Summer 2010
Pacific Northwest

Our route today did not follow our traditional departure process. Ordinarily we start a week or so before a long trip to stock the trailer with items that would not do well over the winter. This allows us to only take perishables and the few items of clothing that we did not previously bring to the trailer. Every other year this meant running up to the storage facility in Chester, NY, a 150 mile round trip. This year, nothing was normal.

As many of you know, we bought a new trailer in Florida last summer after we had a run-in with a gas pump stanchion. That incident caused damage to the forward trailer axle that would have required that we leave the trailer in Nokomis, Florida for a few weeks and return for it. Instead, we bought the new trailer and headed home. That was the beginning of a tale of woe. On our first night on the trip to New York, the TV in the living area ceased to function so a few weeks later we brought the trailer to a dealer in Lakewood, NJ for a warranty replacement of the TV. What we failed to notice were signals being sent to us by our refrigerator that something was wrong with it. We had the dealer winterize the trailer and placed it into storage. In March we headed to the West Coast of Florida for a few weeks of warm weather (we didn't get the warm weather, but that's another story). On our first night south we stopped in Natural Bridge, VA. As we set the trailer up I noticed that when we turned the heater on, the lights dimmed... they are not supposed to. A little troubleshooting told me that the converter, a device that takes 120 Volts AC and convert it to 12 Volts DC and charges the trailer battery, was not putting out any power. So this meant a sub-freezing night without heat. We had the converter replaced, under warranty, in Roanoke and headed south. On our second night we discovered that the refrigerator did not work on 120 Volts as it is supposed to be when we are connected to campground power. We also noticed that several 120 Volt outlets were not properly wired and ten other problems. We brought the trailer back to the dealer in Lakewood and there it stayed for about a month while they repaired my list of complaints. Since we weresoon heading out on our big trip, we went from the dealer to a two night trip to Pennsylvania to ensure that everything worked. It didn't... the refrigerator still didn't work on 120 Volts. We took it back to the dealer, where it was repaired. Rather than go to Lakewood and run the trailer up to the storage area (almost 300 miles round trip), we opted to load the truck and head off to our first stop from there.

The trip involved taking the Pennsylvania Turnpike for its entire length to the Ohio state line. We have not been on the Pennsylvania Turnpike beyond the Lancaster area in some time and, if I can help it, it will be a VERY long time before I go on it again. It is advertised as America's first super highway. That may be so, but it should have been replaced several times since it was built. It is relatively narrow with quite a few curves. The road surface, in a word, is "poor." At one point the trailer bounced so hard on a series of bumps that I thought that we were back on the Alaska Highway. Once we got into the Pittsburgh area, the roadway improved somewhat. The Ohio turnpike a pleasure by comparison to what we had gone through.

When we got into the Streetsboro KOA, we found that the "PA Pike Bounce" caused our sofa to move one foot forward and caused some other minor structural damage. I made a temporary fix of the damage and moved the sofa back to its place.

It was a long day, but we are on the way to another adventure on the road.