White Sands

We left Titusville, Florida three weeks ago on August 1^st, on a leisurely trip towards Colorado in our COVID-19 bubble, aka motorhome.

We spent a couple of days in Destin, but didn’t go to the beach because there were too many families on vacation milling about. We stopped in Biloxi for a couple of nights, then on to Louisiana and Texas. We headed to Castroville, just west of San Antonio, to Alsatian RV Resort. We met Jeff and Carol there, who drove up from the Rio Grande Valley, in their motorhome for the weekend.

The following Monday, we visited Julie’s 89-year old mom through the glass at her assisted living facility in San Antonio. We had made previous arrangements with the staff for the visit. The visit was especially hard for Julie’s old mom, as we don’t think she fully understood the coronavirus and why we couldn’t see her in person.

Later, we met old friends Peggi and her dad Buzz at Tiu Steppi's for a mid-afternoon lunch. It was the first time we had been inside a restaurant since early-March. There was hardly anyone there and I was impressed by the restaurant taking our temperature at the front door. The Italian food was really good.

We headed to Kerrville on Tuesday, August 11^th, where we had an appointment to get our motorhome’s AquaHot unit serviced and two new chassis batteries installed. We hunkered down at Buckhorn Lake Resort for three nights. While there, we ended up changing our plans to go to San Angelo, and instead added another three nights at Buckhorn Lake.

We left Kerrville this past Monday for the long drive across west Texas, with stops in Fort Stockton and Las Cruces, NM. On Wednesday morning, we drove east about 35-miles from Las Cruces to the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range garrison. 

We’re staying at the military campground on post for $10/night. It’s our first-time here. We have a great view of the mountains and the hummingbirds are very active.

Our new home construction is coming along nicely. They have finished the drywall installation, taping and texturing. They have finished painting the outside of the house. We chose paint scheme 7 where the house body color is “reclining green”. They’ll paint the inside of the house next, followed by tiling the whole house.    

Stay safe out there!

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Headed West from Titusville

Our four-month stay in Titusville, Florida has ended as we head west tomorrow, August 1st. We’ve enjoyed our time here as we’ve been able to watch our new home being built at Latitude Margaritaville Daytona Beach.

The Minto new home construction sites have been super busy with activity, so we’ve only gone up on Sunday afternoons. We’ve really enjoyed seeing the progress each week and taking photos of our house and our neighbor’s homes to email to them.   

As many of you know, Julie and I have been full-time RVing in our motorhome since May 2013. we got rid of all of our furniture and lots of “stuff”. We only kept a few things (photo albums, some pots and pans, a few dishes, a Turkish carpet), but no furniture, in a small 5x10 storage unit, before we sold our house and moved into our motorhome.

So we’ve been busy the past four months buying furniture for our new home. We bought two-bedroom sets, a reclining love seat for the den, a small kitchen table and chairs, some chairs for the kitchen island, a sofa, end tables and entertainment center for the great room, three large area rugs, and a washer and dryer.

We found out early on that all of this furniture had to ordered and would take 2-4 months to come in due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The good news was that the furniture stores would keep our furniture at their warehouses until after we close on our house and ask to have it
delivered. 

We met with our builder yesterday afternoon to do a walk-through of the house. Afterwards, Julie and I went out for lunch at an outside bar & grill in Ponce Inlet. The bar & grill was on the water, adjacent to the national historic landmark Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, 175-feet tall and built in 1887.

Stay safe out there!

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Still Hanging Out in Titusville

We’re still hunkered down in Titusville, Florida, but we’ve been busy. On Tuesday, June 30^th, we witnessed the SpaceX launch of a GPS III satellite from Cape Canaveral. The clouds cleared enough so we could plainly see the rocket from our campsite at the RV park. SpaceX recovers their stage 1 boosters, to be used again, by having the booster land itself on a barge-like ship in the Atlantic. Very cool!

My sister Cathy drove across Florida from the Tampa area on Wednesday, July 1^st to spend July 4^th weekend with us. We also had my sister Marcia, brother-in-law Mike, and niece Stephanie come in on the same day in their motorhome for a week-long stay. They were here to meet with their Latitude Margaritaville salesman, their pool builder, and visit the home models to get ideas for their flooring, cabinets, countertops and other decorating for their new home. Their home will be on “Cheeseburger Drive” (upper left-site of map) while ours will be on “Sand Bar Lane” (upper right-side of map).

We spent July 4^th just hanging out and playing cards at our RV park clubhouse. It was relaxing.

Julie and I have been watching the progress the past three weeks, as Minto builds our new home. We take a short trip up I-95 to Daytona Beach on Sunday afternoons to check on the progress. All the construction workers are off on Sundays, so it’s the best day for us to go take a look.

The finished house should look like this in a few months (late-October or early-November).

Stay safe out there!

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Another Month in Titusville

It’s hard to believe that another month has gone by as we hunker down in Titusville, Florida. We haven’t done much. With COVID-19, we haven’t gone out to eat at any restaurants. However, we do occasionally pick up a “to go” order.

We spent the past month looking for a golf cart. No, we don’t play golf. We need a golf cart to get around Latitude Margaritaville after we move in this November. We wanted a golf cart that seated four people and specifically, a cart with the rear seat facing forward. Most carts have the rear seat facing backwards and could make those passengers dizzy riding backwards.

We finally narrowed our search down to an Icon-made cart. Icon is a new electrical vehicle manufacturer, based in Tampa. Their carts are fully-loaded with features like 10-inch aluminum wheels, lights, turn signals, horn, digital gauges, and come standard with a 48-volt Toyota 4KW AC motor for greater torque and distance. We specifically were looking at the Icon, model i40F golf cart.

We went to Icon dealers in Melbourne, Daytona Beach, and Kissimmee, Florida. We wanted to buy from the Icon dealer right outside the Latitude Margaritaville gate, but their price was quite a bit more than other dealers we’d been working with. We bought our Icon i40F, in Caribbean Blue, this past Tuesday in Kissimmee and it was delivered this past Friday. 

On June 10^th, we had our “Meet Your Builder” meeting with our construction superintendent Peter, for our new home at Latitude Margaritaville. Since then, they have graded our lot, “pinned” the location of the house, trenched to place the sewer lines, and set the forms in place. If the weather is good, they plan to pour concrete for our “slab” this coming week. Florida gets lots of late-afternoon thunderstorms during the summer.

We have watched a couple of rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center and from Cape Canaveral this past month. We thought the most spectacular launch was the June 13^th launch of a SpaceX rocket at 5:30AM from Cape Canaveral. It sent up a new batch of 58 Starlink internet satellites, along with three small Earth-observation satellites.  

Julie and I have decided to finally sell our boat. Our boat was a 2004 Chaparral 220Ssi bowrider that I got for my 55^th birthday in September 2003. The past several years we have only been using it for two-weeks in September each year at Lake Powell. Rather than tow it all the way from Page, AZ to Daytona Beach to sell it in Florida, we decided to try and sell it this summer. The past 5-years we have stored the boat in Big Water, Utah, just outside of Page, AZ.  We thought now would be a good time to sell the boat with Lake Powell reopening from COVID-19 restrictions and with July 4^th coming up.

This past Wednesday I put a free classified ad on a local Salt Lake City TV station web site. I also paid for an ad on the Boat Trader web site. In less than an hour I got an “very interested” lead and had six more leads in just 24-hours. My first lead, a guy from the Salt Lake City area drove 5-hours down to Big Water Wednesday night to look at the boat on Thursday morning and take it for a test drive. He bought our boat and we’re happy it went to a good family.

We already miss our Chaparral and all the great memories we have out on many lakes. We’ll really miss our boat in September when we go to Lake Powell and have to rent a boat to go out onto the lake.      

Happy Father's Day and stay safe out there!

Steve & Julie Cornelius