A Spring Break

We thoroughly found a peaceful harbor at F. D. Roosevelt State Park (our review) outside of Pine Mountain, Georgia and we ended up extending our stay there for 10 days.

The Georgia Park system strikes a perfect balance for our style. You can reserve in advance online, but you don’t book a specific spot. Upon your arrival, you just pick the spot you want that is open. And as long as there is general availability park wide, you can keep extending your spot for up to 14 days.

We’d love to see more campgrounds adopt this sort of flexible reservation system.

The park was a perfect setting for us. Our little neighborhood dispersed last Tuesday as The Nealy’s on Wheels and RV-AGoGo headed on.  We enjoyed having a hiking trail start right at our spot, making it super easy to take a break and get a walk in amongst lots of catch-up projects.

After managing the launch of RVillage.com since November, and working incredibly long hours these past couple months – we had a lot to catch up on. Including personal and business taxes, two app updates, lots of e-mail, posts to make and completing our next app.

App Report

Our app State Lines was overdue for an update. It tracks over 50 state laws that affect US based travelers – from seat belts, motorcycles, txting, default speed limits, RVing, overnighting in rest areas, tax rates and alcohol purchasing. This was the first mobile app we created back in 2010 and we continue to utilize it ourselves. We manually research all of the laws each update, which as you can imagine is quite time consuming. Both the iOS Apple version of the app and the Android version are now updated.

  

Our signature app Coverage? was also due for its regularly scheduled map update, which always involves dozens of hours of lots of detailed labor intensive work. This app overlays cellular data maps from the 4 major carriers on device, so us bandwidth hungry travelers know where to head with our various carriers to keep connected. The update is now live on the iOS App store (sorry Android folks, while a version for you is on the radar – it’s not imminent. Been kinda busy, ya know?)
 

[quote_center]You might notice that both apps got spiffy new icons! We hired Jeanette of Motorhome Office of Design & Technology to use her creative wizardry to come up with more modern and professional looking icons. We’re really really happy with them, and can’t recommend the experience of working with Jeanette enough. You’ll notice she also created our new Two Steps Beyond logo – which I’m in complete love with.[/quote_center]

We’re also in the finishing stages of our next app – which I’m super excited about.

It’s something I visualized back in my very first weeks on the road with Chris back in 2007, and I’m so thrilled to see it finally coming together! We are on a rush to get it finished by April 10. You see, we registered the name of the app with Apple back in October when we first started development. If you don’t have the app submitted within 6 months, you loose the name forever!

That little thing called RVillage kinda pushed it aside.

The Forest and Beyond

It was amazing to watch spring emerge around us each day while at F.D. Roosevelt State Park.  As much as we could have just stayed there longer and explore the area, we hardly even left the park we were so heads down on our projects.

We did make one adventure to finally meet up with Jason & Nikki of Gone with the Wynns. In all of our years of blog loving on each other and communication, we had never crossed paths in person before.

RVillage helped us see we’d be in the same general area of Georgia as they passed through, so we split the difference and met up in the town of Newnan, GA. It was great to finally meet up and spend a few hours putting laughter behind the words. I’m pretty sure it won’t be our last meet-up!

But mostly we worked long hours, caught up on some sleep and took hikes.

Spring emerging around us was a perfect juxtaposition to the bizarre sort of winter semi-hibernation we’re emerging from.

 

RVillage is now very successfully launched, we’re out of stealth mode. We’ve totally rocked the initial role we signed on for. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished, and proud to see our baby making a great splash!

And while it’s good to get back to our own projects again, we’re just plum tired. Managing this launch has taken an amazing amount of energy of putting ourselves ‘out there’ wider and further than usual. And keeping something so big under wraps for so long while keeping visible in public – is exhausting.

We need a serious re-charge. Our own sort of Spring Break.

Of course, the timing of Millenicom’s announcements couldn’t have been more badly timed for us.  We predicted that we’d be getting a lot of questions & expressed frustration about the change, as we’ve been a go-to source for information about this service that is the heart of our mobile internet arsenal.

We know they would likely send out an .. umm.. less than informative e-mail that would leave unanswered questions especially when delivered on April Fool’s Day right after billing notices went out for April’s services.

We had a choice of either trying to mitigate those questions or we could be constantly hammered from multiple sources trying to explain the situation. The pressure of having recommended a service we authentically love, no matter how much we tried to set expectations that no-contract means no-contract – was immense. And our exhaustion levels where already pretty high.

The timing also coincided with the day we would be leaving the campground and repositioning to Chattanooga to visit Choo Choo Express Garage for some routine preventative maintenance on the bus.

Not fun to combine a driving day, with exhaustion and trying to sooth the frustration we knew many would have.

April 1st was also happened to be Chris’ 8th Nomadiversary – we really would have much preferred writing up a fun and light spirited blog post celebrating the milestone, instead of trying to sooth over the Millenicom frustrations.

While most everyone received the news as positively as possible and didn’t shoot the messenger (thank you!!) .. there were a handful who didn’t. Even anticipating it, the negative energy floating about was just too much to handle.

And let’s not forget this little detail – this coming Monday will be the 1-year anniversary of my dad’s passing. This week has been full of bittersweet reminders of what the last week with him was like. 

To say both Chris and I are at our edge, is an understatement.

Taking a Digital Break

We’ve decided we’re taking a digital sabbatical for a bit. We’ll be not participating on Facebook personally or professionally.  We’ll not be checking our Technomadia e-mail. We won’t be checking blog comments. We won’t be popping in on forums.

And of course, ironically, we won’t be checking into RVillage.

We’ll finish up this next nifty app, and we will be back to announce it once it’s live in the App Store. If there’s anything worthwhile sharing, we may post it. But don’t expect much traffic here for the next weeks.

But most importantly, we’ll be taking a step back. Regrounding ourselves. Reconnecting. Worshipping Kiki. Remembering my father.

And once we’re breathing soundly again, we’ll explore what life looks like post-RVillage launch.

We’ll be just fine.  We just need a break.