Still raining in Vermont?

The other day when Gus checked the weather in Barre, he said, “Oh goodie, it’s raining.” I told him we are no better off when other people suffer. He looked at me as if I was speaking gibberish; he could not match the words with his understanding of the world. So in case you are thinking we are having too much fun:

We forgot my baseball cap (yes, this is a big deal) and the battery charger for our camera.

I made a wrong turn, the stupid GPS kept saying “recalculating.” I made a U-turn with not enough room, had to back up with the trailer, fast oncoming traffic – the trailer jackknifed and now I’ve got a good size ding in the side of the truck.

This is even better. Cruising at 65 miles per hour on the highway in North Carolina – wow, cool church, let’s go see – we get off the highway and go over a bump and the trailer drops off the hitch. The safety chains prevent disaster but the pavement grounds down various bits of the trailer. Yes, I forgot to put the pin through the hitch that keeps it on the ball. But at least we were going 20 MHP and not 65.

The popup trailer has a panel on the outside to access the controls for the refrigerator (it’s complicated – we can chill the refrigerator using the battery, propane gas, or an electric hookup). To open the panel, you turn two knobs (clockwise a quarter turn) and to close it you reverse the step. Unfortunately, I forgot to lock the panel and it is now sitting by the roadside in rural western Pennsylvania – it will probably cost us $250 to replace the 8’ x 16” piece of plastic. Thank you to James who rigged up a temporary cover!

For those of us who live in New England there is little in life that matters except that which takes place within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic coast. However, you  may have heard that mid-continent there has been a persistent and devastating drought.  But rain followed us from Gettysburg through North Carolina shrouding the Blue Ridge Parkway; from Georgia through Texas including a wild night of wind in an exposed site in a state campground south of Dallas; to a wondrously beautiful campground in the desert outside Carlsbad New Mexico that got interrupted by tornado warnings and we hastily packed the camper and scurried off to a cheap hotel in town, not making it before the rain arrived, soaking us as we frantically unloaded the truck swiping the stupid card to unlock the door to let us into the side entrance of the hotel. (The hotel was named, I think, “Roadside Paradise.”)

We have many gimmicks to assist out travels. We’ve used (rated on a scale of one to ten with ten a satisfying miracle) a GPS to route our destinations (4), the GPS to find food (7), iphone map app to figure out where we are (8), google maps to plan out trip (6), trip advisor to help us decide where to stay (7), iphone email to stay in touch with home and work (8), iphone text for Gus to stay in touch with friends (6), iphone weather (3),cell phones (2), wifi (8 when you can get it), ), state maps given out at welcome centers (9), instinct about when to get off the most travelled roads (10). But in this day and age, we’ve experienced a lot of U-turns, late meals because of bad planning, and uncertain evenings in the truck worrying about finding a campground. It is still about the getting there and not the arrival that defines a trip!

Martin