1 Apr 2025 - And We Are Off!

The Schellhase 2025 RV Adventures is underway.  I had intended on posting an update this spring and we were overcome by events. I had rotator cuff surgery in December and Doreen had foot surgery in January, so we are both recuperating as well as trying to get ready for this trip. I started working on reservations in November and had most of them wrapped up shortly after the first of the year.  

This year we are doing a loop that we are called "Phase 1" (Stops #1-11) that will take us through KS, OK, MO, AR, back through MO, IA and home for grad daughter Hailee's high school graduation.  We will be camping near home 5-12 May (stop #11) before heading east for the start of "Phase 2".  More about Phase 2 later.  This journey will be about 8428 miles point-to-point and 43 stops.

On 12 March we got the RV out of storage and the following day we took it to the dealership for it's annual "physical".  Since I have no room at my house to work on it I hire them to clean and grease the wheel bearings, inspect and grease the suspension bushings and wet bolts, and do a top to bottom inspection of the entire coach.  

The following Friday 21 Mar we took the coach from the dealership to Griff's Valley View Campground & RV Park and that is where we clean it, load it and un-winterize it in preparation for this year's trip.  Thankfully the weather cooperated and we were able to un-winterize.  Some years that does not happen until we get further south and warmer weather.  The game changer for us is a system I installed last year called :Cheap Heat".  It is an electric add-on for our furnace that allows us the easily heat the coach and the underbelly area to help prevent the pipes and water system from freezing.  Running the furnace on propane you can empty tank after tank very quickly.  The "Cheap Heat" system allows us to run the furnace on the 50 amp electrical connection at the campground.  This year we used it quite a bit the days leading up to our departure.

So we unwinterized early in the week and I discovered a water leak.  It was leaking behind the main water panel, the same place it leaked last year.  So I ordered parts and installed them as soon as they arrived.  This delayed our moving in until Friday 28 Mar but then we were able to exercise all the systems and make sure we had everything we needed.  

This morning 1 Apr (no fooling) we departed Griff;s at 0837 hrs and headed south on I-35 through Missouri to Lawrence KS, our first stop after Griff's, on this year's journey.  The drive was uneventful but the headwind really chewed into our fuel mileage.  The foliage was blooming the further south we traveled.  

We stopped for fuel once and again for a pottie break before arriving at the KOA in Lawrence KS at 1335 hrs, our stop for the next three nights.  247 miles today.  We stayed at this campground twice before including last year.  On Friday we will proceed to Wichita and McConnell Air Force Base FamCamp.

We got set-up quickly and everything worked great.  We took a relaxing walk about with Liberty and enjoyed the slightly warmer temps.  

Some of the trees are in bloom as are the flowers.

Nice having and end spot

The sites are tight but we don't notice it on the end.

Tomorrow we made plans to meet up with a very dear high school friend Elaine Burkhart Dubray in Bonner Springs for dinner.  Other than that we don't have any firm plans here as this is just a stop-over before getting to Wichita.  

I will do my best to update the blog nightly during our trip this year again.  Thanks for checking in on us.  Please bookmark this URL:  https://schellhasetravels2025.blogspot.com

15 Jan 2025 - Trip Planning

 

Greetings from Iowa! We hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. We have been very busy since we returned from our 2024 RV travels in August, about a month sooner than planned. Thankfully the health issues that forced our early return turned out to be non-issues, but better safe than sorry. So we took advantage of being back a month early and dove into several projects that we had planned.

One of those projects involved a facelift for our garage to include a polyaspartic/polyurea floor coating, a complete paint job, some trim work and new LED lighting.

We hired the same company that did the garage work to demo and replace the concrete in our front entryway patio area and apply a decorative coating there as well. It not only looks great but corrects a settling issue causing severe ponding and ice buildup in front of our main door in the winter.

Finally we completed a landscaping project around our garden shed with the help of our grandsons, and it came out fantastic.

But while working on the landscaping project I severed my left rotator cuff. Ugh! So we got that diagnosed and had surgery to repair it on 13 December. Recovery from that is ongoing - slow and painful, but the surgeon assured me that as long as I behaved myself and was diligent on the PT, we should be good to go departing on our 2025 RV travels on 1 April .

Once the projects were complete and while we heal from surgery we started the planning of our 2025 trip. I created this 2025 blog framework which includes this first post. This will allow you to bookmark the URL for future reference, which is: https://schellhasetravels2025.blogspot.com Notice the URL is the same as in year's past except for the year. You can go back and revisit any of our travels from 2016 through 2024 just by changing the year on the URL. Here is a map that illustrates our travels since 2016:

We took that map, compiled a list of factors for 2025 and created our 2025 travels which looks like this:

In 2025 there are several significant events that helped shape the route. In yellow, above, is Phase 1. This is a month-long counter-clockwise loop taking us south through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, back into Missouri, Arkansas, back into Missouri and finally back to Iowa to attend our grand daughter Hailee's high school graduation.

Then Phase II is in blue on the map, also a counter-clockwise route. We will depart home after Hailee's graduation and head east through Illinois and Indiana to the Elkhart-Goshen IN area to attend the Alliance RV National Rally. After that we head north into Michigan to see our daughter Jennifer and her family to include our grandson Lucas's high school graduation. Part of the rest of our trip will also involve Lucas as he has enlisted in the United States Army. He departs for basic training in Ft Sill OK shortly after his high school graduation. We plan to attend his basic training graduation the later part of August at Ft Sill (Stop# 40 on the map. So on through Michigan north to the Michigan Alliance RV Rally, into the Upper Peninsula and then down to the Milwaukee WI area to see and hopefully camp with our daughter Michelle and her family there.

From there we start our long journey west, through Iowa stopping for a gathering with some of our high school classmates, then into Minnesota to camp with the Thornells, great friends and a military comrade, We will also see one of my cousins there. Then north to Fargo ND and west all the way out to Idaho and Oregon. There we are basically "filling in the holes" in our previous travels. We will see my cousin Nancy in Madras Oregon and also camp with Barry Barton, another great friend and military comrade from the 70's, We are looking forward to visiting Crater Lake and then down to Utah where we stumbled onto the 2025 Speed Week at the Bonneville Salt Flats at Wendover UT, a gathering of land speed racers! Then we will head SE with a swing through the south.  It will bring us through Gallup, Albuquerque (Command Chief (ret) Mitch Brush's AOR),   and Amarillo before we arrive at Ft Sill Oklahoma and grandson Lucas's basic training graduation the last week in August. After graduation we head home, to arrive approximately 8 September.

185 nights, 43 stops, 8425 point-to-point miles, hundreds of interesting sites to see and many, many friends, relatives and military comrades to reconnect. Should be a great trip!

The trip is planned, 93% of the reservations made, and now "we" just need to heal up so we can get the coach out of storage in March and launch on 1 April. And when I say "we" need to heal up I am talking about Doreen also. She was having an issue with her left foot and so we had that checked out and it will require surgery which is scheduled for a week from today, 22 Jan. This age stuff is not what it is cracked up to be!

Stay strong folks, and stay tuned for updates. Thank you for tagging along and, again, here is the URL to bookmark for future reference. https://schellhasetravels2025.blogspot.com/ The blog will be updated daily once we launch in April.

Take care,

Ed and Doreen Schellhase and Liberty, too!