We were planning to leave for Florida (in the bus) on Friday, December 20^th, so by Tuesday the 17^th our attention was starting to focus sharply on what we had to do to get out of town.  But first we had to get Marilyn to the airport for a mid-afternoon flight back to St. Louis, Missouri.  Linda did the shuttle run while I stayed home and started pulling together stuff to load on the bus or into the car.  I also started copying the files from the old Buffalo Technologies LinkStation Pro Duo NAS to the new Buffalo Technologies LS421e NAS.  This turned out to take quite a bit of time as I had to do the copying in pieces; there were too many files and too many gigabytes of data to copy and paste them in one move.

We also started watching the weather forecast, both at home at along our route.  By Wednesday the 18^th it was becoming clear that we would be much better off leaving on Thursday the 19^th instead of our planned date of the 20^th.  We had planned to have company over for dinner on Wednesday, however, so we did not see how we could possibly be ready to leave the next day.  Although we were disappointed by a last minute cancelation due to the illness of one of our guests, it changed the situation in favor of a Thursday departure.  (We hope you are much better very soon Kristine.)

To paraphrase John Muir, “The driveway is calling and I must go.”

We originally intended to leave early enough on Friday the 20^th to get past Ann Arbor, Michigan before the morning rush hour and make it a campground in Berea, Kentucky before dark.  It was clear that we could not be ready to leave that early on Thursday morning, and did not want to arrive anywhere in the dark, so we adjusted our plans.  (A true traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.  Lao Tzu).  We knew there was a Coast To Coast (C2C) RV resort near Wapakoneta, Ohio.  A quick check online indicated that they should still be open this time of year and that we still had enough C2C points in our account to cover the $10 per night cost.  A phone call verified that they were open and had plenty of available sites.  Although Wapakoneta was only 166 miles from our house it was far enough south to have overnight low temperatures above freezing.  It was also close enough that we could leave at noon and be there by 4 PM.  That would give us the morning to finish loading the bus and closing up the house.