Northward Bound...August 19 - Day 1

(Kim's Perspective)

After several weekends of prepping the camper for another road trip, we felt we were adequately prepared to take Thumper on another adventure.  Sure, the camper has well over 30,000 miles on it and has a couple of leaks, a few cracks, some missing parts...no big thing.  :)  Hitch it up and let's go!  While we've been to all the lower 48, we have not camped (well, our mid-life version of it anyway) in every state, so we were eager to lose pieces and parts of our decrepit camper in a different part of the country this time.  :P

I took the day off and loaded everything into the trailer.  Bill worked half a day and by the time we got the bikes loaded and everything hitched and ready to go, we were on our way at 4pm...

Kitteh is ready to roll!

 ...that is until our first stop....5 minutes later....at the bottom of the driveway when we realized we had forgotten the grease gun for the trailer wheels.  D'OH!  Rather than messing around with trying to turn the truck and camper around, I decided to walk back up the driveway to get it.  Fifteen minutes later (yeah, it's a long driveway) we were in the truck and pulling out to start our trip.  We texted the Sitts to check on their status and they were already on the road.  The plan was to meet at Worthington State Forest in New Jersey for the night.  Never having great Wal-Mart sleeping experiences, we all wanted to get a decent night's sleep at a quiet campground so I spent a fair amount of time researching state parks in the area.  Unfortunately, I somehow screwed up and booked a campground without hookups (I still have no idea how I managed that.  Do you know how many campsite reservations I've made in my lifetime?  Idiot.).  So aside from it being quiet, without the ability to plug in and run the AC, it was almost like camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  The temps weren't super high (it was in the low 70s), but it was extremely humid and sticky.  Needless to say, I wasn't happy with myself for that mistake and I'm pretty certain no one else was either.  At least the campsite was large and pretty level (as evidenced by the below photo I snapped the following morning) which made set up easy...BUT...
 

...getting to the campsite about cost us a new roof.  Our rig is 10'4" tall - pretty short for a camper.  The road leading to our loop passed by a large tree standing at the edge of the road in the middle of a turn and had huge tree limbs hanging low and extending out over the road (how many prepositional phrases can YOU put in one sentence?!)  ha!  As we drove underneath, I kept my eye on the roof and yelled to Bill to stop.  We jumped out and quickly assessed the situation.  There was a ditch on the driver's side and the tree on the right.  We needed to back up and take a wider approach to the turn but there was little room to do so before our wheels would be in the ditch.  The Sitts were on the lookout for us and started walking over.  It was well after 9pm, dark, and relatively quiet so we briefly said hello and chatted about the ridiculous nature of a campground not maintaining the trees hanging over the road.  Bill jumped back in the truck and within a few minutes he masterfully made the necessary corrections and got us through without any damage.  Disaster thwarted.  After we were all set up, the Sitts came in for a bit and we chatted for awhile.  It was quite hot, but by the time we said goodnight around 11pm, the air was cooling down and made sleeping much more pleasant.  Meh, if this is the worst thing that happens, life is good!  But it usually always is.  :)