Dang RV

My Christmas present to myself this year is a Garmin c330 GPS. I managed to snag this wonderful new travel tool cheaply at the Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving) Sale at Walmart. I already have Delorme GPS with Street Atlas added to my laptop which I very much love and actually has far more capability than this basic unit has, but I am not comfortable leaving a laptop, especially one I need to work, in my car when I’m toodling around town for a day or hitting the local tourist traps. My new unit will be used for local driving and as a backup for the laptop on the long moves.

Aside from the excellent price, I chose the Garmin c330 because of the hundreds of great reviews it has gotten on the Internet. It is highly rated by most folks who tend to buy not just one but one for each car and for each college student in the family. The unit is designed to get you from point A to point B, that is all it does, and it does it very well. The screen may seem small at 2.1″x2.8″ but they use it really well and I was amazed that all the direction arrows are very large as well as the text along the top of the screen. It does not have text-to-speech to say the street names but it does say turn here, then there in a very loud, normal, crisp female voice while the street name is displayed along the top of the screen in very large easy-to-read letters. It also changes the screen colors for day and night driving. Easy access to millions of Points of Interest such as gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, local recreation, tourist attractions, etc. makes this a very valuable addition to anyone’s vehicle.

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I’m getting some experience in boondocking while staying in my son’s backyard. It is not true boondocking because I have to have electricity and wifi for my work but those are all I have here.

I must say that boondocking is not as bad as I had imagined. The water tank holds quite a lot so it does not have to be filled often and I don’t mind running it off the pump. The black water tank only needs to be emptied once a month. The gray water holds quite a lot if you don’t take showers in here. Doing dishes in this rig does not fill it up as quickly as in my brother’s motorhome so I can get away with dumping it once a month as well. The refrigerator is running off propane here rather than electricity and it is using very little propane while keeping the food quite cold. I actually had to turn the temp up because it got too cold. That was a shock. The heat works fine off propane as well. I get one week off a 30 lb. tank in winter.

I am still not a big fan of boondocking though because I really like having TV which requires electricity as does my work. I know I could use a generator but I don’t have one and I don’t think I could run one for 9 solid hours non-stop while working in the middle of the night. Since I have to have wifi for work, boondocking for me is out of the question at the moment though I can see how it may be in my future once aircards get fast enough and I change jobs perhaps eventually. Right now I only boondock when I am enroute to a new place that takes more than a day to get there and I am on my days off. That’s enough for me.

OK, stop laughing! What’s the point of traveling if ya can’t stop to smell the roses or in this case the frying pan. I’ve been down sick for a couple of weeks and sleeping 12 hours a day. Not seen anything but the inside of my trailer and as much as I love my trailer, I needed an adventure… BAD! So, today I went to Rose Hill to see the World’s Largest Frying Pan (I’m easily amused). Rose Hill is known for it’s poultry industry and annual Poultry Fair.

Before you all start commenting about others you have seen, let’s just agree that since Guinness Book of Records does not care to decide who’s is the biggest and there are many ways to measure such a thing, then we don’t care either.

The pan is 15 feet in diameter, does have a handle, is separated into sections like a pie so that only part may be used at a time, has 40 propane jets underneath to heat it, and can cook about 365 chickens at one time. They use full sized pitch forks to turn and retrieve the chickens from the hot oil. It is used a couple of times a year for fund raisers, etc. It is housed in a nice little open pavilion on the corner of Highway 117 and Main St. You will normally find it covered but they do have pictures and text mounted on the pavilion.

OK, that was good for 5 minutes and bragging rights. Aside from the pan, I got a lovely tour of a good part of eastern North Carolina in the sunshine, saw several Piggly Wiggly grocery stores finally as well as lots of cotton fields, filled up my empty propane tank I took with me “just in case”, and hit up a buffet for dinner. Then I had to nap as soon as I got home. LOL