Away we go (again!)
Like a kid waiting for Christmas, I was counting the hours until it was time to leave for this year’s road trip. We’re taking a slightly different sort of adventure this year, heading east rather than west. So, we’re swapping rugged mountain peaks and vast wilderness landscapes for a whole lot of seaside time and lobster rolls.
This is also our first summer in the camper without some variation of COVID restrictions and it will be interesting to see whether we still do a lot of hanging out and almost all of our cooking in camp, or whether we find the draw of camping life diminishes as we can move freely in public spaces.
This year’s itinerary takes us about 4000 miles over four weeks, heading to Maine by way of the Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio and Niagara Falls in New York. After about a week in Maine, we’ll take a ferry to Canada and spend almost two weeks exploring the Canadian Maritimes: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, before returning home by way of Quebec and Montreal.
Since I was so busy working on Northwestern’s inauguration this spring, we decided to forego a ‘kick the tires’ trip and instead added a one-night stopover at a KOA in Elkhart, Indiana to do some trip pre-checks and prep. Getting out of Chicago was a construction-induced bumper-to-bumper nightmare, followed immediately by a visibility-limiting, windy-as-heck thunderstorm at the Illinois/Indiana border. Our quick 2.5 hour drive to get out of town was a 4.5 hour crawl. Hopefully that will be the last of the traffic jams until we attempt to return to Chicago.
Forest, the trailer, parked for her first night-out this season.
This being our junior year, I was surprised by how many little things went wrong when we were getting everything online, but also impressed at how effectively we could navigate the trailer’s systems. Rather than panicking, for example, that the refrigerator was broken and that the water heater was registering an error when we tried to fire it up, I quickly realized the simple fix; we were just out of propane.
As KOA’s equivalent to “platinum” travelers, I also knew that we could not only get a quick refill of the tanks, but that they would golf-cart the super heavy canisters back to our campsite for us, so we didn’t have to deal with hauling them ourselves. We’ve now changed the canisters enough times that it was a quick flip and all was well.
We are also having an issue with our jack working right – it’s going down but not up. But, fortunately, we’ve dealt with this before too, and between Eli’s muscle power and the right tool, we made quick work of it manually.
We tucked in for family movie night and we were ready to hit the road the next morning and start our adventure in earnest in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
