It's Not Bad Luck, It's Good Luck

Time and time again it's proven to me that sometimes when I've carefully planned ahead... life happens and the current program gets tossed out the window on a passing breeze while a new strategy is hastily thrown together. It pays to be flexible, but planning ahead is often critical for efficient budgets. Living in a little old motorhome 24/7 fulltime year round means being somewhat organized. There are favored places I want to camp at that are also popular with others due to location or weather or holidays or special pricing or all four.

But what happens when I manage to sprain my ankle then six weeks later shatter my wrist while en route to attend to another emergency (can't plan for those!) Besides my body busting up, the RV split a tire then a month later puked all its transmission fluid in a remote location, leaving me temporarily stranded. Oh joy.

Well, this might be the definition of temporary chaos.

But I see it as all just one grand adventure of ups and downs. In spite of all the not so nice temporary happenings around me, I managed to wake up alive every day so far and soak up mother nature, giving thanks that I had the delight to savor one more day on planet earth. 

The good always exceeds the bad, at least for me.

It's still true. I prefer mother nature over cities. The only fun part about camping in a city is pizza delivery. (Even so, I think my homemade pizza is better than delivery.) Recently I had to camp near or in cities and towns while I played three ring circus with the medical mess. 

I've been fighting a horrific ear infection plus healing my wrist and ankle, so I woke up in pain, kind of grumpy. Somehow I managed to plaster a smile on my face, thank the powers to be for waking up alive, then walk a sleepy doggy down to the beach because the tide was low. I forgot the bug spray (oops!) but I persevered through the woods refusing to go back and when I reached the beach, the mosquitoes disappeared. (What luck!)

Sheer Happiness... a puppydog and his Fribee on a sandy beach.

I don't like dealing with the medical mess in America, it seems I go in for one thing (arm hurts) and I catch the other bugs floating around (raging ear infection). Not sure how or where I caught the ear infection. I know that after my trips to and from doctors and hospitals, I suddenly acquired this nasty sinus problem, whether that affected the ear or the bad water did it in, I have no idea. 

We camped on Lake Hartwell and my outside prefilter for water incoming to the motorhome clogged up in short order. I was bathing in that water, so whether I caught an ear bug from the water or the medical places, I don't know.  I am super lucky to have a Berkey Water Purifier for my drinking water. It can be a fast system with good water and a very slow trickle when filtering and purifying bad water. It slowed to a plip plop, drip drop while we were traveling in bad water areas. Now that we are getting good water in the pipes again, in different campgrounds, the Berkey has sped up with the drinking water delivery. 

Life is complicated! I never would have thought that in America one of the richest countries in the world, we would have to deal with bad water in the year 2015. Progress took a wrong turn somewhere. Oh wait... it's beneficial to many mega corporations for us to have bad water. How sad. 

Life is goof.

Funny how I ended up at the beach today, when my prior plans had me living in the mountains.

It stormed the first two days at the beach, but
I managed to sneak to the beach between squalls.

I had planned on staying in Kinston, North Carolina for another month, but due to a problem, I broke camp to drive towards upstate South Carolina. I wanted to stay at Solitude Pointe Campground on the South Saluda River. Ironically, I had a week reserved there starting Labor Day weekend (now cancelled and mostly refunded.)

Solitude only had 2 nights open but Palmetto Cove a half mile away had openings for a week or more. Solitude Pointe was in the woods with shade, Palmetto RV Park is in a big open field with no shade, no trees, no landscaping just plenty of grass and tiny spots. They do offer up river access (hike down a steep hill) and a grand view of Table Rock. 

Instead of turning off to go to Palmetto Cove or Solitude Pointe, I decided to take my friend up highway 276 which is a narrow twisty mountain road but offers incredible vistas from Bald Rock and Caesars Head State Park which offers trailside primitive camping in remote sites but no RV or drive-in camping.

View from Bald Rock

When we headed back towards the south saluda river, the transmission threw up. This had happened before, just 11,000 miles ago, but also nearly 3-4 years ago. Sheesh, I just don't do many miles in a year I guess. So began my odyssey of studying and learning all I could about transmissions so that eventually it would be repaired correctly, as apparently, the last repair didn't hold. Tsk tsk tsk. I now know more than I ever wanted to know about tranmissions and fluids and overheating and torque converters. Are you getting sleepy now?

Palmetto Cove has tiny RV parking, had we had neighbors,
my awning would have been almost touching their rig, but it was
nearly deserted during our stay, giving us a huge lawn
and a view of the Blue Ridge mountains.

Angels on earth and in heaven seem to be looking out for this fool and eventually I ended up with an appointment with a German mechanic who fixed up the transmission. This all took a few weeks, because I was busy studying plus waiting on Amazon to deliver transmission fluid in hopes we could drive away rather than be towed. Also, I wanted to find someone to fix it start to finish in a day or so, because I am living in the motorhome with medical aids, a doggy and a friend, moving to a motel was just out of the question and of course if you've been reading this blog awhile, I don't own a car and rely on the motorhome to get me around.  Meanwhile I broke my wrist and juggling all that mess including emergency surgery, good grief yet we kept finding beautiful campgrounds in between the chaos and unlikely places to park the motorhome with generator running and doggy locked inside while oopsy, I was in the emergency room or in surgery. 

Talk about fabulous good luck! I have no idea what I did to deserve such grand fortune, but thank you.

Also many big thank you's to the earthly angels that helped me with this chaos. I shall thank the heavenly angels during meditation and pray they understand my gratitude. 

Sometimes I think I drive my traveling companion (who was due to go home some time ago and will be going soon) a bit crazy as I check and recheck things around the rolling wheel estate before we traverse the highways. I call this the "good luck" factor. If you do everything you can to insure good luck, then that is mostly what you get back. Obviously we had a few weird hiccups... but I keep smiling and saying, it's all just another adventure (misadventure?) and it's not bad luck at all. It's good luck!



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