We're OFF: Saturday August 1st

Well, only 25 hours later than planned.... we finally hit the road!

Lots of little things kind of hindered the process. Dave wanted to switch the hitch out on the truck as he'd heard of a few going wrong on other's Suburbans. While the truck was in the garage, he asked for it to be serviced as the A/C wasn't running well - of course, it was neither a quick, nor cheap, fix: $1,500 later, the A/C was working perfectly!

The new awning had a tear and didn't roll particularly well. Finally, after weeks of being promised a replacement, which never came through, Dave drove out to the dealer to collect one, so the awning didn't actually go on until Thursday night (thank you Jeff, tall friend that you are!).

So, what else... ah yes, our house is being rented! This was as much a surprise to us as it was to everyone else, LOL! Our lovely friends, Sam & JD and their three girls are making a sudden move back to PA. We had planned to meet up with them in MI over Labor Day w/e, instead, we'll probably arrive in MI around the same time that they leave, as they head down to PA. They asked what we were doing with the house, given that we'll be coming and going a couple of times, we had planned just to leave it empty, they needed somewhere to live in a good school district and our house fit the bill - it's hopefully going to be a win-win for both of us. The only downside was the need to tidy up the house a little more than we had intended. I think we did pretty well, created some space for them to move their stuff in, while still having to live around our stuff - there's going to be a lot of STUFF in the house! I'm sure they'll make it work, hope so!

Anyway, given that the final decision to rent our place wasn't made until Wednesday afternoon, leaving on Friday morning really was out of the question. Also, Dave had so much left to do in organizing the internet/computer/satellite/TV etc etc system that rushing to leave on Friday seemed silly. I called the campsite to let them know we'd be arriving a day later than planned.

The early Saturday morning leave didn't happen either.....

I called Krissy at 9:15am and requested she bring us breakfast! There aren't many friends who'll rush to do that, with a smile, but she and Mark arrived a few minutes later and fed a very hungry, grateful family - we'd told them we'd be leaving before breakfast, so the fact that breakfast didn't happen until almost 10 meant that we kept our word!

So, we left at 10am, suffered through three accidents, one which had us sitting in a motorway car park (people out of cars and wandering around the lanes - yes, it really was that 'stopped'!), and finally arrived at our campground in Rhode Island at 7pm - not a great start. It was such a relief to be able to RELAX and know that our journey had begun, I am SO happy!