UP TO VIRGINIA BUT NOT OFFICIALLY ON THE ROAD

We moved to Virginia by me driving the RV and pulling a U-Haul trailer, and with my wife driving our Explorer while towing our Bronco. Our Explorer has a V8 and the towing package and is rated to pull 4000lbs. The Bronco has a fiberglass body so is well within that limit. I on the other hand didn't know that I was pulling 6500lbs of trailer. When you move yourself for the Navy you can get reimbursed for the weight you carry, and even the weight you added to the motorhome but you have to weigh empty and then full. Once we weighed at our destination I realized we were over the recommendation for the hitch of the RV. Good news was that it was a dual axle trailer so I didn't come close to the recommended tongue weight. The other good news was that I wasn't over limit on the RV weight and the RV pulled the trailer just fine so will have no problem towing the lighter Bronco.


On the trip we stayed the night at an Air Force base in South Carolina. They were very accommodating to us and didn't charge us extra for having extra vehicles and trailers. They have had others who were on their move stay there also. I also wanted the extra security since we had all of our belongings in one place.


If you weren't following along, I still had two years left in the Navy and was planning to stay in military campgrounds for that two years until I would be on terminal leave at the end of September of 2016. We had reservations for the RV park on Dam Neck Base in Virginia Beach. The campground is backed right up against the dune from the Atlantic Ocean. You can't see the water over the dune but you can easily hear it. We love this park as it has a couple of board walks to the beach with just a short walk. The dogs are welcome on this beach also. The kids love being able to invite friends over and being able to take them to the beach or spending the evening having a campfire. The base is not the actual base I work on but only a five mile drive away to Oceana Naval Air Station where I worked. I'm a jet engine mechanic and work on F-18's, so it's also nice to be a little bit away from all of the jet noise.


The Navy has four campgrounds in Virginia Beach and they have 60 day stay limits until you must be out of the park for 14 days, but you can move to another park for that 14 days. Thankfully the rule is only enforced if the park is getting full. We pulled in during late July, so our 60 day reservations were good until late September, which was well after any worry about the park ever filling up as the summer season was over. We were invited to stay the whole winter until next summer without having to move. There was even the possibility of staying through the next summer, again depending on if the park looked like it would fill up, but during the last summer it hadn't filled up so it looked good. There were others in the park doing this also and some hadn't had to move in four years. As luck would have it we didn't have to move that next summer but we could tell the park was about at capacity especially on the summer holiday weekends. This summer though it's not going to be as convenient for us.


Not sure if you have noticed or not but the economy is picking up, especially in the RV world. For the last couple of years the RV industry has been making a comeback after being preceded by several years of hard recession. The fall of gas prices has also helped the RVer be able to take their RV's out more often. We saw this happening as even the fringe months in the spring and fall the park was getting much more business than usual on the weekends, and knew we were going to have to play by the rules this summer of 2016. We were even informed by the office that the summer holiday weekends were already booked up completely by March and that all of us semi-permanent residents would have to be moving. Dam Neck base is by far the nicest of the three military campgrounds in Virginia Beach and is more of a destination campground for vacationers in the summer, so it's the campground that fills up. With some planning we were able to make reservations over at Oceana and Little Creek campgrounds in the summer, with a sprinkling of some time still back at Dam Neck. Those other campgrounds are actually more designed for the semi-permanent resident and are on the very large and populous bases in the city. We now have reservations to cover us until we leave in the first part of October, Then we can finally hit the road officially.