a little bit of whahh. When your dad is insulting your driving continuously on the phone it causes the tensions to rise.

We got to the place where we were going to park the bus and got settled, we plugged up to the electricity using a 30-amp adapter. For reasons I shall never know the one I bought was defective and didn't even work. It only powered half of the electrical panel. Next, we have the situation where it seemed like nothing worked. Keep in mind this is home from now on and without all the systems working there is no heat and its deep winter in NC. The heat pump did not come on so therefore it's kind of hard to see how you're going to stay warm tonight as it's going down into the 30s. We moved on to the 12-volt gas furnace but it wouldn’t work and that's not great. I think the water pump wasn't pumping properly or something was wrong there with the water. Maybe they had the water disconnected because of freezing temperatures so that was kind of crazy. I remember there being just a whole lot of reasons why this was going pretty badly. At some point we had to say, well it was a success getting there without getting pulled by the police. I had told them as soon as we got him settled, I was going to drive to Winston-Salem for the weekend and visit with my little sister for a while. So many things were screwed up about the first night he said well I do still have an apartment so I would rather sleep there on the floor than in an unheated RV.

With that, I headed on towards Winston-Salem and had a nice visit with my sister Cheryl. We mostly goofed around and watched Netflix and caught up and after the weekend I went back to Durham to give them a hand getting to the next place. We moved the RV to Holly Point where he would stay for the next two weeks. The only thing crazy that happened was he missed his turn to Holly Point and ended up having to go to the next neighborhood and found himself in tight quarters negotiating about a million turns in a Suburban neighborhood trying to get back to the main road.

I was right behind him and I told him to grab a sharpie and whenever you are dead center of the lane I will tell you by phone. At this point, I said, make a mark on your windshield to know how to calculate your position. Doing this will help you know where you are on the road and stay in the middle. Things were working a little better now and a few other systems were up now and he decided he would probably survive. After I got him settled pretty good at the second place it was time for me to catch a flight back to where India was back in Florida and that went fine.

Of course, my heart kind of went out to him because he's still working full-time and having to leave the dog tied up while he's at work for 10 hours at a time. It was assumed Azura the grand dog would enjoy being outside even on a tether but as luck would have it, she fought it. In the days to come there were many times when the dog got loose or he was kind of getting the evil eye from the ranger or something. I'm sure it was a very stressful time for him but he managed and of course, I’m proud of him for surviving. I'm sure 6 months later he will probably say that was one of the hardest couple of weeks of his life.

I was happy I was in a position to help the good son but glad to be back home with India. We are kind of laid-back RV people it's not like we did that much interesting stuff on this second part of our Hillsboro River stay.

We hiked every other day we went to a couple of cover dish dinners that the camp hosts offered each Wednesday. We went into town a few times but have to admit we didn't do anything exciting. Mostly keeping Bert out of trouble as he likes to wander off more than he should.