Dlog: Sumterville FL
Our First stop in Florida is in Sumterville with Jesse's Aunt Dory. She lives on a small ranch property which is just outside of the Villages properties. It has got a lot of open space for Lola to run around and a good area for us to do some van work. This was a very restful reset location for us. However, we did get some good landscaping work done at Dory's office during this time.
January 17th:
Jesse Started cleaning up the adhesive that was left after tearing up the carpet around the drivers and passenger seat, It takes quite a lot of elbow grease to remove, but the results have been satisfying so far.
Dory has an amazing setup for us to do Van work. The temps have been unusually chilly which has limited our ability to work a little bit, but the covered concrete pad protects the van from the rain!
We also installed some new industrial carpet. This will hopefully protect the subfloor from water stains, which occur frequently due to Lola's water dish being tipped over on an almost daily basis.
Today we went to the Tampa RV Supershow. We have been casually shopping around for a new van and during our attempts, someone recommended that we visit the supershow so we could compare a bunch of different campervan models all together. What an amazing recommendation! The show took place on the 325-acres of the Tampa Fairgrounds which were packed to the brim full of RVs of all compositions. We spent all day long looking into all the different typers of vans available, peeking into a few of the incredibly luxurious coach RVs, and checking out a bunch of Airstreams. It seemed that the more we looked into the latest and greatest van conversions, the more we came to appreciate the beauty, simplicity, and efficiency of space usage in the Westfalia Vanagon. There were a total of two custom adventure van outfitters which had produced vans that we would have considered trading for our current setup. And we must have looked into at least 50 different vans that day! We were not expecting to walk out of the supershow loving our 40-year old vanagon more, but we certainly have found our appreciation for the engineering of these old vans again. Although, we don't regret a minute of the supershow or our willingness to check out the newer vans available. There are some cool things happening in the space, and if we are not open to the possibilities of getting a new van, we may end up missing out on a good opportunity in the future. This is all just new data to consider in the future.
Jesse made sure to get some fairground food while we were there
We took Lola since dogs were allowed and she was absolutely exhausted from all the stimulation of the day.
