Moving West

Hi all:  Well, lots has happened since my last post.  I will quickly catch you up on our travels and then share a little info about what it's like "land cruising" in an r-pod.  I've had a few requests for more info on that.
My last post was about Lake Keuka in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  On our way down there, we had breakfast with an old friend who lives near Syracuse and she suggested that we visit Letchworth State Park, the "Grand Canyon of the East".  We had never heard of it but did a little research and decided to head there for a day.  It was only a couple of hours from where we were staying in Lake Keuka so we were able to get there early, get our camper set up and spend the rest of the day seeing the park.  So glad we did that!  There is a deep river canyon that runs through the park and three beautiful waterfalls.  All in all, pretty spectacular!  We were able to take Poppy with us and pretty much saw all the sights that day.  Lots of hiking and walking up and down steps.  We were all exhausted by the end of the day.

From there we headed further west, leaving New York State, crossing through a corner of Pennsylvania and entering Ohio.  We bypassed Cleveland (sorry Drew Cary) and stayed at a campground about half way between Cleveland and Toledo.  From there we headed to a visit with friends who live just north of Detroit -- Verne and Carol Felstow.  Bob and Verne were in the army together in 1968-69.  They trained together in Colorado Springs and then went to Viet Nam where they served in the same tank crew until Bob was wounded and sent home.  They hadn't been in touch since that day until we got together with Verne and Carol last year at a reunion of their Army regiment.  We had a great visit with them last weekend -- we parked our camper in their yard, hooked up to their electricity and had a great dinner and lots of good conversation around a bonfire.

We left the Detroit area and headed north in Michigan and are currently in the Upper Peninsula - more about that in my next blog.

So what's it like traveling in a small camper as opposed to cruising in a sailboat?  There are lots of similarities and lots of differences.  Living in a small space is the same:  you have to move 10 things to get under the settee (couch) to get out one thing that you need.  You have to put everything away all the time and you can't accumulate anything (a great money saver).  We travel in the camper like we did on the boat -- we don't like to reserve anything ahead.  We want to be able to stay in places we like and move on if we don't like it.  This can be stressful, especially on the weekends when the campgrounds tend to be pretty booked up.  So far it's working out pretty well for us -- we've always been able to find a place to stay in the area we want to visit.

We like to travel the back roads instead of the highways which takes a lot longer but saves on gas.  We are getting terrible gas mileage - 8-9 mpg -- a lot less than we thought we would get.  But if we were traveling at 70 mph, we would be getting worse gas mileage.  Here's the rig:

We are finding that putting up the r-dome (the screened tent that attaches to the side of the RV) makes a huge difference for us.  It's not worth putting it up when we are only staying one night but if we are staying two or more nights, we put it up and spend most of our time in it.  We set up our comfortable chairs and a little table and eat, drink, plan, work on the computer and relax out there.  This picture was posted before but in case you forgot, this is the R-dome:

The main reason we love the R-dome is that the interior of the R-pod is really small.  We do have a queen size bed which is set up all the time (I really like that although it's harder to make this bed than it was the bed on our boat) but there is very little floor space and Poppy takes up most of it.  We have to constantly step over her - and that's not easy at night when our black dog is lying on her black rug.  Here is the floor plan of the R-pod:

Well, there are lots more things I could talk about but don't want to make this too long.  I'll try to add more info about traveling in the RV in each posting but if you have specific questions, please post them in the comments.  

All in all, we are having a great time.  I miss my family, my friends, my church, my volunteer activities and my house but I am so glad we are having this experience.  And by the way, Poppy is enjoying the heck out of this trip.  Until next time.....