An Inauspicious Beginning to A Long Journey

The view through our windshield.

2019-08-07

We are on the road again! We left Highland Park this afternoon at 4:25pm in a monsoon (the heavens opened when we were 5 minutes from home) on a trip which represents several “firsts” for us. To begin, this is planned to be (God willing) the longest trip we’ve ever taken. We expect to be away from home for ten weeks. Although the first week will be our annual family vacation at the beach, rather than RVing, but still, we have blocked out ten weeks. For the first time we have a house-sitter-- the post office won’t even hold mail for more than 30 days, and we will be gone, we hope, 70 days.

Second, as I said, this is the first time that we’ve combined the RV trip of the summer/fall with our summer family vacation week in Oak Island, NC. In the past we’ve had the beach week over July 4th, but due to the convergence of 1) the house we’ve been renting for about 8 years suddenly going off the rental market, which meant 2) we had to find a new house with at least 6 bedrooms (we’ve got three generations now, of two families), and this great house was available in August; and 3) all of this was fortuitious because of the arrival of the 3rd generation of our family, who was due on June 19. This mean that if said arrival were late, it would be expecting a lot of my daughter to bring a one week old baby to the beach. So pushing the vacation to August worked out perfectly.

But this meant that we had to tweak our usual traveling style for the first time. We will arrive at Oak Island in our RV, but we will be towing our Jeep for the first time on our cross-country trip.We did a trial run with the Jeep and RV for two weeks in June, when we hung out near the hospital waiting for our granddaughter to make her appearance, and then for another week after she was born. We parked at Lum’s Pond State Park campground, and ran around town in the Jeep, and it all worked perfectly.

So the Jeep tow is our third big change to this trip. We will be dropping the dog off at a doggie “Bed & Biscuit” for a week while we stay with our clan in a beachfront rental house (no dogs allowed.) The RV will be left in a secured storage facility, and we will then arrive at the rental house in the Jeep, which will be our transportation for the week. And when the beach week is over, we’ll hook ourselves back up, collect our dog, and head west from North Carolina instead of from New Jersey.

It’s been a long time planning this trip, and one thing we did was plan to drive to the beach more slowly (in a car, it’s one long day’s drive.) My expectation was that the RV with the Jeep tow would slow us down a little bit. So we left home this afternoon, Wednesday, with plans to stop two hours down the road in Newark, DE, to see the grandchild and pick up a few diapers (our daughter’s car is going to be too full of other baby and beach gear to fit everything!) and a case of wine (we vacation very classily.) And then we figured we’d have two leisurely days to get almost to Oak Island, and we’d then wake up Saturday morning and do the dog and RV juggling act.

Then came the monsoon, which slowed us down. But what slowed us even more was when our tire pressure monitor went off, alerting us to the fact that one of our rear RV tires was losing air. (The monitor is great--it monitors the 6 RV tires and the 4 Jeep tires.)  We were SO lucky that the rain stopped and it cleared up as we approached a rest stop on the Turnpike. So Joe got out, checked the pressure, and then hooked up our air compressor. He filled the tire back to the right pressure, while I walked the dog (she was so freaked out by the thunder, lightening, and teeming rain!) and then got back on the road (this was about a 30-40 minute stop.)  But we kept an eye on that tire, and sure enough, it was slowly losing air again. We must have picked up a nail since we left home.

Unfortunately, it had started to rain again almost as soon as we left the rest stop (we were SO lucky that we caught that hiatus long enough to deal with our tire and dog.) And it just came down heavily and steadily. We called a tire place in Newark, DE, recommended by my daughter, and they open tomorrow at 8am. We would have stopped and refilled the tire on the road again tonight, but seriously, it was raining VERY HARD. So we stopped at the next rest area, between Exits 5 and 4, and decided to chill for a little bit on the off chance the rain would stop. But it kept on until 8:30.... just as predicted by our weather app. Meanwhile, I made the bed, and Joe made us some dinner.

Our original plans were to grab some blacktop in Newark either at a large empty parking lot, or in the lot owned by our son-in-law’s business. In other words, we had no exotic plans, although we were looking forward to seeing the baby tonight! But as it happens, we are going to spend the night in the Walt Whitman rest area on the NJ Turnpike instead. It has actually stopped raining as I type this, but Joe is really very tired, and not up to filling the tire (which does take a while) and then driving another hour or so. And it’s getting kind of late anyway.

So here we are. Tomorrow we’ll wake up early, hit the road, and head straight for the tire place. Somehow between getting the tire fixed up, and connecting with daughter and baby, we will make it all work. And then we’ll keep driving south until whenever we stop.

Isn’t it lucky we left ourselves extra time?