Category: Traveling the hiways and byways

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Driving to NJ

Since the hurricanes in the Caribbean were such an unknown quantity when we were leaving the Boston area, I decided to fill up the coach even though we wouldn’t actually need fuel till the Washington, DC, vicinity.   Better to be able to get out of harm’s way if needed without counting on a fuel stop during a storm.

We traveled some of the worst roads I can remember on Interstate 84 and even worse on 684.   I cannot imagine what 95 would have been like as I read that 84 is a much better drive in a motorhome on a few forums.  One particular jolt on 684 dropped the stabilizer bar down in front of me that holds the electric shade from moving side to side while driving.   It looked like the old- time elevator gates that scissor across the opening, only in the coach it goes up and down with the shade instead of side to side on the old elevators.

Thankfully only  the stabilizer dropped,  but it was extremely unexpected and startling when driving down the road at 65 mph.  For about 30 more miles I had to look on either side of it to drive to the next rest stop were I could try to fix it.

Luckily the bolt, sleeve and washer were right there on the dash when we stopped and it took just a few minutes to put it back together and tighten it up so that didn’t happen again.  Then we were back on the highway.

After a short drive we turned off 684 to  I-287 to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge.   I was surprised to see there were two bridges now.  The westbound lanes traverse a brand new cable stay bridge and the eastbound lanes are still on the old bridge.

Not far past the bridge was the turnoff for the Garden State Parkway.    I had contacted the NJ Turnpike authority to verify I would be allowed on that roadway.   Their first response was a NO, as nothing over 8 feet wide was allowed.  I responded that all modern buses are 8 1/2 feet wide, the same as my coach, and I used to see lots of buses on the Parkway.   The next response from the same person said they were in the process of updating their documents and that I was allowed on the parkway’s full length.

What they didn’t mention was the low bridges if you are in the fast or slow lanes, and they never mentioned the extremely narrow toll booths.  One of the toll booths we went thru had maybe 3″ clearance on either side due to the mirrors extending out the sides.  That was thrilling…

I have grown to love the I-pass transponder, especially the tolls that were full speed without any toll booths to drive thru.

We drove all the way down to exit 98 where we picked up interstate 195 west for 8 more miles toward Rt 9.   We were camping in the boondocks for sure!

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Driving down to BoothBay Harbor.

Since it was a short drive to Boothbay, we hit the road right at 11 am, which is most campgrounds’ checkout time.   We headed out to find US 1 south that was just a few miles inland of us.   It was a surprising drive as right after turning off the main road from Bar Harbor, there was this very nice downtown of Ellsworth, Maine.  We hadn’t been that direction our whole stay as we were just off Mt. Desert Island and concentrated on poking around there.

All along the road were grand old houses as US 1 stays close to the water.    One of the most surprising things of all was a large cable stay bridge.  We could see it off in the distance and it was spectacular to get close to, then drive over it.   I had only seen that type of bridge in pictures.

Most of the way down we were fighting our Google Nav directions as it kept wanting me to go down small streets and make u-turns.

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Heading toward Bar Harbor.

We took two days of driving to get to the coast from Schroon Lake, NY.   We drove off to find US 4 outside of Lake George thru Vermont and up and over the mountains around Killington, which I used to think were tall mountains when going there for skiing.   I was shocked when we passed Killington Peak and I hadn’t noticed we were in the mountains yet.   I guess I am really jaded by the 9 and 10 thousand foot passes we traversed out west.   I noticed those!

Once past there, I was looking for the freeway that headed up toward               St. Johnsbury so we could meet up with US 2 again.   Hadn’t been on it since Michigan where it went into Canada and we had to head south due to not having our passports with us.  🙁     And the freeway was actually free.   I got to test out my Ipass/EZpass in Ohio and NY to the tune of about $50 so far.

Back to finding US 2,  we missed the turn for the road that went diagonally northeast that would cut off quite a bit of miles and time and we had to head back down there.  It got a bit nerve racking when we came upon the 10′ clearance sign.   But we stayed the course and made it back to US 302 unscathed.    Took it over the US 3 and then to 115, which may have been a New Hampshire road and it brought us over to US 2.  t\Then it was just a short jaunt to Shelburne, NH for the night.

We camped in a place called Timberland and the name fit,  It was like we were in the middle of the woods that night.   5 feet behind our coach was a steep drop-off and a railroad track at the bottom.   Didn’t want to back it in too far..

Unfortunately local WiFi was useless and so were both of our hot-spots.   It was like we were back using a 9600 baud modem again.

Then next morning we got on the road early and headed east again on US 2 up to Norridgewock for cut down to I 95 north toward Bangor, Maine.   Our campground was in Trenton just next to the causeway to Mt. Desert Island.

 

 

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Heading toward Niagra Falls..

We got a late start for a longer drive today to right outside Sandusky, Ohio.    It was mostly freeway so fairly uneventful.   Lots of road construction in Michigan and Ohio.   Got to go thru my first EZ-Pass toll booths today.  [A big thank you to Connie for going through all our mail and sending the transponder out!!]  The arm went up on the second one,  the first one was already up.   No indication it took our money,  no lights at all.   I guess the arm going up when leaving the turnpike was a good sign.  I got onto my IPASS account and there is no activity yet.   I guess electronic transactions take a while for the EZ-Pass folks.  Maybe they use sneaker.net.    🙂

We just ordered pizza for delivery to the campsite… It’s been a long time between pizza’s..  Maybe April?   Geez.

 

About 60 miles east of our overnight was Cleveland.  I didn’t imagine the factory of sadness town would be so nice looking.  [I was bummed it was too far to go to Michael Symon’s restaurant downtown!]

The second leg of the trip was about as long as the first day’s but at least we ended up on Grand Island next to Niagara Falls.   As we got into the park, it started to pour,  I almost thought it was hailing, it sounded like hail, but it didn’t look like it.   It’s always fun setting up in the rain.   Just finding the site in the downpour was a challenge, and of course it was a back-in site.  Pull thru’s on rainy days are a godsend.

This campground is very, very nice!   Even the showers are top shelf, although the water pressure was a bit on the wimpy side.

Off to the Falls in the morning.

 

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Gaylord Michigan & a Tornado warning.

We headed out of Paradise Point Tuesday late in the morning and headed toward the Mackinac Bridge.  It’s a really long bridge with a lot of construction going on that day.   I just looked it up and it’s twice as long as the Verrazano.   Weird thing is the speed limit for loaded trucks is 15 MPH.   Could you imagine trucks crossing the Golden Gate, Verrazano or GW bridges at 15 MPH and it not being rush hour?!

We scheduled 5 days for Gaylord in a KOA just south of town.   Pretty nice place as KOA’s go.   The real reason for staying here was to get the fridge sensor fixed.   We had an appointment on Wednesday @ 9 am for the diagnostic.   Of course it was pouring rain Wednesday morning and I made my way to the RV dealer just north of town.    They took down all the necessary info from the coach and called Norcold to ask that they ship a new sensor.   Norcold asked them to try using a magnet on the sensor,  which I already had done.  But they explained that if the sensor had gotten wet, then I would have needed to wait a couple days to try it.   I didn’t know that at the time.  But when the tech tried it, (it had been almost 2 weeks)  it reset.    He was done and I could leave.   OMG.

Thursday we decided to scrub the coach and use the new central Vac I had installed for a thorough vacuuming.  Wow does that new unit have a lot of suction!!   Kathy might have been right that she thought it might suck the tiles off the floor.   The best thing about a central vac is the air (and dust) does not blow back into the house like a regular vacuum does.   We cleaned everything well.

Wednesday evening right around 6 pm the Emergency broadcast System   Alert went off about a Tornado a bit southwest of us.   Great…  More weather,  I immediately got out the laptop to look at the Doppler for our area.  Wow,  lots of red areas around us.  I went outside and put the chairs, tables and grill back in the belly of the coach and mentioned what I heard to a few of our neighbors.   Thankfully the tornado touched down about 30 miles from us and was an EF0 and did almost no damage.   But the rains came like a banshee and went on for hours, only slacking off a bit around midnight.   Our campground looked like a lake that night .  But Thursday morning it had all drained away.  Must be all sand around here.

Friday was a down day,  we did some grocery shopping and basically was lazy all day.   Hey,  I really am retired.    Saturday I affixed the I-Pass/EZ-Pass Toll Transponder to the windshield.   I attempted to charge it up for all the tolls I will be hitting in Ohio and NY in the next few days as we head toward Niagra Falls.   Turns out I had to add a new credit card number to the account as the one I used to initially order the device and put the minimum amount in the account would not work for reloading the account.  I guess they must use different merchant accounts for initialization and refills.   I use VAN’s for most autopay stuff,  (Virtual Account Numbers) thru my Citi cards.    Sometimes they can be a bit tricky in situations where the might use different merchant numbers each time.  I know Amazon does,  so I cannot use a VAN there,  I tried.

I also spent some time trying to get tickets for some of the TV Shows in NYC.  The Late Show,  SNL and especially for Kathy The Chew and Dr Oz.   It will be interesting to see if any come thru while we are still in the area.

 

 

 

 

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Heading toward De Tour Village & Paradise Point RV park.

We left early around 8:30 am so we could hit the dump station and still get to the next park at a reasonable time.   Summer Breeze campground was really nice and I almost didn’t want to leave, but it was time to get to a new spot.   The drive was unremarkable till we hit the city (village) limits when a dark, black cloud enveloped the town and our view out the front.   We pulled over so I could check the NWS CONUS Doppler radar web site.

By now the lightning was spectacular out the front window.   Not really a good thing when you consider what that means.    Anyway, I determined the storm was moving southwest and we should be thru it quickly.  Wow,  was I incorrect!   We started to head to the campground and the storm hit us like a brick.   We got to the turnoff for the road out to the point when the rain and wind picked up significantly.   At one point on that small road, Kathy started yelling that she couldn’t see, slow down!   Inconsequential when you realize I was the one driving.

We came around a 90-degree turn and it was like we hit a hurricane,   The rain was horizontal and hitting us dead on, making the wipers on high of no use then.  I was just driving by braille then, hoping not to hit one of the bumps.    I eventually found the dirt road turnoff for the campground.  Now we only had to get thru the locked gate, to which we had a code.    But when we got there, it was raining too hard to open the window to punch it in.

Then out of nowhere a person started walking toward us with a small umbrella.  He was going to open the gate for us.   You need to realize it was a torrential rainfall.  How his umbrella stayed open in the wind gusts was amazing to me.  What he didn’t know was that I knew the code for the gate, but the rain was coming in at such an angle it was streaming down the driver’s window channel on the inside.   I was just trying to keep it from getting on the floor in the coach. I had lots of towels shoved into the channel to sop it up prior to the channel filling and overflowing on the floor.  For the most part it worked.  And the guy opening the gate made it even better so I didn’t have to open that window to punch in the code.   [Thank you, Tony!]

The sun came out just a few minutes after we parked and I learned the name of the good Samaritan.  His name was Tony and his wife’s name was Julie.    He had just purchased his coach a few months ago too.   His license plate was a take-off on Cousin Eddy from the Christmas Vacation movie.  I had not seen that one, but am looking for a download soon as Cousin Eddy had a motorhome.  It was the same year as ours and had done some upgrades to get it just right.

An hour later we were sitting outside watching the water as the sun was slowly making its way toward the horizon over this glorious little bay in front of us.  Large cargo ships were traversing the waterway in the distance, and now that the sun is down, with full lights blazing.

We sat outside talking with the neighbors about their travels and where they were heading till the mosquitoes forced all of us to head into our RV’s quickly.   Tonight was Kathy’s mosquito introduction.   We don’t have mosquitoes in San Diego.

 

 

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Iron Mountain in the UP of Michigan

The roads in Wisconsin are pretty rough compared to both Minnesota and Michigan.   I guess fewer tax dollars are coming out of Washington for them, or they are being diverted somewhere else.   Currently we are staying on US 2 while trekking from Minnesota to Michigan and it appears it goes into Canada from Michigan, so we will probably head south toward Detroit.

We stopped in this town to get our fridge’s sensor replaced but that didn’t work out as planned.  Brought it over to an RV place in the next town over, but they didn’t read the requirement instructions prior to me getting there and only then did they realize they needed litmus paper as part of the diagnostics to get the new part from Norcold.   No one they or I could find had litmus paper.   So back to the campground I went.  Doubting I will hear from them, I choose a service center a few hundred miles away in Gaylord, MI, and made an appointment for the middle of next week.  (earliest they had, and I had to lay a guilt trip on the service manager to get that appointment)

While we were in Duluth, Kathy decided the central vacuum wasn’t working to her satisfaction.  [[Actually I have been telling him that all along!]  After a bit I agreed and went into the basement to check the bag and it was fine.  I noticed the flex pipe was kind of collapsing when turned on, but also realized it was hopeless as the angles were too severe and the pipe was collapsing at the 90 degree turn.

I ordered a new Dirt Devil Central Vacuum system while we were there to be delivered to our next stop in Iron Mountain.   And I finally got Intel to help me replace our Motorhome’s DVR server  NUC that crapped out about a month ago.   They offered to refund the price so I could buy a new one.   That turned out to be good for me as I purchased a new one for the same price but the CPU speed had doubled since I had bought it.

So repairs on the road..   The new DVR is up and running and the central vacuum was replaced last night.  What a difference that made,  Kathy was afraid the new one might suck the tiles off the floor. 🙂   I had been anticipating a tough job to replace it, but it was much easier than expected.   [Except a lot of time on the floor and knees, ouch!]  The new unit included a new wall receptacle and a much larger hose from that to the unit mounted in the basement.   Luckily I was able to use the old hose to fish the new hose thru the opening way back underneath the fridge.   That new hose was also a lot more ridged, so it is not going to collapse like the old one.

Thankfully I had my cordless multi-tool with me so I could cut the opening in the wall a bit larger to accommodate the new wall receptacle.  Only took one extra charge of the battery to finish it.  Harbor Freight Rocks!

 

 

Heading for De Tour Village in the morning.

 

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Duluth Minnesota

We arrived early to our campsite at a marina near the aerial bridge on the Duluth waterfront yesterday.   I was not sure what to expect, but turns out Duluth is a really cool town.    And as you could see from the real-time camera on the coach, we had a nice view.

We had already been stuck at the aerial bridge twice while sailboats went thru.   It seems the boats blow their air-horns three times – a long, a short and another short – the bridge blows its much louder horn, the same sequence as some sort of tradition.     Those horns are very loud, but I did not hear them at night.  I doubt I could have slept thru that bridge horn.

We spent about half the day at an emergency vet hospital after we got into Duluth as Baxter was not doing well and it was Sunday, so the regular vets weren’t open.   He could barely move about and would not get out of bed Saturday morning.    Had a bunch of tests for a lot of money and nothing was positive, but the vet thinks he caught a tick-borne illness, so Baxter is on Doxycycline for a month.

Today he is already acting like he is feeling much better.  Right now he is sleeping on his back in his bed, making me think he feels a lot better.   His temperature feels cooler.  He wouldn’t even get up for food, so as you can see from the pic, he is almost back to normal.   We had to bring it over to him and he would eat it very slowly.  Both our pups inhale food normally and will jump around while you are fixing it.   Seeing Baxter not move from the couch yesterday was a first for him.  Poor guy had a 104 temperature.

Once he was acting more normal, we decided to drive up to Split Rock Lighthouse, about an hour up the coast from Duluth.   More pretty country all the way up. When we arrived, they were pet unfriendly, so we took turns going to see the lighthouse.   Since it was high on a cliff, it was not very tall and took just a minute to climb to the top.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a balcony to look out, which isn’t the norm I’ve experienced, so it was a short stay in there.   I did look thru the light keeper’s house, which was pretty nice.  There were three homes for them to live in.  Not sure why it took three as I cannot remember seeing that at any lighthouse before.

Those big horns on the top of the building in the pic are fog horns.  I bet they were loud!  As we headed back down to Duluth, we stopped at Kathy’s favorite fast food restaurant, Subway, for a glorious Salad.   I got a sandwich, which I must admit was pretty tasty.   The pups only got a walk out of it.   Poor boys!  Just being abused.

Later that day I was coming back from a grocery run and coming down the hill back into Duluth was a spectacular view of the lake, the town, the spit of land we were staying on, and that huge bridge.   From all the big piles of stuff and large grain silos, I would say the main industry is shipping via freighters in this town.

Speaking of which, we got to experience one of them first hand as a coal freighter was leaving town while we were at the park.  We were still at the park near the bridge and I noticed the bridge was going up as the bells were going off.  I looked back to see it was all the way up.  I had not see that happen the other times I looked when a boat was going thru.  And then the bells stopped with the roadway at the top of the bridge.   I had not heard the bells stop with the bridge open either.

I had to investigate what was going on.   Turns out there was a large ship quite a ways back in the harbor and it was moving very slowly and making a big turn.   It took about 10 minutes from the time I went to look before it was at the bridge…  Those poor folk waiting in their cars.   The ship was over a thousand feet long and was carrying coal to some town in Michigan.   I happened to be standing on the deck off the museum so they announced a lot of info about the ship.

 

 

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Heading toward Detroit Lakes with a slow drive thru Fargo looking for Ray the cat.

It was getting hot in Sioux Falls as we headed out around 10am.   Kind of late for a 5-6 hour drive day.   We planned to stop for lunch at a rest stop that should take about 2 hours to arrive.

We have a fairly uneventful drive all the way to Detroit Lakes and the Country Campground.   We did get to drive thru Fargo,  for some reason I thought Fargo was a ways from Minnesota.  But its not.  Fargo is right on the border.   We didn’t get to stop there,  but I did  keep an eye out for Ray.   We were in Mn lickety-split and about 20 minutes in I looked over at Kathy and said it appeared the oversold the lake stuff as we hadn’t seen one yet.   In a few minutes we saw the first one, and now they are everywhere.   Everything is lush and green here.  Nothing like what we are used to in San Diego.  Found the campground quickly and was escorted to our site.

 

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The search for Richard Dreyfuss

We left Buffalo Wyoming for a short jaunt to Devil’s Tower,  maybe a 2-hour cruise.   I like the short trips,  but they would be even better if we were staying longer…   We checked in at the campground next to the entrance gate.   Turns out it was where the movie scenes at the tower were filmed back in the 70’s.  I had no idea it was the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, but I saw the T-shirts!   That makes me wonder if I would even recognize Richard now.

All fun aside,  we deployed the living space and headed over to the park.  I figured it wasn’t going to take a long time to see the park, that’s why we were leaving in the morning.   I was right,  it’s an awesome site.  You can walk right around its base on a short trail.   We chose not to as it was very toasty and there was no shade at the tower’s base.   We didn’t see any climbers on the face, but were told by a ranger over 5,000 people climb it every year, just check in with the rangers and have the correct gear so they can look at it.  [I talked to a couple that had just come down and they said it took about 8 hours to go up and back down.  I can’t imagine how they do it because it looks almost straight up!  Plus it was about 100 degrees.]

On the way out we stopped at the Prairie Dog Town on the main road.   They appeared to be the big hit with the kids., especially when they stood up on their hind legs to look around.  There was even a young teenager with green hair and the dogs were looking at him more than the others.

The campground shows the movie every night at 8 pm, but of course it started to pour and then the lightning and thunder began just a few minutes before 8.  So we headed back to the coach and I rented it from Amazon and streamed it to the TV thru the Mobley during the storm.   Kathy had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  She wasn’t super impressed.   I loved it.. again!