Thursday 6th July – saying our final farewell to the RV

Being the worrier that I am, I was never going to sleep soundly when I could lie there and think about how much we had to do and whether we could fit it all in whilst not cutting into Tash’s plans.

I gave up trying to sleep at 6am and got started on the van, waking Simon up at the previously agreed time of 745am. 

Clearing the RV took longer than expected before we even began on the intensive clean that we wanted to give it.  We have high standards y’know. Keeping an increasingly nervous eye on the time, between us we power washed, hoovered and cleaned inside and out to the best of our abilities with the time allowed.  

Shiny on the outside.....

.... and on the inside.

Ready for the final drive to Campers' Inn....

Basically, Tash would be able to come and collect us from Campers’ Inn but only if that left sufficient time to get back to Concord in time to collect the girls from nursery at 4pm.  Running late (as ever), we left the house at 1245 pm, but we still had to fit a detour in to Westford to pick up the title deed for the RV that was essential for us to be able to sell him.  However, this gave us an opportunity to check out how work on Tash and David’s house is going.  David is working extremely hard to treat all of the wood in the house to get rid of the lead paint and re-decorate throughout.  It is a labour of love and is taking longer than expected but I’m sure the end results will be well worth it. 

We grabbed our mail and drove on to Campers Inn where we cleared the tanks one last time (on this continent anyway!) at the dump station.  Confident we had removed all our belongings from the RV we strode into the reception and asked for Lance, our man who we’d been introduced to who would deal with the final bits of paperwork.  But he was not there. Apparently, he never works on a Thursday! Despite us clearly agreeing that we would drop the RV off today and Lance having no problem with it at the time.  Luckily, in stepped Bob, who couldn’t find the paperwork we’d previously signed and who didn’t even step foot on the RV to check our handy work!  He was extremely laid back about the whole deal.  Confident we had kept to our side of the bargain he copied the title deed for us to have a copy and bid us farewell.  We were only there for 5 mins!

 

I sent a text to Tash to confirm that we were ready to go and she picked us up within minutes.  The benefit to today being a massive rush and completely chaotic was that it gave us no time to dwell on what we were actually doing.  Saying goodbye to our home-on-wheels that had done us so proud for over 27,000 miles, 48 States (plus Canada) and eight months.  I have form for getting emotional when saying farewell…. The fact that I managed to hold it together today was as surprising to me as it was to Simon!  We took a couple of photos after we had removed the licence plates and we left Harvey the RV in our wake…. Hopeful that his next owners would appreciate him even half as much as we had.

Tash took us straight back to Concord.  We dropped Simon off and then headed to play-group to collect the girls at 4pm.  How Tash manages is so impressive.  She moved through the nursery like an efficient tornado, picking up rucksacks, lunch boxes, diaper bags and finally, three young children.  It was like a military operation!

Back at the house, time for an urgently needed shower before it was 5pm – time to take Eleri to ballet class.  Then we collected curry for dinner, before reconvening at the house for the evening.

Even though she was unable to join in with the singing, Aeofe was still smiling along

Whilst I had been observing ballet, Simon had been hard at work learning ‘Let it go’ on guitar for the girls who are massive fans of the Disney film, Frozen.  It’s difficult to learn a song that you don’t really know but thankfully Simon was able to play along with a Youtube video whilst we all did backing vocals and the girls were suitably impressed.

Without the RV, it was time for us to reorganise our belongings and pack for the next few days in New York City - our commiseration prize to ourselves for having lost our four-wheeled companion.