Well, here I am in Las Vegas. Actually I’m currently on a shuttle bus heading to Mesquite, NV, where I’m going to pick up our new (to us) Suburban.

I brought my camera, but somehow ended up leaving without a card reader, so all the great pictures I’m taking will have to wait to get posted when I get back.

More to follow!

No, we haven’t left for full-time RV’ing yet, but this is my first blog post from the road. We came to Indiana this weekend to go an RV show and explore Amish country with the girls. We’re in Shipshewana, Indiana, and we’re surrounded by buggies and restaurants with really, really, really good food.

Last night we ate at the Blue Gate Restaurant. Family-style buffet. Madeline, who is usually not one to compliment food no matter how good it is, could not stop saying how incredible our meal was. Every few minutes, she would say it was the best she’d ever had, that it was so good, that she wanted more. She told our waitress that it was the “goodest” food she’d ever had.

Makayla, likewise, didn’t barely mutter a word after the food came to the table, which is not only out of character, but usually cause for concern because it means she’s probably doing something sneaky and underhanded in her toddler-stealth-mode. This time, her silence wasn’t something to be worried about. She was too busy eating.

Our dinner included chicken, ham, noodles, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, chicken stuffing, homemeade bread (with homemade peanut or apple butter spread), our choiceof beverage and a huge slice of pie to finish things off. We took the pies back to our cabin and had them after our stomachs had time to work on dinner a bit.

Our cabin was very cozy and a nice “upgrade” from the tent:

It was nice to “camp” and sleep on something better than an air mattress for a change.

The RV show was a little disappointing, and I think it was a bit overhyped. It may be the largest, oldest RV show in Indiana, but the advertising for it should have mentioned what the media was reporting locally: that this year’s show was going to be about half the size of previous shows because of the sagging economy. Showing a picture of last year’s show with about 300 RVs was misleading, becaue I estimated about 120 at this show. And the “huge indoor RV gallery” was, in reality, nine Class A motorhomes.

Even though the show was a lot smaller than we were anticipating, we still were able to walk away with some more information to chew on in our search of our family’s perfect RV. We got to poke around inside travel trailers of just about every length, and also got to look at some Class C motorhomes that just might turn out to be a pretty good fit for us, too.

After the show we came back to the cabin and made big bubbles:

All in all, we’ve had a good time so far. We fought the “fall asleep in a different environment battle” with Makayla again, something we feel we probably won’t have to worry about on the road with her because she’ll be sleeping in the same bed every night, even though the BED may be in a different place, her surroundings will always be the same. I’m sure we’ll have an acclamation period, but once she recognizes her new bed as “hers,” the late-night, bedtime jitters will diminish.

A family member asked me how we’re going to get our mail while we’re out wandering around the country. At first at thought about getting a P.O. box and then having family check it every week and mail us the import stuff. That was until I came across this really cool service:

This is probably one of the coolest way to completely rethink snail mail. All your snail mail is received and the envelopes scanned and their images put into your inbox. You log in, look at the envelopes and select the ones you want them to open, scan completely and email to you. You can also select pieces of mail to be shredded, recycled or forwarded to wherever you currently are. Their plans start at $10 a month and will give us piece of mind knowing we won’t be without old-fashioned snail mail while we’re on the road.

I used to use a service back in the 90s called PayMyBills.com that handled your bill payments. You would change your billing address on your accounts to a special address they gave you and they would process all your incoming invoices, statements, etc. I’d log into the website, see scans of all my bills and then pay them electronically through a check they would print and mail. Now I pay all my bills online with a debit card, but PayMyBills.com was so cool for the 90s.