Current Location: Two Rivers Campground, Nashville, Tennessee

Malcolm realized late last night that it had been several days since a blog update (probably one of the longer gaps in time on this blog). So, this morning (Sunday), he is catching up to today with a bunch of random snippets of events over the past week.

Last night was the company Christmas party. It was held at the Watermark Restaurant in downtown Nashville. There were about 30 people there. The food was delicious and it was great to meet co-workers and their spouses or significant others. All of the employees at the Nashville office have, or will be, relocating from other parts of the country since this is a new corporate headquarters for the company.

As we talked to others about their efforts to find a home in the Nashville area, it made us realize how much easier it is for us to find a home in any city we need to work from. Simply opening an app or two on our electronic devices and picking a nice-sounding campground is infinitely easier than the traditional move from one house to the next.

The area we are staying in this trip (and the last one up here) can get really busy this time of the year. We share access roads with the Opryland complex. There are numerous holiday-related shows this time of the year as well as the popular Opry Mills mall just down the street. We found out on Saturday just how popular the area is as we were coming back from a mall in another area of town.

As we were driving on I-40 and I-440 on the way back to the trailer, overhead message boards on the interstates were already warning of high traffic volumes around the Opryland area. We knew a few backroads to get us close to the area and took those. That helped a lot, as we saw people stopped in line three or four miles back from the area when we got off the highway to take our back-country route.

As we left the campground for our Christmas party Saturday evening, and took the back route to avoid the crush of traffic in our area, we found that even the back route was crawling with people trying to get into the area. It didn’t affect us since we were going the opposite direction. Coming back home, though, we found out how popular the light show at the adjacent Jellystone campground was as we waited on our two-lane road in line with folks waiting to go to that show.

This past week at work was primarily training classes for systems that Malcolm has worked on for years and that others from different offices around the country are now training on to learn for future installation and maintenance purposes. Malcolm primarily sat in the back and watched his emails from work to see if there was anything requiring his attention. This made for a fairly relaxing week at the office. This coming week, he will be back at normal activity levels. It will also be a slightly short week, as we need to pull out Friday to head back to Alabama.

We’ve been running on our tanks and water pump this entire week. The warmest night we’ve had since we’ve been here was last night, and it was still down near freezing. We’re glad we found the leak in our old water pump last time we were here and replaced it with a quieter pump and accumulator. It has made running off the tanks much nicer.

Malcolm got off work a couple hours early on Friday and took the opportunity to get the propane tanks filled next door at Camping World. One was empty and the other was a little less than half full. That is six days’ usage. We’ve had the furnace set to 72 degrees most all week. We do run the fireplace and space heater, as well. The cost of propane (fairly reasonable at Camping World) is well worth the cost compared to potentially having something freeze up and cause water issues.

This morning (Sunday) we were both feeling a little under the weather and got moving too late to get ready to go to church locally. Instead, we’ll watch a live internet broadcast of the church our daughter and family attend in Washington state. Fortunately, the campground here has really good wi-fi. Part of that is probably due to low numbers of campers this time of the year.