After 10 glorious days at my mom’s house on Lake Winnipesaukee in NH — during which I had such a happy time visiting with dear friends and family (and hiking, kayaking, and gaping at fall foliage) — we’re on our return trip west!
Well, first we detoured east to Maine, for a quick overnight. And we’ve covered some serious ground since then:
- York, ME: York Beach Camper Park
- Worcester, MA: Friends’ street!
- Long Island, NY: Nickerson Beach Campground
- Kutztown, PA: Saucony Creek Craft Brewing
- Reston, VA: Fairfax Lake Park
- Shenandoah National Park, VA: Big Meadows Campground
- Moorhead, KY: Cracker Barrel parking lot
- Hopkinsville, KY: Casey Jones Distillery
A few highlights
We’re still loving life in BB, and have enjoyed so many high points in the last 10 days since leaving NH.
- Walking along Short Sands Beach, spying a quintessential Maine lighthouse, eating lobster roll and the best fried haddock at the Lobster Cove in York, ME.
- Connecting with a bestie college pal Shari and her wonderful family at their home in Worcester, MA. We all sat outside until after the sun set, eating takeout BBQ and gourmet cupcakes while bundled in blankets, before retiring to BB, which was parked in her street! In person connections have so been so minimal since March, so to see Shari face to face — and get in a good chit-chat walk with her around her neighborhood — was so good for my soul!
- Seeing my brother and his family on Long Island. We stayed in a beach campground that’s apparently packed during the summer, but we found it less than 1/4 full. The friendliest camp hosts live and work here, hands down! (And we’ve encountered a bunch.) Felt good to catch up with my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew over NY-style pizza and have the chance to walk the beach.
- Motoring a motorhome through NYC — Throgs Neck Bridge, Cross Bronx Expressway, George Washington Bridge — is not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, my husband has a strong one. We spied no other RVs on these urban highways. It was a thrill to see the Manhattan skyline!
- Getting together with my work friend Siobhan and her husband for an al fresco beer in their hometown of Bethlehem, with its super cute downtown.
- Overnighting next to a cornfield at Saucony Creek Craft Brewery (and tasting yummy amber, saison, wheat beers) in farm country, PA. This brewpub is a Harvest Hosts location. (Recall, we paid $88 for a membership, and can overnight at more than 1,700 breweries, distilleries, wineries, golf courses, museums, and farms across the country — for free!)
- Meeting up with travel bloggers Charles & Julie McCool at their home in Reston, VA. I wish I’d remembered to snap a photo of the fabulous distanced set-up Julie had for us on their deck, where we noshed on delish local pizza and swapped stories — we hadn’t seen each other since traveling together on a Viking Star cruise of the Mediterranean in 2015! (Ah, remember foreign travel?)
- Seeing all the things in Shenandoah National Park. From its Skyline Drive (105 miles of curvy highway with fabulous vistas of mountains as far as the eyes can see) to the variety of hiking trails (many with waterfalls!) to the amazing fall foliage, our two-night stay in a campground here is an overall highlight of the last 44 days. I absolutely loved it and would go back in a heartbeat.
Yep, we’ve been on the road for 44 days. It’s gone by in a flash. I absolutely love the array of things we’ve done (we’re about to do a bourbon and moonshine tasting at Casey Jones Distillery, a Harvest Hosts location, and where we’ll bed down tonight). Overall, it’s been a blast!
But….
It’s not all fun and games
Bikes met Jeep
So, my navigation skills still need improvement. On our way to Worcester, MA, I used the RV Co-Pilot navigation app, which is supposed to route me safely around low clearances based on our RV’s profile (12 feet 6 inches high). But instead of using common sense when I saw it routing us weirdly around a residential area, I surged ahead, and ended up directing Quent to bring BB up and over a hilly, potholed street. We bumped and swayed in the RV like crazy!
Turns out we bumped and swayed so much we jiggled our bikes free from the bike rack, and they tipped over and beat up the Jeep’s front fender, knocking out one of the front blinker lights. Not fun.
In my defense, we probably should have been using a bike rack designed for an RV, instead of one meant for a car hitch that was more than 10 years old. And in the Badlands, when we were going over bumpy roads, one bike had actually fallen out onto the road. So, we knew the bike-rack system wasn’t great. Still, it wasn’t cool to damage the Jeep (even though I have a love-hate relationship with it anyway).
We ended up giving one of the bikes to my friend in Worcester, and we took apart the other one and it’s now housed in the back seat of the Jeep. No more bike riding for us on this trip! (Mind you, we used them once in Chicago to bike along Lakeshore Drive — which was awesome, but we could have rented bikes there.) Live and learn.
The battery is screwy
For whatever reason, our “house” battery isn’t holding a charge. We took it to an Interstate Batteries place in Pennsylvania, and the friendly employee there told us there’s nothing wrong with the battery, it just needs a nice full charge — one we could get if we left it with him for 2 days. Um, nope.
So, it’s charging a bunch as we make some nice long drives this weekend, but still, we’re finding that the RV lights aren’t shining as bright as they once did. And, more significantly, one night our heater stopped working, because we ran out of electrical charge (we think). We’re hoping once we plug into electrical for two full days at a campground this week, it’ll be back to normal.
Full-time work on the road can be stressful
I feel so fortunate to be working full time while on the road. I just didn’t think it would be so difficult to have solid Verizon coverage (for a Wi-Fi hotspot) or find good Wi-Fi connection during the workday. But it is.
And having to plan our itineraries around Monday to Friday working hours and when I need to be online for face-to-face meetings means we have to be super thoughtful about when we relocate from one campground to another.
Now that my husband is no longer working for himself (yep, while on this RV trip, he sold the business he co-owned, and will now be working for someone else), it’s now two of us who are ultra-concerned about having solid connection.
It’s no fun not being able to log onto Zoom meetings for work (I gambled on having good Wi-Fi at a lodge in Shenandoah National Park and lost), so for the rest of our trip, we’re being super cognizant of booking weekday campsites that either have Wi-Fi on site or aren’t in the middle of the woods!
This also means we’re bypassing at least one key sight I wanted to see on this trip: Mammoth Caves National Park. Turns out you need a reserved ticket to do the self-guided tour, and they’re selling fewer than usual, thanks to COVID-19. We wanted to see the caves today, but they’re sold out. We could get tickets Monday, but just didn’t want to risk bad cell service in the national park campground, nor did we want to take time out of the workday to do the tour (though we could do it on a lunch hour) and then relocate to another campground in the evening. Logistics!
Bottom line: Quent and I pinky swore we’ll never do such a far-reaching trip like this while either one of us is working for a company full time. It’s just a bummer to miss sightseeing opportunities or get stressed out about Wi-Fi.
Now don’t get me wrong, this trip has been ah-mazing — I wouldn’t have done it any differently this time around since we wanted to get to the East Coast to see family stat, and safely, and this was the best way to do it: relatively quickly out and back.
However, the next time we take BB out for a long stretch, we’ll either take vacation time to get to a destination and then not move for a while in order to work. Say, we could take a week of PTO to hit some national parks en route to Tucson in February, where we could book campgrounds for 5 nights at a time and just enjoy the warm Arizona weather (the whole point of our original empty-nest travel plan was to avoid Colorado winters).
Or during a future RV trip, we’ll be working for ourselves. Freelance writing and editing in semi-retirement isn’t out of the question for me — it’s just a question of when that semi-retirement might happen!
Or we’ll be fully retired and can REALLY enjoy the good RV life! Heading out on the road for several months at a time, taking time to really get to know areas instead of skimming the surface as we’ve been doing sounds heavenly!
We’ll see what the future brings — but for now, we’re mostly sticking to interstate highways to get ourselves back to our Colorado home in relatively good time. Along the way we’ll stop to see my college-freshman son (despite video-chatting weekly, I sure would like to see his face in person before Thanksgiving) and then get both driver Q and BB a much needed rest!
