This week marks the start of our longest distance trip thus far…and is also right up there for total number of days. We will stay at a total of seven campgrounds in six states over 14 days! Prepping for this trip was definitely far more involved than our recent two- & three-night trips…and I was very pleasantly surprised that all of our food fit in the refrigerator and freezer. They’re full but not stuffed! We’ll likely need to make at least a couple of grocery store stops, mostly for things like fresh fruit – overall, though, most of our meals are packed in and ready to go!

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We left Rochester before 9:30 on Tuesday, heading to northern Maryland for our first stop. It was an ideal driving day – mostly overcast, dry, and reasonable temperatures. A couple hours of Tuesday’s driving was along route 15 in PA, which is 55 mph with occasional traffic lights. This is actually one of our favorite types of routes in the RV – once we get above about 60 mph, the road noise in the RV gets pretty intense, so it’s harder to do for long periods of time…so a 55 speed limit is really nice compared to 70 mph highways! It’s always nice to see those state welcome signs to let us know we’ve made progress and are getting closer. This one was definitely welcome, since we knew once we crossed into MD, we weren’t far from Cunningham Falls State Park, stop #1.

We arrived around 4pm, found our site, and did a bit of leveling (something we haven’t had to do much of recently!). We took a short walk around the park and campground loop – much needed after sitting for so many hours with just a few short breaks. It’s a very shady campground and mostly empty – midweek just before labor day isn’t a popular camping time, apparently! It’s also a very buggy campground – they were quite annoying while we were walking!

We’d been watching the forecast, especially with the remnants of Hurricane Ida heading toward the mid-Atlantic. As predicted, the rain started around 11pm, and continued non-stop. Just a steady, pounding rain. All. Night. Long.

It was still raining Wednesday morning when it was time to leave for our next stop in Four Oaks, NC. Fortunately, it wasn’t a  super heavy rain. Mark was a trooper, disconnecting and putting stuff away in the rain. He has all the necessary rain gear in the RV, however, for exactly these types of days! I noticed Wednesday morning that there was a streak of moisture in the hallway…not good. It wasn’t super wet, but it was obvious something was leaking or dripping. One end of the trail was where the freshwater tank is under the bed, so we lifted up the mattress and Mark found a connection that seemed a little loose. He tightened it and we crossed our fingers that would be the end of that (update: as of Thursday late morning, no more moisture!).

We left the state park shortly after 9am, and it rained pretty consistently for the first 45 minutes or so…then we finally saw some sun! The whole day was a bit crazy as far as weather…but most of the drive was dry, fortunately. We had three or four bursts of heavy thunderstorms, and at one point, a tornado warning came up on my phone…surely a side-effect of Hurricane Ida. I was driving at that moment, so Mark pulled up the weather channel app and radar and could see that it was behind us and we agreed it was very low risk to continue on…so we did, and we were fine. Overall, we are incredibly fortunate that our travel day was just a bit rainy in pockets, given what Ida was bringing to the mid-Atlantic and Northeast! It definitely balanced out the beautiful driving weather we had on Tuesday!

It’s always fun when you get to a route and the GPS tells you to go 262 miles on that road. Once we exited the DC beltway onto I-95, that’s what happened…no turns, no exits for 262 miles!

We stopped at a Costco near Fredericksburg, VA to fill up the tank (love Costco gas prices!), have lunch, and walk around/stretch our legs a bit. It was the weirdest Costco ever – walk into the main vestibule and you can choose between entering Costco or entering a shopping mall. I’ve never seen a Costco attached to a shopping mall!

During our drive, our tire pressure monitor started beeping…the tire pressures all looked fine, so we had no idea what was causing the beeping. It stopped pretty quickly and didn’t happen again, but you gotta love when that happens! We should probably read up on what could cause that, for future reference.

I missed the “welcome to Virginia” sign – it was small and tucked away. But I did get the NC welcome sign – as you can see, it was raining pretty hard when we crossed into NC mid-afternoon! The windshield wiper photo-bombed me!

We stopped at the welcome center and learned something new…just as Coca Cola was ‘born’ in Atlanta, Pepsi was ‘born’ in the Carolinas!

We pulled into our campground just after 4pm. We have a pull-thru site which we haven’t had in many months…I think Mark really enjoyed not having to back in after a long day on the road! The campground is pretty large without too many trees. A few of the sites along the edges have some trees behind them, but the middle sections are mostly wide open. As with most private campgrounds, there are lots of amenities – two pools, pickleball courts, dog parks, mini golf, and more.

This campground offers cable TV hookup, and Mark had two coax cables in the RV. But, Murphy’s Law, even with both cables, we were still two feet short of the cable jack. Oh well, figures! We’ll just stream TV like we usually do!

Dinner and a walk and we were both pretty exhausted. Glad to have Thursday as a rest day – no driving, just relaxing at the campground before our final south-bound leg on Friday.

Woke up Thursday to a beautiful morning – no rain, and a refreshing breeze. So nice to have fresh air after such a hot, humid summer in Rochester. It’ll warm up later in the day for sure, but we’re enjoying the morning air and I took advantage of it with an early two-mile walk.

And, now we have an update on our plans to tow a vehicle. As I mentioned previously, we had a short list of automatic transmission vehicles that can be flat-towed. Mark and I decided to visit a couple of car dealers to see what was available, test drive a couple of the options, and see what we could work out on our MINI lease. We started with the Chevy Trailblazer. We drove one and liked it, but we weren’t very happy with the pricing/deal (given how fast they seemed to be selling, the dealer didn’t have to offer much, and it was a 2022). So, on to a sister car, the 2021 Buick Encore GX. We thought it drove even better, plus it has more safety features…and they had more rebates than Chevy (in spite of the low supply, still some rebates to be had because it was a ‘21!). Plus, the dealer is part of the same group as the local MINI dealer, and they really wanted our special edition MINI with just 11,000 miles back as a used car – so we were able to end our lease early without making any additional payments, no disposition fee, and $1,500 in equity toward the new car. Not a bad deal! They needed to get the GX on trade from another location, and as of Friday afternoon, it looked like we’d be getting a red car. Then on Monday we found out the red car was gone, but they had a “black currant” one in stock. It’s basically purple…how convenient that it’s my favorite color?!?!? Meant to be?!?!? We picked it up last Wednesday!

So step one is complete. Next step…take to RV dealer to have a base plate, tow bar, electrical lighting, and supplemental braking system installed to prep it for towing…a few thousand dollars of investment there (roughly the same as what we ‘made’ on the MINI!). The dealer has ordered the parts and they should be in when we return from this trip. Then Mark will work on installing a battery disconnect switch, with some help from his cousin who is a mechanic. Our goal is to have it ready to roll by late September when we have a 3-night trip planned to the Hudson Valley area of NY – so not too far from home. A good chance to test it out and make sure towing works as expected, there are no issues, etc.

Since we bought RoVer, there has been a never-ending list of gadgets and goodies to buy…this one definitely tops the list! One of the few we didn’t get from Amazon, too!