Florida Fixins'

On Monday morning (July 11), we met with our service advisor, Mike Wittman, at Alliance Coach, and by 9:00, they had our motorhome inside their service center to begin working on replacing our front air conditioner.  We thought there might have been an issue with our front slide again because the top of the slide was not closing completely.  Dan, our service guy. let the slide out, got up on his ladder and found where a bracket had come loose from the new slideout awning topper.  He got that re-installed and the slide-out worked fine.  Thank goodness!

We were able to upgrade to 15,500 BTU from the 13,500 BTU we had which will hopefully cool the front of the camper a little better.  Dan finished the work on the motorhome and we were back on our site at Alliance Coach by around 3:00 pm.  So far, the air conditioners are working great!

While we were in Wildwood, we drove around The Villages some more to check out all the new houses and villas being constructed.  The community is amazing in all of its amenities and nice recreation centers.  We spoke with different residents and people working in The Villages and didn't meet anyone who didn't love living there.  In speaking with a lady working in the Eisenhower Recreation Center, we asked her if there wasn't something she could think if negative.  The only thing she could come up with is that it is easy to get over-involved in everything and sometimes you have to make yourself go outside "the bubble" of The Villages.

Entrance Hall of Eisenhower Recreation Center

The center is dedicated honoring our military.

Card and game playing room.

Craft room

Ball room

We were on the road early Tuesday morning and drove to Classic Coachworks at their new facility in Ormond Beach, Florida, getting there around our appointment time of 8:30.  Classic did the renovations work for us in 2013 on the TVs, residential refrigerator and shades and we thought it best to go back to them to get our front driver and passenger side shades fixed.  We thought it would be an easy fix but they had a lot of difficulty tracing down the wires to the shades they had installed 3 years ago.  They thought a fuse or the wiring was the problem because we weren't getting any power to the electric shades.  They ended up running new wires to the shades and although they work fine now they made a mess of our video/audio cabinet with all their wiring and it took them about 4 1/2 hours to get the work done.  Needless to say, we were a little disappointed.  That cabinet was already a mess of TV cables and wiring.  Now we need to at some point remove each piece of equipment, tack up all the dangling wiring, and put everything back together again.

We were anxious to get out of there because it had taken so long and they don't have a place where you can park your rig overnight like Alliance Coach.  We left there around 1:30 and just began heading north on I-95.  We had decided we would go to the Williamsburg area of Virginia because we had not been there before and then head on to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where we will meet up with Ken and Bonnie for about a week and a half.  Yippee!!!

We drove through a little rain but nothing bad.  In the picture below, we are crossing the St. John's River.

We decided to stop at the Oaks at Point South Thousand Trails campground for the evening.  It's not the nicest campground in the world but we had stayed here in the fall of 2012 and were familiar with it and could stay here for free on our Thousand Trails Zone Pass.  Other than not being able to get out with satellite, it was actually better than we had remembered it being.

On Wednesday morning, we were on the road by 9 am and drove up I-95 to Richmond and then east over on I-64 over to Williamsburg.  We are park-hopping to Hershey with our Thousand Trails Zone Pass and had reservations at the Thousand Trails Williamsburg RV Resort.  It was a typical Thousand Trails with close sites, lots of trees, and a lot of dirt, but we found a decently level site and got all set up.  We're going to spend the next three days exploring the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg.