Prelude
This is the continuing story of two previously sane adults
in their early sixties who, never having gone camping, decide to retire, sell
their home and all its possessions, buy a large, expensive and complicated
Recreational Vehicle (RV) Motorhome and spend the next two years traveling all
over North America with a skittish and paranoid dog named Daisy. (It doesn’t faze us in the least that neither
of us has any mechanical aptitude either.)
Our son and daughter are sharing an apartment in southern
California, we both miss seeing them as often as we used to and this will be a
terrific way to visit them more often as we continuously go back and forth
between their area and The Great Outdoors.
We are fortunate to sell the house quickly last July with the proviso
that we can rent it from the new owner until the end of December. Although both
still working, we are convinced we can empty out our entire forty years of
accumulated treasures in time to be on the road by December 1st. A
leisurely drive down the east coast to Port Canaveral, Florida, a four day
Disney cruise followed by five more days in Disney World at the mother of all
RV Resorts, Fort Wilderness, and finally plenty of time to meander out to
Orange California, just in time for Mary Ellen to do some Christmas shopping
with our daughter while my son and I watch the last weekend of NFL football
before the playoffs. What can possibly
go wrong?
We’re certainly not worried because We’ve Done Our Homework. Or at least I have for both of us. We’ve
visited RV shows, read a stack of books from Amazon about being new RVers and
what to expect, picked out a good dealer in our area and at the country’s
largest RV show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, pick out our dream house on wheels, a
thirty-seven foot Miramar 34.2 by the RV manufacturing giant Thor. The fact
that it is a brand new model for 2014 and most Thor dealerships aren’t even
familiar with it yet should set off alarm bells for us but too late – we’re in
love with our new toy, the daydreams of doing the Jack Kerouac thing (only in a
more luxurious fashion) fill all our waking thoughts and the overall allure of
a Big Adventure have completely blinded us to reality.
By November 1st the storm clouds are gathering.
Our RV had to be special ordered with the dealer assuring us it will be here in
time for our planned departure date but now phone calls to check on its
progress are getting more and more vague answers. There are only two of us to
go through every room, every closet and cabinet, the cellar and the attic all of
which are stuffed to the max with items which should have been jettisoned
decades ago. By Thanksgiving, the roof falls in on all our plans. The RV will
not be in until mid-December, so that is the end of any leisurely driving
anywhere (although we still fly down to Florida to go on our cruise or else we
forfeit the entire prepaid trip.) Our house is empty of all furniture and
necessities so a generous old friend of ours graciously puts us up for a
week. As the big day draws closer we are
so exhausted, disappointed and frightened (we won’t have the time we hoped to
learn how to use the RV or even take it out on the road for a test drive) that
when it finally arrives were in complete denial of the situation we are in.
On a cold, dark Monday evening in mid-December, I finally
back the RV into our driveway and we alternate the next few days trying to pack
it, give tours for friends and neighbors and finish sorting the last few items
remaining in the house. Our timetable is completely shot, we have to keep pushing
the departure date back further and further until on the night of December 18th,
we realize that we must be on the road tomorrow or we’ll miss Christmas with
our kids…
Dec 19th
We are up at 5 AM to finish emptying the house, packing the
last of the items that we’ve decided are essential to living on the road and
getting rid of the final few pieces that haven’t made the cut. We have to be in
Orange, California (over 2700 miles away) by the afternoon of December 24th
if we are to spend Christmas Eve and Day with the kids, a trip that if not
completed on time will be a disaster as far as
Mary Ellen is concerned. Towards the afternoon we have given up any hope
of sensible and orderly packing and are literally tossing things into garbage
bags and then into the RV. By the time we actually pull away from the house at
5:30 PM (it’s already dark) we are both so exhausted and frazzled that we don’t
notice that the interior of our beautiful new motorhome looks like a cross
between a World War II submarine heading out on patrol and an RV that looks
like thirty illegals used it to sneak across the border.
We drive down Interstate 95 as far as possible before
succumbing to complete exhaustion in a rest area (not considered the smartest
thing to do by experienced RVers who know these are crime hotspots) near
Fredericksburg, Virginia. We’re slightly relieved to see five other RVs parked
there apparently for the night and being too destroyed to think logically,
merely go back to the bedroom and collapse on top of the bed in our clothes,
passing out instantly.
Dec 20th
We sort of know how to turn on most of the lights, the
refrigerator is working and our little furnace has kept us warm all night so
despite having spent the night in our clothes we awake full of hope for our
first full “day” on the road, little knowing that we are in the same position
as the passengers on the Titanic. We have no food with us but one of our
neighbors has baked us a loaf of bread and a seeming endless supply of brownies
which we have for breakfast, and lunch and dinner and…well that’s about all we
ate for the first three days.
Heading south we get through North Carolina and in the early
afternoon are in South Carolina, when Mary Ellen feels sorry that I have to do
all the driving so she confidently announces that she’ll take the wheel for a
while. Being conscious that this is a
new age of gender sensibilities (and having spent a lot of time driving cars,
tractors, buses, tractor-trailer combos while the largest thing Mary Ellen has
ever driven is a van) I not only agree but encourage her to give it a try. It’s
a straight shot on a not-so-busy Interstate where she can just stay in the
right lane – what can go wrong? Despite having been married nearly forty years,
I fail to notice the tell-tale signs that she is more nervous than I expected
her to be and instead I give in to my drowsiness and pass out in the passenger
seat.
It seems only a moment that I’m asleep when a grenade goes
off right outside my window; at least it sounded like one. Some yahoo state
road worker was driving a “batwing” grasscutter (so called because the blades
are housed in two platforms that raise and lower on both sides of its driver.)
He decides to raise the wings and take a shortcut by driving on the shoulder of
the road just as Mary Ellen gets sandwiched between him and a huge tractor
trailer rig on her left. The explosion I hear is the destruction of our right
side mirror assembly. A call to the South Carolina state police lets us know
that there are no injuries; they take
our information and tell us they’ll call us if they need to but that we might
as well just continue on. But now we have no blind-side mirror.
We use our iPhone to locate the nearest Camping World and
although they don’t have anything resembling a replacement, they manage to rig
up something to keep us going. We’ve lost three hours which we can’t afford to
do so off we go again. Thank God for the Great State of Alabama. We’ve just
crossed the state line after dark and there is another clean, safe rest stop.
The previous night’s act is repeated:
passed out, in our clothes on top of the covers on our king sized
bed.
Dec 21st
The winter solstice – only three more days left and
California is still over 2000 miles away. We have a small dog (Daisy) who is skittish to begin
with but having watched the only home she’s ever known be disassembled in front
of her and now having been thrown into a smaller, moving house with things
falling off shelves and boxes crashing to the floor on certain turns, she has
retreated to the fetal position under the dashboard beneath Mary Ellen’s feet
(I’m driving again) and as far as we can recall has not eaten nor emptied her
bladder since we left the house.
Today we plan on making real time and head confidently
across Alabama into Mississippi. Along with Daisy, we are towing a Jeep
Wrangler behind us (for all of our future adventures out west.) The tow bar
setup is fairly complicated but we hooked it up at the house, it worked like it
was supposed to so we don’t even think of it when we pull in for gas. I fill
the RV with over 70 gallons (it holds 80) and hopping back in I start it up and
begin turning out of the station we’re in – only to realize I can’t make the
turn. The curb is too high to drive over and I can’t backup or it could
severely damage the Jeep’s transmission because of the way it is configured to
the towing apparatus. We realize we have to uncouple the Jeep, back it away
from the RV, back the RV up, then
re-couple and we’ll be on our way. Now to further complicate things we have a
Brake Buddy ( a device which most states now require. It sits on the floor of
the Jeep driver’s seat and whenever the RV’s brakes are applied, a mechanical
arm pushes the Jeep’s brake pedal to avoid jack-knifing.) Soooo, after disconnecting the Brake Buddy,
Mary Ellen hops in the Jeep, turns the key and – nothing, because the battery
is dead. Not having time to read the directions, I didn’t realize that “Buddy”
has to be unplugged when the RV isn’t running or else it will drain the Jeep’s
battery. I tell her to stay in and I start rocking the Jeep back and forth to
get some momentum; then I begin pushing it up the slight incline on which it is
hemming us in, all the while recalling the torn meniscus I was rewarded with
the last time I tried to push a car by myself.
Now, if I saw a 63 year old fat
man trying to push a 3700 pound jeep up an incline, I would definitely at least
try to help. The gas station we are stuck in is very busy with lots of good old
boys zooming in and out of there in their pick-ups but not once does anyone so much as offer to
help. Maybe it was the New Jersey plates.
But Sisyphus like I survive my ordeal and after a half hour,
AAA shows up to get the Jeep started, we hook everything back together and head
north for Memphis beneath a sky blackening by the minute. By the time we cross the Mississippi around
6PM, Mary Ellen is scaring the hell out of me by saying it looks exactly like it did just before a tornado
almost got her and our daughter in Missouri
a few years back. I console
myself with the logic that tornados don’t occur in December – I hope.
Now down south, they do their road construction projects a
little differently than us Yankees do. Apparently, if they have to fix 31 miles
of road, they shut down the entire 31 miles until the project is done. So
around half an hour after entering Arkansas, we find ourselves in the Traffic
Jam From Hell as three lanes of heavy commercial and auto traffic are squeezed
into a single, narrow lane with concrete barriers on both sides. As we enter
the gauntlet, the heavens open up with one of the longest and most intense
downpours I’ve ever seen. It only slows things even more and at one point we
don’t move for over forty-five minutes. Of course I have the wipers on high which
is barely keeping the windshield clear and that’s when they decide to stop
working. At first I thought they’d literally blown off but Mary Ellen bravely
volunteers to get out and find out what happened. The have become stuck below
the windshield and after she frees them up, gets back in the RV looking like
she just went swimming in her clothes. But at least we have our wipers working
again – until they start getting out of sync and then stop for good. Out she
goes again but this time they have failed completely. Since we can’t pull over
in the dark and the monsoon, we just struggle along wiperless – for another 173
miles.
Now for this night we had made reservations in an actual RV
Park which will have full hook-ups (electric, water and sewer) so we won’t be
living like animals for a third straight night. When we finally find it, it’s
dark, scary looking and muddy but we have no choice so in we go. I find the spot assigned to me, get the RV
and Jeep into it and even plug it in to the electric (our first time “hooking
up” to anything – we’re real RVers now!)
But the storm, the wipers, the incident with the Jeep’s dead battery and the destruction of our mirror all dampen our
enthusiasm, as well as the fact that we haven’t seen the sun since several days
before we left. So, once more, onto the bed in our clothes – it’s been three
days since either of us had a shower or changed
or had anything more substantial than Elise’s brownies to eat. I think
of all the well-wishers back in our neighborhood who saw us off, especially the
one or two that hoped that someday they also could bravely hit the road to
excitement like we’re doing. Hoping for their sake that Elise hasn’t lost her
recipe for brownies and that somehow we’ll survive this ordeal, we pass out
once again. And we’re still nearly 1700 miles from Christmas with the kids.
Dec. 22nd
In the morning light, the RV park we’re in doesn’t seem as
disquieting as it appeared the night before. Not wanting to offend Mary Ellen
with the stench I’m about to create, I schlep over to the campground’s communal
bathroom, expecting the worse. Instead, I find a combination men’s
room/showering facility that looks like it is used for surgery it is so
spotlessly clean. I even consider getting
us both to take an extra few minutes to shower and change but realize the
futility of suggesting to Mary Ellen that she take a shower in a communal
bathroom nestled in the Arkansas woods. On top of the cleanliness, the owners
of the park pipe a radio program into the place which must be fine at other
times but this being a Sunday morning at 6AM just west of Little Rock, I’m
treated to a religious talk show. The format is people calling in to tell about
how they’ve been changed by reading the bible and the caller is a man whose
daughter has recently died. So here I am straining to move my bowels of four
days worth of treasure while listening to some poor guy weeping as he tells how
is teenage daughter hung herself because her parents discovered she had been
“sexting” pictures of herself to a guy in her high school.
But little do I know that our luck is about to change for
the better. An hour after leaving our first campground, the sun comes out, we
cross into Oklahoma and witness one of the most spectacular landscapes we’ve
ever beheld. The monsoon of the previous night apparently hit the Sooner State
also and was quickly followed by an arctic blast of freezing air and now
Oklahoma is a literally dazzling landscape of silver and white. For our fellow
easterners who’ve never had the pleasure of driving through Oklahoma, you may
be surprised to learn that the state is not just an endless flat sea of prairie
grass. The eastern part of Oklahoma is made up of tree-covered rolling hills
and now, having shed their leaves, every branch, every shrub, seemingly every
blade of grass and ground is a stunning silver. We drive for hours through our
own sparkling Narnia with a cloudless, deep blue sky for a backdrop and take it
as a sign that our persistence has been rewarded.
But something must be done about our personal hygiene so not
knowing how to work anything in the RV yet, we decide to stay in a hotel that
night. If you are ever on the road and need a decent place to stay, consider
the Drury Hotel chain. How they can do what they do for the relatively low
price they charge is a mystery to us. We treat ourselves to a reservation for a
night in Amarillo, Texas and even make one for the Drury in Flagstaff, Arizona.
From there it will be non-stop to California. The Drury in Amarillo assures us
it has plenty of room for the RV-Jeep combo and the Drury in Flagstaff has one
spot where we can park that they will seal off with traffic cones to make sure
there is room for us. Yeah, right.
The frigid air has hit Amarillo and the reservations office
was correct, there is a lot of parking and they do take dogs. I pull the RV
into a corner to take up as few spaces as possible, and in we go for dinner,
hot showers and sleeping in a real bed. We’d like to take advantage of the
complimentary breakfast they put out each morning but it starts at 6AM and we
are committed to being up and gone before then. All three of us pile out the
front door into the freezing (4 degrees) pre-dawn and discover someone has
parked directly in front of us leaving no room to maneuver out. I envision
another Mississippi scenario and decide to take a chance backing up with the
Jeep attached. I only have to go about three feet and I crawl as slowly as
possible doing it. The Jeep survives, the world doesn’t end and we are
Flagstaff bound before the sun is up. We actually may make it!
Dec 23rd
Another day of brilliant sunshine as we drive to
increasingly higher altitudes towards northern Arizona. We calculate that we
may even be in Flagstaff before dark which will be our first “arrival” in
daylight. But I take a wrong turn off of the exit and before we can turn around
find the Drury Hotel, it is dark again. We finally find it, turn into the space
between the hotel and their parking garage and incredibly, right in front of
us, are the promised traffic cones neatly saving us a spot. We’re not in Jersey
anymore!
This Drury has a complimentary “appetizer buffet” which
would be a full size dinner at any other restaurant. They even include two
complimentary mixed drinks or beers, so
we take turns watching Daisy in the room while the other goes down to eat. We
fall blissfully asleep before eight in another real bed with the excitement of
knowing that barring any unforeseen disasters, we’ll be in California this time
tomorrow.
Dec. 24th
Flagstaff seems like a really nice town, as much as we can
tell in the dark but slightly warmer (9 degrees) predawn. I take another wrong
turn and end up touring the deserted Northern Arizona University campus before
getting my bearings back onto Interstate 40 heading west. Leaving Flagstaff, I
can see in my surviving driver’s side mirror that the dawn is just beginning on
our Christmas Eve, 2013.
Now Mary Ellen begins warning me of all the mountains we are
going to encounter before we get to Orange (she has made this trip several
times before in a tiny Hyundai to get my daughter out to law school) and
although I acknowledge her warnings, I mentally dismiss them. What I didn’t
realize was that she was referring to the western side of the mountains, not
the ones we’re easily cruising up now.
We’re in almost hourly contact with our kids now who
actually seem excited that we’ll be with them for Christmas. They have made
reservations for us to attend the Christmas Day buffet in the old First Class
Dining Salon on the Queen Mary, permanently anchored in Long Beach. We are calculating that we are only two hours
away from them when we crest the mountain range – and I suddenly understand
what Mary Ellen was talking about. Never have I seen such a steep, sustained
downhill run that begins in Barstow and heads down to the Los Angeles
area. It doesn’t seem possible that we
could have been as high as we were to have such a long steep descent in front
of us (not remembering that it actually was a long, gradual ascent from New
Mexico; what was a four hundred mile climb up is being squeezed into less than
forty miles on the downside.) I urge Mary Ellen to close her eyes as we
white-knuckle it down and down, and each time that I think we can’t
possibly go any lower, we round a bend
and another roller-coaster like plunge greets us. From having once been a truck
driver, I know how to pump the brakes instead of riding them but I’ve forgotten
about going down in the same gear I went
up in and now picture us ending up crunched in the gravel of one of the
“runaway truck” pull offs. Just when I think the next bend will reveal a
grinning Satan welcoming us to hell, it gradually begins to level off and the
end is in sight. Interstate 15 south to the San Fernando Freeway, West to Route
57 south and suddenly there is Angel’s Stadium on our left (the kids can walk
to the games from their apartment directly behind the stadium.) Off the freeway
onto Katella Avenue, we find our RV Park and pull in exactly at 3PM. It’s
Christmas Eve and mission accomplished:
I’ve arrived in time for Mary Ellen and me to spend Christmas with our
children.
The weather is spectacular, about 75 degrees, zero humidity
and a soft breeze blowing under a clear blue sky. It’s not the kind of
Christmas weather I’m used to but I’ll take it. I’m too numb to do anything but
sit in one of the chairs under the umbrella of the table at our site and think
back to all we have been through in the last two months, especially the last
five days and wonder how we are still alive, still married and still talking to
each other. But we are, the kids arrive (my son bearing a backpack of cold
Coors Light in cans) and we are finally together again for the first time in
over a year.
They’ve really gone all out decorating the apartment they
share, a Christmas tree is set up, and there is enough food wine and beer to
supply an army. We eat, drink, laugh like hell, watch a Christmas movie and
then collapse in another real bed, Daisy nestled between us. It’s Christmas in
California and the world is good.
Dec. 25th
I was so worried about not being dressed properly that I’ve
spent $150 on a navy blue blazer to wear to the buffet aboard the Queen Mary. I
shouldn’t have worried as I’m one of the few guys wearing one – I keep
forgetting that everything out here is “California Casual.” The Dining Room is
a high, spectacularly decorated example of the Art Deco era. On one wall is a
map of the Atlantic Ocean with a long slot that used to hold a small ship which
was moved each day to let the First Class types
know exactly where they currently were in their crossing. The buffet
isn’t cheap but the food display is enormous, Mimosas are for the asking and
the selection of dishes is huge. I’m a big eater but even I can’t do this place
justice; I’ve also volunteered to be the Designated Driver so I get to enjoy
watching everyone else getting sloshed on the champagne and orange juice until
decency demands that we give up our table. The best part of the Queen Mary is
the history of it. Virtually every famous personality of the thirties, forties
and fifties was a passenger aboard her and the enclosed promenade deck is lined
with life size pictures of all the glitterati that once enjoyed sailing aboard
her (as well as the thousands of GIs who were transported aboard her during
World War II.) It’s a shame that in order to cross the Atlantic, an experience
like the Queen Mary has been replaced with a cramped, uncomfortable, eight hour
ordeal with no food and bitchy
metrosexuals as your stewards.
Tomorrow will begin our education into how the RV actually
works, ie. how to plug the electricity in properly, how to hook up the water
and cable TV, connecting the gray water
and black water (guess what that is) tanks to the sewer lines at each
site, how to turn on the stove, the televisions, how to not only use but even
flush the toilet, how long you can take a shower before the hot water runs out,
operating the washer and dryer, what do you do with your garbage… Yep, we set
out on a nearly three thousand mile cross-country trip without knowing any of
this. (I hope no experienced RVers are reading this.) But for the rest of the
day we’ll head back to the kids’ apartment complex (which looks like a five
hundred dollar a day, south seas, luxury resort) hang out by the pool, drink,
sleep, catch up with our phone messages and emails and just be grateful we
accomplished our goal.
