Focht Family Blog

While we were in Atlanta we had a few fun times. My brother brought his bus both weekends and camped with us. Here is his bus,”The Pilgrim.” It was owned by a traveling minister who fulltimed in it for 18 years before Tim bought it.

The first weekend Andrea’s aunt Candy was in town and it was her birthday. They decided to have a little party for her. The girls decorated outside…

Here are the boys, my brother, and Andrea’s parents and aunt Candy waiting for the party to began.

Meghan and Josh helped put the candles on the cake…

And here is Candy blowing them out…

Today we took Misty to a Petsmart because we still think there is something growing in her stomach. The vet was concerned about her pale gums (which I noticed last year) and thought that she might have something wrong with her spleen. They x-rayed her stomach and chest and found that her heart is huge compared to what it should be. She said she was actually surprised that she didn’t die 2 months ago. She has had a few episodes that we thought were mild seizures that I guess were cardiac episodes. We are going to put her down on February 28, 2009 in Savannah. We don’t want her to suffer anymore than she needs to.

Yummy!!! I just had a wonderful breakfast! One of Nathan’s customers is Loveless Cafe in Nashville, TN. We stayed the night in Nashville and went to the Loveless Cafe for breakfast this morning. The Loveless Cafe is home to “The Biscuit Lady,” Carol Fay. I watched her on Food Network doing a Throw Down with Bobby Flay.

We were greeted by two of the employees, Jesse and Colleen. They gave us some of the history of the restaurant and the business while we walked to the restaurant. Carol Fay was at the restaurant this morning seating people. She seated us and Colleen joined us for breakfast. There was soon a big plate of hot, fresh biscuits on the table with homemade preserves (blackberry, strawberry, and peach) as well as honey and sorghum. All of these are made on the premises. Since the cafe is known for its biscuits I ordered steak biscuits with hashbrown casserole. They were delicious!!! I could only eat half of my breakfast, so the other half will be my lunch!! :)

After breakfast we walked around the store. Josh took a liking to Colleen and we soon found him with her behind the counter at the store! :) He will keep us jumping while he is growing up. :) We are now on the road to Atlanta and we will be there for 16 days so I may not update everyday.

We just can’t seem to stay away from Nappanee for long. I think the RV is homesick. While we were driving to Pennsylvania we started having problems with the headlights. We called Newmar and they said that we could come in for service on Wednesday. We made it to Nappanee early in the afternoon on Tuesday and parked at the laundromat. We haven’t been able to find a laundromat the last few days and we had 4 large baskets full instead of our usual 2. After laundry we parked in Camp Newmar to get some sleep before our early wake up call.

They worked on the RV today and fixed the headlights. It was a bad switch and was covered under the chassis warranty. Have you noticed that most of our issues have been Spartan, not Newmar? They want to touch up some paint on some new screws they put in tomorrow but we have decided we will leave tomorrow and just touch up the paint ourselves. Tomorrow we plan on leaving Newmar by 9:00 and start our trip to Atlanta. I think we may stop for a meal in Nashville at one of Nathan’s customers but we will see.

Nathan and I have decided that we should stay in one place for the summer so that the kids can get some time with other kids. So we came up with a list of what we wanted in a campground and I stumbled upon a nice campground in Transfer, PA named Shenango Valley RV Park. So, instead of heading south when we left Iowa we headed to Pennsylvania so we could check out the campground. We called the owners and they told us we could come out and look at the campground on Monday because they were at an RV show in Erie. We arranged to have dinner on Sunday with my Aunt Sue and Uncle James in Cleveland.

As is often the case with our travels we changed plans. We drove to Erie and spent the night there on Saturday so we could go to the RV show and check out the campground exhibits. Erie was a scary town. We actually had a teenager throw a snowball at us while driving through the streets downtown. I told Nathan I was glad that it was just a snowball.

The RV show was held at the Bayfront Convention Center. It is on the lake and the lake was frozen. I took some pictures of the icy lake and of the marina with all of the boats out of the water…

The RV show had 18 campgrounds exhibiting but we decided that Shenango was still the only one we wanted to look at. Next we drove back to Cleveland for dinner with my aunt and uncle. Here is a picture of my Aunt Sue and my mom while we were waiting for dinner…

After dinner we drove to a Walmart in Chardon, OH for the night. The next day we went back to Pennsylvania to check out the campground. We had a lot of fun running up and down the hills covered in snow. We checked out a couple of areas for possible sites, the playground, the pool, and the river. We ended up putting a deposit down on two seasonal sites at the top of the campground further away from the playground. The sites are further away from overnight sites so we figure there will be less traffic on “our” street. Nathan is already designing the deck he is going to build so we can sit outside and watch the kids. We will try it for a season and if we like it then we will continue to “season” and travel during the winter months.