We pulled up stakes and headed out of American Heritage RV Park in Williamsburg around 11:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Our goal for the day was to make it to Charlotte, North Carolina, where our plan was to boondock at the Pilot there. We arrived in Charlotte much earlier than we thought we would, around 6:30 p.m., and it was so hot (in the 90s), that we decided to press on rather than stop and swelter in the heat until the sun went down. Plus, the Pilot was very small and there was no real RV parking there.
Lex is our driver; I’m just the navigator, so how long we drive is really up to her. She was still feeling good and figured she could continue for another couple of hours. As it turns out, she had much more in her than that! We made it all the way to the Atlanta area (Buford, Georgia, to be specific) before giving up the ghost. She took us 525 miles across four states over the course of 14 hours. By the time we pulled into a little corner of the Wal Mart parking lot in Buford, it was after 1:00 a.m. and we were both beat. It was still hot that late in the evening, and opening up the windows and putting on our battery-powered fans just made it barely tolerable. We sucked it up and went to sleep. By 9:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, we had gotten up, had breakfast, and Lex had gone into the store for some supplies. Plus, I’d contacted the RV park and learned we could come in early.
Half an hour later, we pulled into Stone Mountain Heights RV and Mobile Home Park. The owner, who was really very sweet when I talked to her on the phone, had left us a map with our site number on it on the door. As we were driving around looking for our street, we ran into the other owner, her husband, and he was nice enough to point us to the site and then helped guide us in. We got one of the few pull-through sites in the park, I believe. It’s nice and shaded here, and we have a concrete patio. The sites aren’t terribly close together, either. There’s a small Class B motorhome with Texas plates to one side of us and empty lots behind us and to the other side, so we’re relatively private as well.
Site in Stone Mountain Heights RV Park
As we were getting the RV leveled, a nice couple, Kathy and Dick, walked up to say hello. Turns out they are from Maryland and are now fulltimers who have lived here in this park for the past year while Dick works in the area. Really lovely people. They told us there is another Baltimorean here in the park, a young filmmaker. What a small world! How is it that three folks from the Baltimore area all end up in the same hole-in-the-wall RV park in Stone Mountain, Georgia at the same time?
None of us are typical weekend RVers, either. Not surprising, really, as this park is not really a tourist resort. It was originally a mobile home park, and as the older mobile homes have been leaving, the owners have been converting the pads into RV sites. I’d say the park is about 50/50 now. There are folks who have been here quite a while, clearly, and there are a number of families, too. This means kids on bikes, one of whom rolled up while I was hooking up the utilities to say hello.
So folks seem friendly around here, and we’re just off a state highway in the middle of a suburban community, so just about every retail outlet there is is somewhere nearby. This is not camping by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, this trip is not really a “vacation.” We are traveling, yes, and the days in Williamsburg really were a little vacation, but most of this trip, Lex will be working. I’m teaching until the end of the first week in July, too, so basically we’re just moving our home from place to place and visiting the people and places that matter when we have some leisure time.
Speaking of those people who matter, I have an old friend, Wes, here in the Atlanta area, and he and his wife are coming over tomorrow evening. I think it’s been about three or four years since I last saw Wes when we was in Baltimore for a conference, so it will be wonderful to catch up. I think I’ll grill some bison burgers on the patio for us. I was actually supposed to make those burgers tonight, but we ended up treating ourselves to Church’s chicken. For some of you, that’s probably not a treat, but we can’t get Church’s in Baltimore. In fact, there was a Sonic next to the Church’s, so we were in heaven! You know you are in the South when the Dairy Queen serves barbecue sandwiches and a local fast-food chain serves fried green tomatoes.
Getting settled today was not without its tribulations. There’s very high water pressure in this park, and my pressure regulator (a little brass fitting that screws into the water faucet on one end and accepts the water hose on the other end) isn’t working properly. Almost no water is getting through. I need to find an RV parts store or a Wal Mart (the only big box retailer that carries RV supplies) tomorrow and pick one up. When water pressure is too high, it can burst our drinking water hose and possibly even our interior plumbing. Not good. For now, I’ve just refilled the fresh water holding tank and turned on the water pump, and that’s where our supply is coming from. It works fine, but Lex doesn’t care for it because the water still smells slightly of bleach since I disinfected the holding tank before we left Baltimore. I explained to her that at least the water is germ free, but she’s not buying it. I have to get the city water supply going soon, or I’m going to hear about this all week. 
We also struggled getting the RV leveled. The pads here are gravel and not entirely level. We used the leveling bubbles built into the RV as guides, and they misled us. We ended up raising one side of the RV way too high, so the whole rig was pitched to the other side, giving us both vertigo. So we had to go out again, hitch up the RV, move it off the levelers, remove some of the blocks, drive it up on the remaining blocks, and then go inside to see whether or not we were level. It’s easy to tell. We can feel it in our feet and legs and inner ears, certain doors won’t close properly, and stepping up the stairs is weird. Plus, I have an electronic leveling app on my iPhone. I used it the second time around rather than the physical levelers outside. The iPhone didn’t steer us wrong. We finally got the rig properly situated. Having a level camper is not important just because it’s more comfortable for us but also because the rig’s weight needs to be equally distributed across the axles or else we can risk damaging the tires and the frame. The fridge also needs to be level because it relies on liquid ammonia contained in the condensing coils to function. When we’re off level, our fridge doesn’t work as effectively.
I also discovered that because of the angle of the RV relative to the septic connection, our sewage isn’t going to drain properly. Even though I have the sewer hose sitting on the Sidewinder (a plastic frame that keeps the hose up off the ground and puts it on a slight incline toward the drain), it’s not enough. Not sure what to do about this problem short of standing outside when I dump the tanks and holding the hose up in the air so it can drain. Ick.
We encountered a problem while trying to put the awning down over the patio. One of the awning arm locks came loose on our travels from Baltimore to Williamsburg. We actually managed to fix that lock after some back and forth. The main awning roller lock still isn’t working properly and won’t until I have the entire assembly replaced, but it will stay put after some fiddling with it. Once the awning arms are tightened up, the roller won’t retract by itself. That could be a problem because RV awnings work on the same principle as roll-up shades in your house. Ever let go of one and have it roll up so hard and fast that it knocked itself out of its mounting? Well, that can happen with an RV awning, too, except the awning is 18 feet long and weighs quite a lot, so if it flies up unexpectly, it can damage the body of the RV and possibly injure someone. That’s why it’s important for us to get that part fixed, something I plan to do when we get to San Antonio. Until then, we’ll limp along.
The final puzzle we had to solve today was perhaps the most critical. The park doesn’t have wifi (which I knew), but I failed to check and see if Cricket mobile broadband offers coverage in the Atlanta area. They don’t, so our modems are useless here. We had to figure out an alternative so Lex can actually go to work in the morning and so I can log into the course I’m teaching, and we had to figure out that alternative quickly since retailers close early on Sunday afternoons. We stopped at the AT&T store, but they couldn’t really offer us a viable solution. Lex ended up heading to the Best Buy and buying a Virgin Mobile broadband Mifi modem. That was money we hadn’t planned on spending, but it was a necessary evil. Sure, Lex could go sit in a free wifi hotspot for eight hours, but that’s not her idea of a good time. The MiFi lets us connect four machines to the single modem. This is perfect since we can get both our laptops and desktops connected. Lex and I can work at the same time rather than waiting on the other one to finish using a broadband modem and then swapping it out. We’re now covered this week and next week in Louisiana, another place Cricket won’t work. Oh, well. The Cricket modems weren’t a complete wash. We will be able to use them during our five weeks in Texas, and that’s good since Cricket offers unlimited service. The Virgin service is limited to a certain number of megs of data download. Once you hit that limit (not hard to do when sending bunches of e-mails and loading lots of webpages), the modem shuts off until you pay up again. So neither service is ideal, really, since one has limited coverage and the other doesn’t offer unlimited usage, but between the two of them, I think we’ll manage to maintain Internet access for the duration of the trip.
Tomorrow I have papers to grade and company to get ready for, so I think I’ll wrap this up. Until tomorrow!
Tags: fulltiming, Georgia, rv, Travel, Virginia
