We’re two weeks in and happy on the road

As Quent and I sat on the upper outside deck of the ferry returning us to St. Ignace, Michigan, from Mackinac Island, I breathed a contented sigh of relief.

I’d planned three key Midwest sightseeing adventures to kick off our 7-week RV road trip (after spending a long weekend with friends in Buena Vista, Colorado), and given how travel plans have been upended in the past 18 months, plus the snafu we ran into at the start of our June 2021 RV road trip, and of course the uptick in Covid cases nationwide, I just wasn’t going to believe we’d be able to pull off our plan until it was all said and done.

But we did it!

In the first four nights after leaving Buena Vista, we mapped out a path that would get us to Voyageurs National Park (first on my list of key sightseeing stops) as soon as possible. Soon as possible, that is, without totally exhausting Quent, since I don’t drive CC the RV. We spent just one night each here:

• Brush, CO: municipal campground
• Lexington, NE: Mac’s Creek Winery, a Harvest Host
• Wagner, SD: Choteau Creek Winery, a Harvest Host
• Dilworth, MN: mobile home & RV park

Every day looked pretty much the same for this high-mileage section of our trip:

• 7am: Wake up and exercise
• 8am: Eat breakfast (cereal, oatmeal, or eggs and toast), tidy up, and ready the RV to hit the road
• 9am: Hit road
• Noon: I make sandwiches while the RV is rolling; Q eats while driving
• 2 pm: Stop for gas
• 4pm: Arrive destination
• 5pm: Happy hour and dinner, either at our Harvest Hosts location or in the RV. (Quent cooked a bunch of casseroles and burritos before we left that are in our RV freezer, so we’ve been pulling those out and heating them up, supplemented with fresh or frozen veggies.)
• 8pm: In bed watching TV on our glam fancy screen in the bedroom if we have good wifi; if no good wifi, we’re reading. (I just finished The Last Thing He Told Me. SO GOOD.)

Along the way, on our long days on the road, we’ve been listening to a lot of music. I get up to pee often (so convenient!). I scroll through my phone when we have cell service.

As the person in the passenger seat, I’m also chief navigator, and so far this trip I’ve only screwed up two times. After the first, Quent gently asked, “Maybe it would be a good idea to have two navigation apps going or maybe you could map out a plan ahead of time so we don’t end up on random dirt roads…”

Oops.

And then when I did it again just yesterday — when I accidentally plugged in 2800 State Road, not 2008 State Road, and we went back and forth and back and forth around curvy roads in Ohio for 20 minutes — I just heard from Quent, “It’s all good.”

I tell ya, I married well.

Hitting bucket list destinations

Since we arrived in northern Minnesota — so far north, at one point we could see Canada across a lake — we’ve had a slightly more relaxed schedule. That is, we’ve spent a couple of nights each at three different campgrounds, and have enjoyed two more nifty Harvest Hosts locations. (If you’re an RVer and haven’t looked into this membership club, you should!)

• Kabetogama, MN (2 nights): Pines of Kabetogama, a resort campground
• Iron River, WI: White Winter Winery, a Harvest Host
• Hancock, MI (2 nights): municipal campground and one of the nicest city-owned campsites we’ve stayed at
• St. Ignace, MI (2 nights): Tiki RV Park, a commercial park that’s convenient to the Mackinac Island ferry, but the wifi and cell service were terrible
• Vermillion, OH: Paper Moon Winery, a Harvest Host

It’s been nice not having to pack up and move every night. That said, we’ve had busy days exploring two national parks and a touristy destination that’s been on my list for a long while!

Voyageurs National Park

More than 40 percent of Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park is composed of water. If it had been 78 degrees and sunny, Quent and I may have figured out a way to get out on the waterways to explore islands visitors can only get to by boat. But, we had little time — one full day — and crummy weather (62 and cloudy, then rainy), so we stuck to the shoreline and hiked nearly 6 miles along wooded trails and easily accessible lookouts. I was surprised at how the leaves were already changing colors up there!

Isle Royale National Park

Isle Royale National Park, an island on Lake Superior, is only accessible by boat or plane. That meant we needed to book a ferry ride (3 hours) or a seaplane ride (35 minutes). We opted for a plane to Rock Harbor on Isle Royale, since we only had one day on the island, and I’m glad we did! We didn’t feel rushed while hiking a 4-mile trail through pristine wilderness.

I felt like I was part of a special club, experiencing this island that has recently seen about 25,000 visitors a year (compared to Yellowstone’s millions). I highly recommend this secluded island if you’re ever in the area (or make it a destination, like we did!). In fact, it ranks up there among my favorite national parks (I’ve now been to 35), along with Arches, Bryce, Shenandoah, and Rocky Mountain.

Mackinac Island, Michigan

I’ve wanted to visit this island between the top of the “mitten” of Michigan and the Upper Peninsula for years, since learning about it while I worked as an editor for a bus tour company in the 1990s. Popular among the escorted-tour set, Mackinac Island is filled with history as a former fur-trading post and then vacation destination in the 1800s.

The main street lined with fudge shops is charming, and the cottages and larger houses with their big porches and blooming flower boxes are darling. Quent and I spent the day here, biking the perimeter road (as much as we could with road construction closing a portion of it), walking around to historic sites, and eating local fish on the deck at the Pink Pony. I enjoyed everything but the horse manure in the streets – with no cars allowed on the island, the horse and carriage is a main mode of transport (besides the plentiful bicycles), and it’s smelly.

On the road again…

Now we’re on the road to Rochester, New York, to watch my daughter Kaylin play in her home volleyball tournament. A college senior (!), she and her teammates missed out on an entire volleyball season due to Covid last year. We didn’t visit her freshman fall to watch games live; I went to visit her in NY sophomore year to watch a handful of games, but her dad stayed behind. So Quent will be able to sit in a gym to watch his baby girl on the court for the first time since high school in the fall of 2017!

It’s a big deal.

After that, I’m not sure where we’re headed. We think we’ll stay in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic for a bit. We’d toyed with scooting up to Toronto and over to Montreal, and that’s under consideration if temperatures don’t drop too low (we like warm). Two states we missed on our fall 2020 RV trip – Rhode Island and Delaware – are high on the list.

Not sure where we’re going, but here’s what I do know: I love this style of travel. I love this style of living.

I’ve said it before, but I love waking up in a new destination every day or every few days. I adore experiencing new things, like this week’s pasties — a meat pie common in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. (I literally thought two road signs in a row had “pastries” spelled wrong.)

I love sitting up high in my passenger seat, taking in the scenery around me as we roll down the highway. I love our routines — Quent drives, I navigate; Quent deals with emptying tanks, I treat the toilet with disinfectant.

I love making easy meals, learning about our country’s history, seeing pretty landscapes, and going to bed early.

I love the simplicity of life on the road, especially when it comes to cleaning. Keeping a 300-square-foot home on wheels clean is a lot easier than our brick-and-mortar house back in Colorado.

Reconciling life on the road with world events

I’d say the only disconcerting element of road tripping along happily is the disconnect between my joyful life in an RV bubble and the worldwide chaos whirling around us.

I really thought for this RV trip we’d be in a much better place regarding the pandemic, and it’s so disheartening to see Covid case numbers and hospitalization (especially among children) continue to rise.

Then pile on the Afghanistan crisis, Hurricane Ida and the havoc she wreaked throughout so many states, and Texas’ horrific rollback of abortion rights, I find myself regularly disheartened when doomscrolling through the news and social media (which is too often as a road-trip passenger).

It’s hard to reconcile the suffering that so many folks are feeling right now with my contentment on the road.

But in addition to doing what we can to help ease others’ pain (for me, that’s donating money to causes that help to right injustices and combat discrimination), I still think it’s important to create our own happiness wherever we are and at whatever place we’re at.

Taking care of ourselves, celebrating wins, marking kids’ milestones … that’s all important stuff when we’re all facing shared challenges as we continue to navigate the pandemic and world events.

I hope you’re finding joy somewhere, somehow today.  

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