People Plan: The Universe Laughs

Gin is the planner.  I am the plodder.  I especially plod when it comes to plans.

We arranged to have a 12 volt line running from the rv to toad so that the battery of the toad will not be dead after towing for several hours.  It has not been tested yet.  I hope it works.  It wasn't cheap to put in.  RV mechanics charge about $100 an hour and the guy who installed the line for us probably gave us a break on the hours, but it was still enough for about eleven rounds of golf (at senior rates),  12 good lunches, 13 days of car rental, and 14 partridges in a pear tree.

The pressing issue, pun intended, for the brakes in the toad is critical as we begin to plan for our New England trip.  We probably qualify as "leaf peepers."  The fall foilage is beautiful and what better place to enjoy it than New England.  New England means hills, mountains, and severe circumstances for an rv towing a vehicle.  A supplementary braking system is in order just to protect the rv braking system and probably by law, although the laws are about clear as mud when it they are looked up.

The cost for a supplemental braking system for the toad is about one and half times the total value of all things in the paragraph before last and a gold record by the Partridge Family to boot.  So, being a frugal person (cheap also fits many times), I wanted to shop around for a "deal."  Long story short, places were either not experienced at putting in the system I wanted, too expensive, or did not seem reliable.

We had heard and seen wondrous things about the Hershey RV Show, the one in Pennsylvania and appearing on tv several times.  Gin and I have had basically positive feelings about the ones we attended, so off we went in the car.  It was a nearly 2 hour trip and we got there one-half hour after the opening of the first day.  The place was jam packed already.  There must have been a thousand, no embellishment, rvs there by dealers and more than a hundred vendors with products, not to mention a walk from the nearly filled parking lots that had Sherpas for hire to help with the lengthy hike.

One of the vendors did indeed offer a deal on installation of the exact braking system that I wanted.  The only problem was that the dealer was over 2 hours away and could install it with the earliest time being 3 days after we wanted to leave for New England.  It was decided to make the dealership a stop on the way to New England and get the work done by delaying the trip for 3 days.

We belong to AAA.  We have more than gotten our money's worth with maps, campground guides, and some discounts for tickets, etc.  The time for making tentative arrangements, times, and routes for our trip had arrived.

Long ago in a place far from away, I was involved in professional development with the topic of data analysis.  I preached that to determine causal relationships, one must reduce variables in order to make decisions.   How many variables are there for a trip like this?  Well, there are places that are absolute must sees or stops (see dealership above), highways that have different numbers of lanes, mountains, forests, driving distance capacities for me, places that dogs are allowed or not, 30 or 50 amp services, non-refundable reservations, trains that go by in the night (just like every village having an idiot, campgrounds have trains that travel by only at night with 3000 decibel whistles), reviews of scenic areas on the internet, the electromagnetic flux of the earth, and so on.   We tried the route planning of several services and found the AAA one to fit our needs the best.  I didn't have to gargle that night.  I just poured in the mouthwash and the shaking did the rest.

It remains to be seen how all of this planning turns out, but being a cynical person like I am about some things, perhaps it is time that you reread the title.......