March 3-4, 2015 Madison, Florida

Just so you know, Florida is not a bad place to be stranded. We have trip interruption insurance from AAA and State Farm, so they are taking care of us.

85 degrees and sunny. I read by the pool this am. Poor John was on the phone and running around today. Hopefully he will get to relax soon. Right now he wants to keep busy. This afternoon we drove back out to the accident scene and left flowers where the man’s car ended up and said a few words. Seemed like the right thing to do.

Historic downtown Madison, Florida this evening.  Stately oak trees with Spanish moss and a park full of statues.

 

The moon rising over the Madison county court house. The court house was 100 years old in 2014. Our pod was delivered this morning and we spent the whole day moving out of the bus. John is seeing structural damage in the bus, the front slide is  crooked. A tile broke in the middle of the bus, part of one of the mirrors. Probably more that we are not seeing. We may never see the bus again if they total it. Even if they decide to fix it it will take months, so we took everything out. We also emptied the car of some of our sports gear  and put it in the pod, to make room in there to haul more stuff  in the car. We are taking some camping gear since we don’t have the bus.

Yup, boxes again. Seems like we just moved everything out of my house in Denver. That is what I get for thinking we would not have to move again for a long time. When John was clearing out the car he found this little green tree frog in the car.

Looking at the pod through the damaged windshield. The windshield popped out and is cracked . The vent for the air is missing from the hole in the dash. I found it on my side on the floor after the accident. This other photo is of the windshield on my side. The rear view mirror is missing from the silver arm in front. It is still hanging from wires in the front. Don’t know if that broke the window or the impact did. I felt like I had shards of glass all over me afterwards, but I thought it was from cleaning up broken dishes. I was so shell shocked I didn’t notice all the shards on the dash until today.  The mirror on John’s side got ripped off by the car.

The broken panels are under the steering column. Right by John’s feet.  There is no crash protection in the front of these buses. Only the fiberglass body. It is a miracle we were not hurt.  Johns watch is hanging from the turn signal on the steering column. He took it off 5 + years ago when he retired and hasn’t worn it since. He left it in the bus today.  More packing. John in the bedroom in the back packing.

   

The pod packed. We did not need one this big. It is 18 feet long. The next smaller one was 8 feet, and John thought it would be too small. We bought the mattress new last year, so we took it too.  The pod will be delivered into storage in Colorado for when we get back. We will then try to find room in our tiny apartment over the garage and the garage for this stuff. It is already packed with things from my house. We are planning to either move back into our fixed bus or get a new one when it is all settled.

We have plane tickets to for March 12 to fly to Death Valley for two weeks to visit with my sister and family. We had them before the accident.  They are round trip from Fort Lauderdale.  We had planned to leave the bus in Naples, Florida to have a complete solar system installed, including new batteries and a new inverter. The trip to Death Valley is at a good time. Hopefully the accident will be settled by then.