Raining on Flying Pigs, Lobsters, and L.L. Bean

It's raining again with a forecast of only thirty percent chance of it.  Reminds me of the national weather service forecast of a few years ago.  By using supercomputers and the combined expertise of all the brainpower there, they predicted that there was a fifty percent chance of more snow that year.  Think about it, fifty percent essentially means that it might or might not snow more...

Drove to Freeport.  Nice little town and we were there early after waking up about daylight. Got a good parking place right in the L.L. Bean complex.  Went to the Home Store, the outlet, and then to the regular retail outlet.  Lots of good stuff of which none that I need or bought and neither did Gin.  Overall, though, it was mildly disappointing in terms of expectations.  

We found the When Pigs Fly Bakery as suggested in a guide.  They had all kinds of unusual breads and samples of most.  Bought some with cranberries, dates, nuts, and other stuff.  It was great.

Lunch was at the local lobster pound.  Gin got a large lobster and I got sea food chowder. Gin loved the butter with the lobster.  My chowder was good.  It was an authentic New England experience.  The rain was pouring.  It was chilly.  We enjoyed it as an authentic New England experience.

Went back to the rv for a planning session.  Discovered that the Columbus Day weekend was going to overrun the campgrounds.  We moved up our timetable somewhat and decided to go to Acadia National early the next morning.

Although it stopped raining for about twenty minutes at one point, it started again and kept it up most of the night.  

Off to Acadia next...

On the Way and Our First Night in Maine

We decamped to go to Portland.  Of course, it was still raining.  Now I know how big the national debt is because about 16 trillion raindrops per hour fell through the night and into the morning, but it quit around daybreak.   Had a little trouble with the self levelers, but am getting used to mini-crises.  It worked out with a little patience and some cussing at manufactures in general.  Not all stuff is their fault.  The pantry that is a 

multi-bracketted, vertical holder of the cereal for the dogs and me, would not slide out. Now, this is a major crisis.  After much surveying, grunting while laying on the floor, and applying higher levels of engineering expertise that I don't have, Dan mentioned that most operate by a lever somewhere.  When he was saying that on the phone while while Gin was talking to Beth, I saw something that suspiciously looked like a lever.  HELLO!  Problem solved.

Just as an aside, while dealing with all of the little issues such as above, I have noticed approximately half the national debt number of screws that are missing, not turned all the way in, etc.  That doesn't include the brittle plastic tabs I broke off the screen between the bathroom fan and the vent.  Of course, the fan blades had come off the fan spindle connected to the fan motor, connected by 2 flimsy metallic thingamabobs held by a whichamacallit and so on.

The drive through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, and then Maine went well for the most part. There was some drizzle at times, but nothing terrible.  The roads in Connecticut, New York, and parts of Massachusetts were very, very bumpy at times.  People picture the drivers of class A motorhomes as smiling, serene, and loving life on the road.  For me, although it is getting better, a bumpy road causes me to be a mover and shaker - not the kind you are thinking about.  Dishes rattle, joints creak, the top heavy chassis is frequently leaning, the wind makes noise, my teeth are rattling, and there are other noises too many to describe.  One salesman described driving an rv as managing an earthquake following behind you.  Not bad.

Got to the campground.  The new supplementary braking system seemed to work fine, but how do you know?  Unhooking was okay, although Gin has to learn that the car has to have the ignition on for it to move - a minor problem.

Hooked up in the rain.  The number of raindrops falling on my head now numbers the amount of dollars our democratic governor has increased our taxes by.  A washer was missing from the fresh water hose, but I had extra washers - see previous blog about cats barking.

Rain, rain, and more rain.  Gin had to take the dogs out.  It was darker than the insides of a wolf.  More fun.

Went out to dinner at a family restaurant recommended by AAA.  Nothing in Maine is close. It the most spread out thing since I dated Fat Myrtle in high school.  Took 25 minutes to get there.  However, the food was good, the atmosphere real New England (we were the only strangers to the owners there), there was a piano player who played oldies, and we met some folks in their mid eighties who were delightful.  They heard us tell the waitress that we are from Baltimore and being Red Sox fans, they struck up a conversation.  Nice people there and would recommend it to anybody.

Gin had a lobster roll and we both had blueberry pie.  We never have desert, but this was suggested in the AAA book and it was as right as rain - wait a minute, I would not consider rain right at this point (see 16 trillion above)

Tomorrow, we head for L.L. Bean in Freeport in the toad.  Gin is looking forward to more lobster.

A Toad Reborn

We took it easy while waiting for the car to be finished the next morning. , The dogs will be meowing and the cats barking tonight because they finished the job by 11:15.  Of course, lunch was from 12 to 12.30 so we could not pick it up until after 12.30.  Decamping was not a problem with the dreaded black water draining not being necessary - Yeah!  We got to the shop, were oriented to the supplementary device by an excellent technician, and went in for the bill.  It took about thirty minutes for the bill to be done and paid.  Got a show price for the unit which saved us about four hundred dollars, so it is tough to complain much.  I am very satisfied to this point about the experience.

We were off to the booming metropolis of Metamoras, PA.  The campground there was about the only alternative unless we wanted to drive an hour more.  With the uncertainty of when the car would be completed, we opted for the relatively short ride of nearly 3 hours.  

The campground was cheap - probably for a good reason.  First the manager(?) told us to hook-up in the wrong site.  Had to have her walk out to the site to prove it to her.  

Then, the toad was dead, ded, doornail dead, no battery, zilch, nada, etc.  Very frustrating after the supposed and expensive fix.  Turns out that it was an idiosyncrasy with a key that we had had made.  After calling AAA and then figuring out the problem myself (see dogs meowing above...), we cancelled the service call just as the guy arrived.  He was understanding and said that he also really understood hybrids and would take a look just to make sure.  With his infinite understanding of electromechanics and probable mail order degree in engineering, he said it was a loose wire.  Didn't say anything but thanks for the memory.

Actually the AAA guy and manager were both nice, but both were inept.  I know, the kettle and pot thing....

Anyway, back to the campground.   It was beside I84 and noisy as could be with the big trucks.  It was raining hard much of the night.  It sounded like the inside of a drum at times.  Amazingly, it did not bother me that much or Gin who lives better through chemistry, that is, by taking a sleeping pill.

We decided to cut our driving the next day by half because of the driving rain that was predicted, pun intended.  It was not as bad driving with the toad as my anxieties had thought they would be, but it was not pleasant in any sense.  We frequently drove around 50 mph, but many other people were too.  It was a good decision as we would have been on the beltway around Boston at a prerush hour time.  Not good.  I would just as soon be beaten with a stick as drive at that time around Boston.

Got to the campground and wanted a pull through so we wouldn't have to unhook the toad.  The only available pull through was a 30 amp, which I thought we had a converter for in the rv, but was not.  So, we unhooked the toad and then hooked up the rv in the rain.  It sounds worse than it was - well, maybe not....

Off to near Portland, Maine tomorrow if the universe is willing and the crick don't rise...

Cabelas, Love, and Uturns

We are on our way to New England.  Our first stop is Shartlesville, PA, a campground near the rv repair shop in which we will have a supplementary braking system for the toad installed. It is really needed for the towing as even the hills along route 10 demonstrated on the way here.  No real problems, but the mountains in NE will create a lot of wear and tear on the rv, imho.

It took about 40 minutes to hook up the toad and get out of the lot.

Some observations on the way up

     Folks along Lancaster and Reading really keep their property attractive

     Route 10 was a two lane, curvy road

     I am much more comfortable driving now

     Farm machinery rules the road in rural PA - slow, slooooow

The drop off for the toad work involved a uturn through a Hess gas station with the toad behind and then through a hardware store parking lot on the way back.  I am learning that the no uturns signs for businesses mean maybe and will try my best not to do this, but the PA road rules almost demand it for rvs.  I doubt if the businesses will ticket us, but the PA state police will for sure when making an illegal turn on the highway.

The rv feels like a race car without the toad behind.

While looking for a grocery store, we came across Cabelas.  We did not know what kind of store it is, but it is BIG.  Turns out to be a an outdoor outfitter.  They had a huge parking lot with room for sixty or so rvs and hundreds of cars.  We spend about an hour there.  They have great merchandise if one is an outdoorsman or like that kind of clothing. It was quality stuff with comparable pricing.  Lots of camo clothing, ammo, guns, fishing supplies, a pond with fish in it, stuffed animals (kept looking for deer crossing signs), and some bargains too for some things.  It was busy for a late Wednesday afternoon.  The second amendment is the rule here.  A sign in front of the store says to check your firearms there...

We missed the turn for the rv camp despite some precise directions from the office.  An interesting thing we saw was a Love's gas plaza.  Must have been 100 trucks there.  It was like they were having a party or something.  Went the wrong way in the lot and got a wave from a driver passing by.  I thought he was being friendly and he probably was. Retrospectively, he may have been communicating to me about going the wrong way and saying that he spared our puny existence in our 31 foot rv by not being run over by a HUGE semi.

The Appalachian Campground is nice.  While in the lot at Cabelas, I thought it was a good idea to call and make reservations at 4 o'clock.  Luck that I did.  They closed at five and we would have been stuck with no place to camp - unless we pretended like we were a truck at Loves and boondocked.  They had cable, which is really nice.  It was our first experience with that as opposed to the very spotty antenna reception.  There were no trains too - a first for us.  I woke up several times during the night with the silence and said, "What was that?"

Will pick up the toad by noon according to the shop's schedule.  Yeah, fat chance!

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.......

Williamsburg with the Kids

Our next trip in mid July was determined by the vacation the children and grand cuties were taking at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia.  A major decision to be made was to tow or not to tow.  Being concerned about another dead toad upon arrival and some faulty financial calculations on my part resulted a decision to rent a car once there and not to tow.  It turned out well.

For the first time, I was largely comfortable in driving the rv.  The major understanding that caused this was not overthinking the size of the rv and how it fits into lanes.  As long as the focus was on a distant point without worrying about constantly staying in the lane on a close proximity basis, things seemed to go fine.  At least, that is my story and I'm sticking with it!  We traveled between 55 and 65 miles per hour with the average being close to sixty.  Sixty five is really too fast and fifty five is just a mite slow.  We averaged around 9.3 mpg, which is good in my book.

The drive was uneventful, but tiring.  Five hours is about my limit.  I-95 is not the place for Gin to get comfortable with handling the rv, so that is to come later.

The rv camp was nice.  Set-up was no problem.  The only glitch was moving the rv and redoing the setup after discovering that the leveling jacks really had one side of the rv up in the air.  I don't know whether that is a problem or not, but it concerned me.  Therefore, the adjustment by unhooking, moving the rv on the pad, and then hooking up again was made.  It had everything to do with the way I pulled onto the pad initially, so it was another learning experience.

The next morning, I was picked up by Enterprise Rental Cars to get the rental car.  It was a bright red, very small car with a red and white interior.  Gin thought it was "cute."  It did quite well for us in and around Williamsburg and although it was an additional cost compared to towing (see faulty calculations above), it was worth it not to have to tow, worry about a dead toad, and for the experience of renting as an option.

We spent all day at Busch Gardens with the kids and had a lot of fun.  It rained cats and dogs for about an hour, but it turned out alright as it gave us time to get ice cream and for the kids to rest.  We wouldn't let the cats and dogs have any of the ice cream - well, only what was dropped on the ground.

I had previously wanted to go to Jamestown because of recommendations from family and friends.  Truth be told, history can be a real bore for me for the most part and Gin wasn't that exited about it either.  So...

We did Williamsburg sightseeing the next day as the kids went to the water park.  We did the old historical district by what I call mechanized hiking, that is, we drove by.  Next, we went to the new Williamsburg Pottery.  It appealed to the eye, but lacked the charm, unique items, and pricing of the old one.  Lunch was had near the historical district and was good.  Although intrigued by the three cheese grit with shrimp offering, I had crab cakes.  Too much mustard or similar spice in the recipe and I was tasting them all day.

Shopping was next on the list and that went okay.  Gin posed with the statue as seen below.  It was our only picture as we were remiss in taking some of the kids at Busch Gardens.  This will have a bearing on the content of the blogs in the future with the purchase of a small, portable camera that is easy to use, I hope.

One highlight (I am easy to amuse because of previous exhilarating outings such as going down to the Safeway and watching 'em check out on Saturday mornings) for me was the purchase of a chocolate truffle for me and one for Gin - when she wasn't with me.  That is just about the only way that goodies can be bought and eaten by us.  She will not buy them, but enjoys them when offered.  Oh well...

We met the kids, saw their condo, and went to an ice cream store that night.  It was fun and we got frozen yogurt (low or nonfat), but in a waffle cone (definitely a no-no with the fat and calories).  Go figure - it's like eating a doughnut with a diet soda.  The last time I looked though, I was still on the right side of the grass - above instead of below.

The trip home was long, but uneventful.  I resolved to get the dead toad problem fixed...

A Dead Toad ..., Part 2

It was time to tend to our major goal with the rv.  It is not so much the camping that we look forward to, but the sights we can see in our travels.  At this juncture, our sights defined include the scenery wherever we go and the local habitats, which include shopping at the not-run-of-the-mill places and local restaurants.

We went to the less developed side of the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.  We did some minor hiking in addition to seeing the canyon.  It really was very impressive, much more than I anticipated.  The trees and general environment were pristine and what a state park should be.  My cynical nature, no pun intended, is characterized by states and tourist offices describing their attractions in an embellished way.  By being born and raised in West Virginia, embellishment is fine with me as long as I am the one doing it and I do it exceptionally well on occasion - that's no kidding or as my father used to say, "I'm not pulling your leg" on this one.  If embellishment is being used to sell me something, that is another story.

We used the rest of the day to shop in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.  It is a nice, quiet, interesting place to shop.  Gin really liked the different types of merchandise sold in the unique shops and probably would have liked to spend more time there.  For me, it was okay.  I bought a seven piece screwdriver set for a buck - my kind of shopping.  When asked why it was so quiet, a salesperson said that Wellsboro is really busy during a music festival and again during the leaf changing season.

We like to eat in local places rather than chains.  On a back street, we saw what looked like a family restaurant that was somewhat busy.  To be off the beaten track and thriving is usually a good sign.  I had a real hamburger for the first time in well over a year, not the 93% fat free cardboard that we usually eat, and french fries.    Actually, the hamburger was split between Gin and me as prearranged and negotiated before ordering.  One of the great dilemmas in life as one gets older is being full before dessert can be ordered and eaten.  Normally, when we eat out, it is usually lunch, we do not eat dinner or just have something very light.  We resolved the dessert issue, I saw that this restaurant had real home made pies, by coming back later in the day and ordering a piece of pie apiece to appease us personally.  The pie was good, but not amazing considering that we deprive ourselves of that goodie as a rule.  Oh well...

The owner of the campground advised Gin that the canyon was spectacular at sunset.  We went to the more developed side.  This is a much easier side to see the canyon with much larger views and we enjoyed it very much.


The drive home was relatively uneventful.  With less wind, it was much less stressful. We did return to the same gas station as on the way, an independent one, to get cheap gas.  It is amazing to me that there was as much as a thirty cent difference in prices along the way and with the rv getting about 8 miles to the galleon, this was important.

When stopping for the gas, I dutifully started the car as had been done on the way up.  The manual said to do this as part of the towing procedures.

We were concerned about having a dead toad when arriving at the storage lot for the rv.  I ignored Gin's advice for the direction of the rv in relation to the toad.  Bad, bad move...  The toad was dead and sitting at an angle which put the hereto told release handles for the tow in a locked position (see the previous post for the details.  By putting the toad in park once again in desperation, I now had an rv sitting in a position that could not be turned around and a toad that could not be moved.  Woe is me.  It was hot in the late afternoon.  We could have called a wonderful neighbor for assistance, but preferred not to bother him if possible.

So I did it with an Army solution.  If something does not work, bang it with a bigger hammer.  I will spare you the gory details, but one tow bar side was eventually disengaged from the toad which led to the other one having the pressure taken off and we were free.  The rv had to be driven home and another car picked up to bring back for jumping the battery for the dead toad.  Mission accomplished.  However, something has to be done about the dead toad after towing for more than five hours.....