Another chapter

Another chapter in our RV life might soon begin.  After two and a half years living in our Class A Bounder, we are considering renting a house in Port St Lucie, Fla.  There are many, many advantages to living in our RV.  First, we can’t accumulate stuff like we did for 30 years in our home in Massachusetts.  The RV is very easy maintenance on the inside with barely an hour’s worth of cleaning a week.  There is no yard work and someone else maintains the pool.  There is plenty of opportunity to socialize or not.  Best of all, we have everything we need in the Bounder:  a good bed, ice maker, washer-dryer,  convection oven/microwave, and of course a stove top.  The disadvantages for us are our dogs, the golden retrievers. 

We love our dogs and we were very excited to have time to play with them when we retired.  When we returned to work they protested in the worse possible way.  Because we left them at home alone when we were still working in Ma, we tried that with the RV.  At first it was okay leaving them in the RV while we went out to dinner or shopping.  Leaving them for hours proved disastrous when  we returned to work.  At one point they broke out of a locked RV and attacked another dog.  The dog survived  and we paid all the vet bills but it made us very wary of leaving them alone.  We got a crate for the male, but he attempted to break out of that by bending the cage with his nose.  It was obvious that he would soon hurt himself if we didn’t try to do something else.  Our situation again changed rapidly when small dogs were allow by their owners to come on our RV site.  Even though my dogs were tied they attempted to lunge at the small dogs, scared their owners enough to complain, and we were promptly thrown out of the camp ground.  We found a new place, but the RV sites are much smaller.  Now that the season is about to start, we are very concerned about our dogs.