Our RV Adventures

Our travel agent, Chantelle Nugent, has done a fantastic job booking our upcoming European jaunt. And it got even better today when she sent over a tentative itinerary for the Paris/London part of our trip.

The hotels look great, and the tours of Versailles, the Louvre, Stonehenge, etc. are exactly what we want. She’s arranged everything, including private transport between trains, planes, and hotels.

243 Days and Counting !

Our good friend Chris Yust over a list of 12 Mistakes Tourists Make In Amsterdam. And I think #1 is kind of interesting.

1. Don’t Confuse A Café and A Coffee Shop.

At a Café, you can get a pot of coffee. But at a Coffee Shop you can a pot of, well . . . Pot. Coffee shops in Amsterdam are where you go to buy legal cannabis, er, pot.

Don’t Mix Them Up.

Thought I’d repost some of our adventures in Pennsylvania in October 2012.

Choo Choo Barn and A Canary Club . . .

Today started off slowly but turned out to be pretty busy.

Our first thing was give Stu & Donna McNicol a send off. They’re heading over to Maryland to visit relatives for awhile.

Later, around 12:30, Jan and I headed over to the Strasburg area just southeast of Lancaster to check out the area where we spent some time during the summer of 2009 while we were on our way out to Newfoundland.

We stayed at a Passport America park in the area called Roamer’s Retreat, and it looks like it’s just as nice as it was three years ago.

adsfa

And the view from the park of the surrounding countryside looked just as good as before too.

adsfa

By now we were getting hungry so we headed over to a place we had eaten at three years ago and really liked. We didn’t remember the name, just where it was located. It turned out to be a Isaac’s Deli, a local chain.

And the food is just as good as we remembered. One item was a type of tomato soup. It turned out to be their Pepperjack Tomato. Closer to a bisque than a soup, it was delicious.

As were the sandwiches we had. Jan had the Shrike, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, melted provolone cheese, fresh tomatoes and sprouts. I had the similar Canary Club, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, provolone cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo.

And our sandwiches were so big we both had leftovers. Nice.

Then for dessert, we split a slice of their Pumpkin Cranberry Stack, a spiced pumpkin cake kind of like a carrot cake. Really delicious, too.

After lunch Jan and I walked to the other end of the small group of stores to visit the Choo Choo Barn, a family-owned, 1700 sq. ft. O Gauge model railroad layout.

And this was a really neat layout. not only very detailed, but the lighting, and especially the animation, were just amazing.

adsfa

This is a zoo with many of the animals moving and making noises.

adsfa

A Flea Market

adsfa

This one is really amazing. It’s an Amish barn raising. And what this picture doesn’t show is all of the animated Amish guys on the roof hammering away, and guys on the ground sawing lumber. Really neat.

adsfa

And like the Entertrainment Junction we visited in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago, this layout also has a night period to show off the many lighting effects.

adsfa

This animation has a guy flying a control line model airplane around the yard. The plane is the yellow shape in the middle of the picture.

adsfa

In the snow-covered mountain scene in the background here, the gondola goes up and down the mountain, and skiers ride the lift up and then ski back down.

adsfa

I think you’d have to go through this several times to even start to see all the neat things going on.

adsfa

Leaving the Choo Choo Barn, and heading home, we drove through the Red Caboose Motel, a motel made up of 41 cabooses, ah . . .  caboosi, maybe. Anyway, there’s a bunch of them.

adsfa

And they even have a Pullman Dining Car to use as their motel restaurant.

A really neat place, and I bet, fun to stay at.

We finally got home just in time to turn around and head back out with Nick and Terry for supper. We ended up at the Cocoa Diner in Hershey, a place Nick and Terry had eaten before, and it was really good with a very big menu.

Thought for the Day: 

Wisdom and education are different things. Don’t mix them up.

dfgh

For once we didn’t have much on the schedule today, except for gassing up the truck and eating lunch out somewhere.

And now we’ve got a problem. But it’s a good one to have.

We’ve eaten at San Lorenzo’s, a nearby Mexican restaurant, twice now and it’s really good. But for some reason we couldn’t be satisfied with just one good nearby Mexican restaurant, so we had to go and find another one.

There is a Los Ramirez Mexican restaurant near my client’s office and it’s always busy, to the extent that my client’s parking lot apparently gets used as the restaurant’s overflow parking at night after the office is closed.

We had noticed that they have another location near us on the way down FM-517 to our storage unit. So today we decided to give it a try. But we didn’t have really high hopes since we checked out the menu and thought the prices were really cheap. I mean, REALLY cheap.

And in comparison to San Lorenzo’s it didn’t get off to a good start. Neither of us thought the chips and salsa were as good here at Los Ramirez. The salsa at San Lorenzo was thicker, and warm, as are the chips. Not that it was bad, it was just . . .

Jan got the Pechuga Rellana, a chicken breast stuffed with Grilled Shrimp and Broccoli, and served with Charro Beans, Lettuce, Tomato, and Sliced Avocado.

I got my go-to usual Beef Fajita Taco Salad, but wasn’t expecting a lot since it only cost $6.99. So I was very happily surprised to get this.

The meat was delicious, and wasn’t just spread on top. It was piled up all the way  to the bottom. There must have been at least a pound of fajita meat in there.

And Jan was crazy about hers. It was absolutely stuffed with grilled shrimp, and the broccoli had been grilled as well.

And remember the ‘cheap’ part.  Well, it was. But cheap AND delicious go well together. Jan’s Pechuga Rellana was only $7.99, $3 or $4 cheaper than the equivalent at other places.

And my Beef Fajita Taco Salad was only $6.99. But it gets better. That salad is also on their lunch menu, which is every day from 11am to 5pm. So it was only $5.59! 

I’ve paid $11.99 for something as good as this elsewhere. And this is the first time in a good while we’ve both had full meals with iced tea for only $18.14 plus tip.

So now we have problem. Two close-by Mexican restaurants, both really, really good.

Decision, Decisions!

Jan and I started talking about our upcoming trip to Florida, sometime in October. But because we going a slightly different way than we have before, we’re looking for a nice, cheap, (there’s that word again), RV Park for a one night stop in the Tallahassee, FL area.

So, any recommendations?

Thought for the Day: 

Never question your wife’s judgment. Look who she married.

sgfg