Eggtoberfest 2017

We had a blast at the 20th Eggtoberfest at Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta.

Here is the gang. Heidi, Patty, Joe, Matt, Me, Peggy, Kathy, Terry and Danny. Patty and Joe came down in their RV. Terry and Kathy drove down and stayed in Patty's RV. Heidi, Matt and Danny flew down. Their flight was about 6 hours late. They didn't get to the park until 11:30 Friday night. We've been looking forward to this for a long time. This is one of the best festivals you can go to.

We set up our spot close to the band stage. One of the best things about this festival is they let you bring in all your stuff to party with.

Matt, Danny and Heidi in the crowd.

Heidi and Joe next to Eggzilla. The super size Egg.

This is why we come . . . to see all different things on the BGE.

You do see a lot of smoke.

And some famous cooks! Dr. BBQ and me. I'm not sure who is more famous.

Here's a bad crowd.

She was part of the marching band.

I love marching bands.

Heidi and Patty taking a break. What you do is, walk around the festival and eat different cook's creations.

This is what it looked like the day before. A big parking lot full of Big Green Eggs.

After the festival is over we picked up 2 Large Demo

Eggs. Heidi got one for her "boss" and I got a new one for me. I gave my old one to Danny. These eggs have only been cooked on that day. They're a good deal at $795.00 each, that's cheap. Terry is taking Danny's egg back home. Thanks Terry! They had a great store at the festival. You can buy anything BGE there.

Here is one unlucky Egg. 

Maybe you have to break some eggs to make a great festival.

After all the fun, we had to start heading west. We are on a seven day run to Yuma. So far we've driven over 350 miles a day to get to Amarillo, TX in three days. We're going to take a two night stop here and go to the Big Texan Steak Ranch, home of the 72 ounce free steak. That is, if you can eat it in one hour.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

Big Upgrade

We're still at River's Edge RV Park in Murphy, NC. We got some major work done yesterday. We upgraded our refrigerator with an Amish cooling unit.

Here is the new cooling unit. You can see that it has twice the cooling tubes and they are bigger.

  Here is the old "Nevercold" unit. It only has one coil, the Amish one has two coils.

Jeff and Don from J&J Appliance, here in Murphy, did a great job. It took them about 4 hours to do the job. (With a little help from me, mostly supervising).

They took it right out of the wall.

They took all the electronics and the old cooling unit off the back.

 They put the new cooling unit on the back, then rewired all the control stuff back on.

Checking to make sure they do it right.

In and running!

We've talked to 3 different people that have upgraded to this Amish cooling unit and they all say it's 10 times better than the "Nevercold unit". They say they can keep ice cream in the freezer. We could never do that. The ice cream would come out like soup in the "Nevercold". If you look it up on the internet, they say the average guy can do this job. There is NO way I could have done it. That's why you call the experts in.

We were part of a successful, class action, law suit against Norcold. We'll get 4 checks from them for the next 3 years for $276.00 each year. That will help pay for the new Amish unit. I'm going to the store today and get some ice cream!

I added a dash cam to the big truck. Just another toy to play with.

Peggy is doing a little better with her knee. It's hard to keep her in that chair. The brace she has on seems to be working to help her recover. She's not moving too fast. 

On Sunday we'll move to Stone Mountain RV Park in Atlanta for the Eggtoberfest.  

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

Still a Great Park

This is still one of the nicest parks we've stayed at this year. The weather has been great, it's a little foggy in the mornings but it clears up fast.

Here's a drone shot of the park. I took some good drone shots of the park and sent them to the park owner. He's going to use them to update his web page. Someone else wanted to charge him big money for these pictures. I am cheap. Free. 

On Saturday we went to Blue Ridge, GA for the "Blues & BBQ Festival". It was a little hard to find a parking spot, but it was a nice festival. We had lunch at the Blue Ridge Brewery. The food was very good.

It was a beautiful day.

Ice cream maker powered by a one cylinder John Deere.

 This is the Murphy courthouse. It's a beautiful marble building. Murphy has a nice downtown with some good stores and a nice Irish Pub and a brewery.

 I've never seen a flag deposit box like this one. This is cool with all the stuff in the news concerning our flag.

 The only thing that's a little pain in the butt are these "Stink Bugs" here in the park. They don't bite, But they are just ugly bugs.

Oh, and this lost duck. All of his buddies flew south but he stayed here. Everyone is feeding him bread, so why would he leave.

One bad thing, Peggy tore the Meniscus in her left leg. She got this nice brace here in Murphy emergency care.

   She has to stay off it for a while. The only other thing we could do to fix it, was to cut it off. It's a bitch getting old.

Throwback Picture of the Blog.

 My mom sent me this picture. This was back in the early 80's when we used to race Hobie Cats. 

This photo proves that I had hair when I needed it.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

Great Park

We've moved to River's Edge Mountain View RV Park in Murphy, NC. The weather hasn't been that good. We're getting the rain from the hurricane Irma, but not much wind. So I got the Drone out to get some pictures of one of the best parks we've been in this year.

 This is a picture of our site. It's so long I can park the truck in the front or back. It has a nice pad with a picnic table and a portable fire pit.

 The park has 50 sites. We're on one of the basic sites They also have premium sites that are longer and some back-in sites on a small river.

There's a lot of room between sites. We are here for 2 weeks. We are getting the tire blowout damage fixed. Rick's RV Repair is going to do the work right here on our site.
 The owner came over after we were set up and gave us a good deal on our site. What a great park.

This is a picture of the flight control for the Drone displayed on my iPad. It has a lot of information on it.

The iPad mounts on the front with the flight controls behind it.

This Drone is so smart. 

A Drone Fly By. This is my first video down loaded. I will work on the video quality. Try to use the HD setting if you have the bandwidth.

Funny things you see in RV Parks:

We stopped in Bristol, TN for one night on our way here where we saw this really nice TV antenna, mounted on a 2x4, on the back of this RV. If you look close, you can see a beer can in the antenna. I talked to the guy and he said it works great.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

Full Hook Up

After 12 days without full hookup we finally got a FHU site. That was the longest we've went without FHU. 

We have moved to Summersville Lake Retreat. A nice park in the mountains in West Virginia overlooking Summersville Lake. 

The weird thing at this park is that it has a working lighthouse. 

You can pay $7 to go up in it.

Here is a good Drone shot of the lighthouse.

I love the good pictures that the Drone takes. 
Lighthouse Story link Lighthouse Story

We found the World Famous Tractor Bar just down the road from the park. It's got this tractor in it, and follows the tractor theme. Even the bar stools are tractor seats.

Before we left Milton we had dinner at the Backyard BBQ. They had live bluegrass music on a stage in the backyard.

We met Gethen Jenkins in the backyard. He's an Outlaw Country Singer. We got his first album off iTunes and it's pretty good. He's from Huntington, WV. Here is a link to his music http://www.gethenjenkinsmusic.com/

We had some burned out running lights. So Peggy and I changed all 19 of them. We found two of them weren't even wired in. So we fixed that. Now all of them work. It just looks so much better. 

I'm still having fun with my Drone!

Here is the flight of the Drone taking a picture of the lighthouse. You can see the shadow of the lighthouse. The Drone is 757.9 feet from me. This is just some of the information you can get from the Drone on my iPad.

This thing is amazing. 

I haven't crashed it yet and it always comes back.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

New Toy

I got a new toy the other day. A Drone! I got the DJI Mavic Pro. It's a flying camera.

This is my first flight. It took about 8 hours of study to get it to fly. After unpacking it and charging up all the batteries and controller; which took about 2 hours, and after reloading the software twice; I called tech support and that's when I found out it won't work with my Droid phone. So then I made a trip to one of my favorite stores, Best Buy, to buy an IPad Mini 4. After I got that mastered (I hate Apple stuff) and loaded with the DJI App, I was in hour number 5 and it was getting dark outside. The next day I powered up to find out it has to load new firmware. That took an hour to do. This thing is awesome, it's so smart.

 Peggy and I took it out into a nice open area in the park for our first flight. It was awesome! I had it in Beginner mode so you can only fly 98 feet away. It's a good start. My last drone experience of about 5 years ago, took 2 minutes to fly it into a tree and about an hour to get it out of the tree. So in comparison, this flight went good. We tested the "Fly To Home" button a couple of times and it worked great. It came right back and landed on the landing pad just inches away from where it took off. It has GPS to tell where it took off from and land right back on that same place.

The camera on it can record in 4K. I had to order a mount for the IPad. It will be here tomorrow. Until then, Peggy has to hold on to it when I'm flying. We'll call her a flight attendant. 

It will fly 98 feet away and stop and ask you if you want to take it out of beginner mode. But I think I'll fly in Beginner mode for a little while. They say it can fly up to 4 miles away and still come back on one charge. I'm not ready to try that yet either. You have to register with the FAA to get a permit to fly this drone. I did that for $5.  The drone has software in it and it knows when it's in a "No Fly Zone." Now that's smart. Those Chinese think of everything. This thing is a quality machine. I tried to load a video on the blog, but it took too long. So no videos on the blog.

But I had to add a Drone Picture. This is from 98 feet in the air.

A Drone shot from down low. A Drone selfie.

Oh and Peggy got some good shots of some birds.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.