BIG TRIP '01

Hi, all (or perhaps I should say, "Y'all"):

We just returned from our biggest trip to date: 26 days/3,600 miles.  The trip was essentially divided into 3 parts.  Part one - 4 days dry camping with friends in Hammonasset beach state park here in CT.  Part two - a long, meandering trip south down Skyline Drive (Shenandoah Nat'l Park) and the Blue Ridge Parkway to Cherokee, NC, the Chattanooga, TN area, then up through KY to the Dayton, OH area.  Part three was a run for home through PA and NY in two days.  We learned many things:

• Detailed itineraries are unnecessary.
• Reservations are not necessary.  We stayed in national, state, local, and commercial campgrounds (and one Flying J truckstop) and never needed a reservation.  The campgrounds were never full.  Of course, it helped that we usually pulled in around 4 PM or earlier and rarely on a weekend. 
• We can comfortably live about 3 days/2 nights dry camping in our TT before the water starts to run out.
• Secondary roads are indeed more pleasant to travel than the interstates.
• We prefer the quiet, scenic national park campgrounds over commercial campgrounds, at least for short stays.
• Campground price is in no way an indicator of campground quality.
• You can never have a tow vehicle that is too powerful, but you can have one that is too big.
• A 3 or 4 hour daily drive is the maximum for pleasant traveling.
• Really big RVs are nice, but won't fit in some of the nicest campgrounds.
• A Maxxair Turbo/Maxx fan is a great thing to have.
• Wireless email/internet is very cool.
• Some of the people you meet on the internet are really nice people in real life, too.

THE TRIP

I won't talk much about our four days at Hammonassett State Park in CT since we have discussed our trips there on these pages before (Notes vol. 7).  I will say, however, that this was not one of our best experiences there.  The teenagers seemed louder and more obnoxious and there were a lot of people, young and old, who lacked basic campground courtesy.  People were constantly walking through our sites.  Perhaps this was because we chose sites in a different area of the park this year, perhaps it was just bad luck.  We did notice the same sort of thing in a state park in Ohio, too.

One of our goals on this trip was to try to keep expenses down.  After leaving CT we headed south toward Skyline Drive and spent the first night in a Flying J truckstop.  It started out a little shaky when the guy in the car we parked next to (we thought it was empty) rolled down his window and tried to panhandle some money from me.  But there were other RVs nearby and we had the dog (and some pepper spray) with us so we felt secure enough.  It was a cooler night than the last one we spent in a truckstop (Notes vol. 8) and we had the Maxxair fan (Notes vol. 25) to keep us cool and to cover the parking lot noise so we actually slept pretty well.

The next day we checked into a KOA campground in Front Royal, VA and drove into Strasburg to do some antique browsing.  They had some neat stuff (some junk, too).  I saw a lunchbox that my mother used to keep buttons in on a shelf with a $295 price tag on it.  I saw Matchbox cars that I had lost years ago going for $5-7 each.  Our son bought a bullet from a Civil War battlefield.  The KOA itself was less impressive.  Muddy, uneven sites packed close together for $40 a night.  A long, single lane entrance road.  Not one of our favorite campgrounds.

The next morning we started down Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Although pollution has dampened the mountain views they are still very impressive.  That first day we encountered a black bear alongside the road .  Wildlife were numerous and very tame.  Deer would let you approach within a few feet .  We stayed in Loft Mtn. campground, a national park campground on Skyline Drive.  Deer were walking through the sites and we could walk straight out the door of our TT about 100' to a rock outcropping overlooking a valley and watch the sun set over the mountains beyond .  We had a problem with our van BART that day.  While descending a long grade both the brake warning and ABS warning idiot lights went on and stayed on.  I could find no problem with the brakes and the lights went out and stayed out after we restarted the van.  A mechanic suggested it was an errant sensor and advised us not to worry about it unless it happened again (which it didn't).  We wonder if it had something to do with the change in atmospheric pressure caused by the long descent.

The next day was to be our first night sleeping in a WalMart parking lot (Charlottesville, VA), but alas, it was not to be.  A sign at the entrance said, "No Overnight RV Parking," so we went to a commercial campground instead for a couple of nights.  We visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, and we visited downtown Charlottesville.  The downtown area has a nice little street, closed to vehicles, paved in brick and full of interesting little shops and restaurants with outdoor dining.  We got the first bumper sticker for our TT there .

On 8/3 we continued down the BRP, staying in nat'l park campgrounds for three nights.  From the Peaks of Otter campground we took a bus up to within 1500' of the Sharp Top Mtn. summit then hiked to the top .  Fantastic.  There was a large boulder you could stand on that dropped off to the valley below.  I felt like the kid in the movie Titanic when he was standing at the bow - "king of the world" .   (All of the facilities - the campgrounds, roads, and the BRP itself were built by the CCC during the Depression.)  We stopped at the Natural Bridge which turned out to be much more impressive than we expected .  We visited the new D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA and met a veteran there who hit Omaha Beach in the first wave.  This memorial actually put tears in our eyes.  It is very well done and well worth seeing.  The statues represent the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy from landing craft during WWII.  "Bullets" send water flying around the front of the landing craft and the men in the water .

The next two nights we stayed in a commercial campground just off the BRP.  Talk about mountainous terrain!  Even the campground roads had switchbacks!  We met up with a friend from the rec.outdoors.rv-travel newsgroup - GBinNC - who turned out to be a great guy with a heart of gold.  He took us up Grandfather Mountain for a walk over the mile-high swinging bridge , some great views from the mountaintop , and a tour of the nature center .  

The next night (8/8) found us in another nat'l park campground on the BRP alongside a very interesting couple.  He was 92 years old (he looked about 65) and his wife was a bit younger.  They have been camping since 1964 and are on their 8th RV - a new Sunnybrook TT with a Hensley hitch.  We had fun talking about TTs, hitches, trucks, etc.  Nice folks.  I hope we can be as lucky as them in our older years.

We found Cherokee, NC disappointing - too commercial/touristy for our tastes - but found the story of the Cherokee Indians and the Trail of Tears compelling.  We found the Cherokee KOA overpriced.  We went to the Chattanooga, TN area and found a Holiday Trav-L-Park campground.  We have stayed in the Holiday campground in Virginia Beach a few times and found this one just as nice.  We stayed there two nights and visited a Civil War battlefield in GA and a cave in AL inhabited by humans at least 10,000 years ago .  BART got an oil change.

Next we met another denizen of the rec.outdoors.rv-travel newsgroup - Hunter.  Hunter is a fascinating woman.  She let us stay at her home in TN overnight (with 30A electric hookups).  She has a beautiful log cabin full of neat stuff and surrounded by her horses, dogs, and cats.  She has been a full-timer and had great stories to tell.  She turned out to be one of the most interesting people we have ever met.  We all had fun going out to dinner with her where we tried southern foods like collard greens and hush puppies (somewhere along the line we bought boiled peanuts, too).

Next it was off to KY and Mammoth Cave.  We found a real gem of a commercial campground.  It is called Cedar Hill Campground in Park City, KY, just outside Mammoth Cave Nat'l Park.  It sure didn't look like much at first.  We stopped to check in at a gift shop on the main road then took a back road to the campground entrance.  At the entrance stands the abandoned building that once housed the campground office and is now a wreck.  A drive down a paved road now turning to gravel and potholes did not impress us any more, but then around a corner and...  A beautiful campground with large sites, full hookups, a fishing pond, a brand new immaculate pool and barely anybody there .  All this for $19 a night!  Wonderful.  A great deal if you are going that way.  We stayed for three nights.

Mammoth Cave itself is very impressive.  We took two tours of the cave totalling about 3 miles underground .  There are 360 miles of passages mapped so far and more yet to be discovered.  We also visited Abraham Lincoln's birthplace in this area .

We went north to OH next where we did an 18 mile ride on a wonderful bike trail that ran alongside the Little Miami Scenic River.  OH is big on bikes.  That rail trail alone runs for 70 miles and there are many other trails like it in the state.  Some of them even intersect to form a network.  (We saw a Dayton fire engine go by with a bike rack and 4 mountain bikes on the back.)  We stayed in Caesar Creek State Park which had decent size sites and 30A electric hookups.  Again we encountered people with no idea of proper campground behavior.  We had a back-in site with maybe 15' of grass behind our TT and a large family who had chosen sites on either side of us kept walking back and forth behind our trailer.  I finally got fed up, hooked Tessie to her leash, and walked her behind one of their TTs, past where they were all gathered up to eat dinner, and through the back of their site.  They stopped walking behind ours.

We spent two days visiting the US Air Force Museum in Dayton.  They have more planes, rockets, missiles, spacecraft, uniforms, artifacts, photos, movies, whatever, there than you can imagine.  It would take days and days to actually see it all.  We saw the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan to end WWII , the 707 (Air Force One) that carried President Kennedy to Houston and his body back to Washington , an Imax movie and much, much more.  If you like aircraft, this is the place for you and admission is free!

Finally, we headed home, stopping at a rundown city campground in Snow Shoe, PA for a night and returning home 26 days after we left.  Oddly, we had been playing tag with a severe thunderstorm since OH.  It first hit us while we were in the OH state park and would have taken our awning if we hadn't strapped it down to the ground.  We drove through it the next morning as we entered PA.  Along the way it apparently contributed to two tractor-trailer wrecks, one of which killed the trucker and another motorist.  It passed over us in the PA campground that night, bringing tornado warnings with it.  The next day we drove through it again in CT as it brought traffic to a virtual standstill and it hit us at our house just as we were unhitching for the last time.

For the most part the weather was excellent.  All the serious rain we encountered was on our traveling days.  The temperatures were in the 80's during the days (when it was 103 back in CT) and 60's at night.  We couldn't have asked for better.

DETAILS

MPG:  We got an average of 9.5 MPG towing and 9.9 MPG overall on this trip.  Our Ford E350 van with V10  engine, 3.73 axle ratio, and Chateau seating package towed very well with excellent power, good engine braking, and plenty of room for 2 adults, one child, a dog, and a cat.  Total miles travelled: 3,607.

Expenses:  Total cost of this trip (including fuel, food, all fees, souvenirs, everything) was $1,744.09.  That works out to $69.76 per night on the road for a family of 3 and two pets.

COMMUNICATIONS:  We tried several different means of staying in touch with people while travelling.  Here are the details:

Voice:

Our Verizon analog cell phone was completely useless outside our immediate home area. Roaming didn't work. Verizon told us they are no longer signing extensive analog roaming agreements with other providers and said we should get a tri-mode (digital) phone if we intend to travel throughout the US.  Most of their tech support people were completely useless. After reviewing  all our options we just ordered an Cingular phone and service plan (We wanted AT&T but they are not available in CT). Goodbye Verizon.

Our BigZoo calling card plan worked well for voice calls but often hung up when we needed to push buttons during the call to do things like manage our bank accounts, etc. BigZoo did charge a .55 surcharge every time we used a payphone.

Our regular home telco calling card worked on some occasions when we couldn't use BigZoo, but not always.

With the Verizon cell phone out of service, we used our VisorPhone (see description below) to make several voice calls.

Data:

Our primary device for internet access was a Handspring Visor PDA. The Visor itself was excellent for the purpose since it is small and can be worn on your belt. We tried several different methods of connecting it to the internet for email and surfing:

Road Warrior acoustic coupler - while I had reasonably good luck using this with my laptop in my old job it was completely useless on this trip. I don't know if the problem was the different areas we were in or if it was incompatible with the Visor's modem, but we never connected with the acoustic coupler.

Road Warrior modem doubler - This device is designed to provide a safe modem connection through any phone with a removable handset. (Some switched phone systems [where you have to dial something like 9 to get an outside line] can damage modems). It plugs into a regular phone where the handset cord normally goes. We used this once, in a KOA where I was told to dial 900 to get an outside line, and it worked well.

Thinmodem - this 56K modem plugs into the Visor and connects it to regular phone lines. It worked well in all campgrounds that had a modem line available (which was most of the commercial campgrounds).

VisorPhone - this device plugs into the Visor and turns it into a digital phone using the VoiceStream SMS network. It also acts as a wireless modem, allowing you to surf, get email, etc. wirelessly through your regular ISP (AT&T for us). We found this had coverage in slightly less than half of the campgrounds we were in. Coverage in metropolitan areas and around major interstate highways was better. This was our favorite way to connect due to the convenience - get your email while sitting in a chair in your campsite. I even surfed from our website links page to the OH state park page to check out campground choices using the Visor and Visorphone. Of course, it was also the most expensive per minute.

(A note for Visor owners - the email application that comes with the VisorPhone (One-Touch) works better than Multi-Mail Pro. MMPro kept crashing.)

That's about it. Here are some links:

http://www.blueridgeparkway.org/ - Blue Ridge Parkway info

http://www.nps.gov/maca/ - Mammoth Cave National Park

http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/ - Air Force Museum

www.handspring.com - Visor and VisorPhone info

http://www.cardaccess-inc.com/ - Thinmodem

http://www.roadwarrior.com/rw/index.asp - Road Warrior gadgets

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