Early in August, we decided that we needed to trade Winnie II for a rig with more Net Carrying Capacity.  While 2500 lbs is fine for a gas coach you use on vacation, it just wasn't going to cut it for fulltiming.  With this in mind, I stopped at the local Atlanta Winnebago dealer.  This is where Winnie II came from .  I picked out a couple of coaches I thought Libby might like and made arrangements to come back later in the week to show them to her.  I had talked myself out of a diesel and was looking at the Ford 20,500lb chassis.  Libby wasn't turned on to either of these coaches and the dealer didn't really want to sell us one anyway.  We had paid about 10k too much for the 98 Chieftain and figured we would let the dealer redeem himself on Winnie III.  It didn't happen.  We were very disappointed and began to look elsewhere.

On the last day of July, I called Lazy Days RV in Tampa.  Libby and I had been there several times in the last year looking a various coaches.  We have been most impressed with the value and quality of Fleetwood's Discovery.  We made a deal on the phone and set our plans to travel to Tampa in two weeks to pick up the new diesel pusher.  We managed to pay a reasonable price for the D, about 25% off MSRP.  As I told the salesperson at Lazy Days, I wanted them to make a profit, but not enough to take a vacation in Tahiti.

On August 8, we took Winnie II to Atlanta to spend a couple of days at Stone Mountain Park.  I had a couple of meetings to attend on Monday and Tuesday, so we just stayed in the metro area and I went to the office for a couple of days.  We left Stone Mountain on Tuesday in the late afternoon and traveled to Jennings, Florida.

We camped at a fairly nice park next to the interstate for one night and started on to Tampa on Wednesday.  On the way down I75, we saw a new 2000 Discovery with dealer plates.  I figured it was going to Lazy Days, so when the driver stopped at a rest area, we pulled in beside him.  Nice guy, he let us crawl around in the new rig.

We arrived at Lazy Days about noon on Wednesday and immediately had their free lunch of gourmet hot dogs.  After lunch, we went out and looked at the rig we had purchased over the phone.   Luckily for us, it was exactly what we wanted and the colors were great. We took delivery on August 11, staying at Lazy Days for four days to make sure everything was working.  The tech assigned to our coach visited us several times, fixing some items we discovered needed maintenance during the walk through.  He was very good and when we left on Saturday the coach was in fine shape.

We moved on to Okeechobee for a day, visiting with several friends and showing off the new rig.  Then we moved onto West Palm Beach for a day, visiting with our oldest son.  After spending $50 for one night in the campsite in West Palm, we moved the Discovery to Orlando for our visit with our son who works for Disney.  On the trip up the Florida Turnpike, Libby drove the D for the first time.  I had to arm wrestle her to get back in the driver's seat.

We left Orlando on Tuesday morning, arriving back in Atlanta at Stone Mountain Park for a couple of days of meetings at the office.  Of course, they were very exciting and we were sorry to have to go back to Blairsville on Thursday.

Friday we left Blairsville and went to the Huntsville Amateur Radio show.  The D performed flawlessly again and we were very pleased with the ride.  At the Hamfest, I sold the rest of my radio gear except for what will be staying with us in the motorhome.

Sunday we turned around and rolled back to Blairsville.  Our mileage on these first two trips was in excess of 10 mpg, so we were very pleased with this.  We spent the rest of August in our driveway in Blairsville.