And We're Off!!

Thursday, August 5, 2021

We’re off today on our second “10 week” vacation in the RV (mostly). As we did back in 2019, we decided to drive the RV, with the Jeep towed behind, down to Oak Island for our annual Cohn-Mezer Beach Week. When the week is over, we will proceed with the second stage of our trip, meandering toward Milwaukee. But for now, we are focused on Oak Island. Last year when a tornado forced us to relocate our vacation, we rented a house in Kill Devil Hills, on the North Carolina Outer Banks. To get there, Joe and I drove down the coast through the Eastern Shore (Delaware, Maryland, and a smidgen of Virginia), took the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Norfolk, and stayed east to get to the Outer Banks. The drive was so lovely that I said, Next time we drive to Oak Island, the heck with I-95, the most miserable highway in the world... let’s just go this route all the way down to Wilmington. So this year, we are doing exactly that. We have the RV this time, so we can take a couple of days to get there, like we did in 2019, but the drive is much prettier. Today we started off by driving through the New Jersey Pinelands, the small but incredibly lovely town of Haddonton, and ended at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, which we took back in April. Except for the time we spent on the NJ Turnpike, we have totally avoided I-95. So we left home at 1:55pm (my absolute must-leave-by time was 2pm) and headed south, as I said. Our drive was uneventful, except for one stop to find out why the front tire under me was screaming (we have a tire monitor.) It was apparently too inflated, and Joe released some air to solve the problem. Other than that, and one wrong turn that we fixed right away, the drive was uneventful. We arrived at the Ferry at 5:10 pm, pulled into our slot, walked the dog, and relaxed until it was time to drive onto the ferry. The voyage was delightful; we sat in a shady place and watched the NJ horizon move farther and farther away. I leaned back and dozed for a while, which was just perfect; I think Joe probably did too (he drove the entire three hours.) We finally docked at about 7:30, and drove 30 minutes to Georgetown, DE, where we are comfortably parked in the very back of a Walmart. We don’t expect any issues to arise overnight, and the air is cooling off quite a bit. Joe made me chinese dumplings (frozen at home, and brought along with us) for dinner, and that is pretty much all about our day! (I left out the packing all morning, of course, and the quick lunch at Highand Pizza... it takes a LOT of packing to get out of a house for 10 weeks!) Tomorrow’s plan is to head down US113-US13 into Maryland, cross the Chesapeake Bay, and find someplace in North Carolina to stay for the night. The pickings are kind of slim down there, so we will need a little bit of luck. All part of the adventure! And that is Day 1 of the Cohn RV Journey of 2021.