Adventures with EliJoin Eli (along with Susan & Dave) on his adventures and travels!

It’s been 2 days at the St. Louis West KOA, after 2 days at the Shut-Ins. It’s pretty much the complete opposite.

Shut-Ins: Quiet, empty, no signals.

KOA: Near the highway, railroad tracks, surrounded by RVs and cabins, WiFi, 4G, and cable hookup.

Now, it’s important to note I don’t think one is inherently better or worse than another – they just different.  Roller-coaster roads aside, both Susan & I agree that the Shut-Ins would be a great place to if we were expecting (and prepared for) a week of radio-silence.  But as my first week working from the road – not so much.  The KOA has been much better in that regard – I can sit in the RV, log on to the wifi, and take calls on my cell phone.  But I do miss the peace & quiet of the Shut-Ins, and the remote nature of it.  It’ll be an interesting balancing act for us, to find campgrounds that can meet Susan’s desires for getting back to nature and peace, and my requirements for at least cell coverage.

The big mistake I made before committing to the Shut-Ins was not [adequately] researching the Verizon coverage maps. I thought that I did, and saw that it was on the edge of coverage, which I figured meant my booster would make it work.  I don’t know what map I was looking at the first time, because when I went back and plugged in the actual address (148 Taum Sauk Trail Middle Brook, MO 63656), there is NO coverage on that map!  Oops.

Definitely something to pay closer attention to in the future.

It worked out, however – instead of spending 2 weeks at the Shut-Ins, as we originally planned, we spent 3 days. We moved up to the KOA first thing Wednesday morning, and we’ll stay here through Sunday. That’ll give us a chance to meet up with some friends in the area and see a couple of the sites (St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center).  Then we’ll start working our way east, towards Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. We’ve already verified our next location has wifi and cell coverage (although the woman on the phone indicated people have trouble with Verizon there, it shows up with plenty of coverage in the 4G map. We’ll see what we get when we get there!)

This quick change of plans and abbreviated timetable means we are not (or at least I am not) quite as ready & settled as I had hoped to be.  The initial plan for two weeks was so we could get away from home and take some time to get ourselves situated, but I don’t really feel like that’s happened yet for me.  I did get my office area a bit more organized (yes, the RV has an office area! More to come on our RV interior in the future…) but our entertainment system wiring is a mess, I’ve been trying to figure out the satellite dish for over a week, and I have some boxes & bins I still need to go through.

I also have a lot more I want to do with this blog, technically-speaking.  I haven’t been able to get any kind of email subscription service set up yet. We want to get more pictures included in our posts, and just fixing some of the random oddities that keep popping up. So don’t be surprised if you read a post one day, and come back a few days later and we’ve added some pictures or photos to it (like I just did to Susan’s Shut-Ins post!)

Despite all of that – so far, so good.  I’ll have these random moments throughout the day when my brain thinks “I’m really doing this – living and working in an RV. That’s kind of crazy.”  And not just me – but me, and Susan, and Eli.  We’re all doing this together and figuring it out together.  I can’t even really fathom what it’s going to feel like in about a year from now – whether we’ll be loving this kind of lifestyle, hating it, or somewhere in between.  At least by that time, I’m hoping Eli will have decided there are better things to eat then rocks…