This lifestyle isn’t all sunshine and unicorns. Our travel day to Maine, was a series of unfortunate events. It started 3 miles after we left our campground in Plattsburg, NY. We had woken up early that morning to get a jumpstart on the longest leg of our adventure yet. A full day of driving from NY to Ellsworth, ME. The map said it would take about 8 hours, but we’ve learned for every 2 hours of a trip, add at least 30 minutes due to towing a camper. So, needless to say, we were in for a long day of travel.
We typically check, double check, and triple check everything before we hit the road. Well…apparently I forgot to secure our jack block down to the camper and a soon as we hit 55 m.p.h., it went flying off and into a ditch. CRAP! Luckily, Ben took quick note of where he heard it fall, got us turned around, and we pulled off to look for it. Somehow, he found it! Lucky us! And with that, we were back on the road.
Now, Plattsburg, NY is right next to Lake Champlain. The fastest way to cross Lake Champlain into Vermont from there, is a ferry…yeah, no thanks. We took the ferry with the truck, but the thought of pulling the camper onto it was a little much. Plus, by the time you paid for the ferry, waited for it, and ferried across the lake, it was about the same as driving slightly out of the way.
Our map thought it would be fun to take a winding, mountain road through Vermont that may or may not have been paved. Eeekk! So here we are, driving 25-30 mph for what felt like forever. Up and down huge hills with me in the passenger seat, trying to work/distract myself. The silver lining was that we it was very scenic! Once we made it back to civilization, we pulled over for lunch. All of that jarring and bumping around from those crazy mountain roads had made our window valence fall off from the wall. Lovely. No biggie – we’ll fix that later.
Back on the road and several hours later, we roll into our campground, Patten Pond Camping Resort in Ellsworth, ME. We got there after the office closed, which normally isn’t a huge deal. I grabbed our welcome packet and we went off in search of our site. This is where things get interesting. We found our site, but instead of a pull-thru site, they assigned us a pull-in site. BIG DIFFERENCE! The problem with that is, we can’t just pull-in to a site. We have a truck and a trailer. We could pull-in put then never unhitch our truck or back-in and have all of the hook-ups on the wrong side of the trailer. No bueno. So I call the after hours number…no answer. I call another customer service number and am told I’ll get a call back in less than an hour. Yeah...after you’ve been traveling all day, the last thing you want to do is wait. We have hungry children, restless pets, and tired parents here! Luckily the girls’ need to use the restroom led us to a piece of paper posted in there that said to visit one of the campsites there, where there is a host, to help. So that’s what we did. We got assigned a temporary spot, until we could straighten things out in the morning.
So, this temporary site was a pull-thru (bonus!) and would do just fine. However, it was a tight squeeze into it and we have over 50 feet of vehicle to manuever. Oh, I forgot to mention, every 5 feet in this campground, there was a giant boulder. No biggie. So here we were, dodging boulders and trying to swing this big rig around into this spot. We almost had it when we heard a BANG! Uh oh…that didn’t sound good. I stayed in the truck and Ben got out to investigate. Turns out, there was a big metal dumpster that the very rear end of our camper clipped and got hooked to. But we were going soooo slow, so how bad could it be? Well, it shattered our bunk house window and dented our side panel pretty darn good. Ben came back to the truck to deliver the bad news to me, expecting me to freak out. However, I remained calm, probably eerily calm to him. I knew he felt terrible that this happened so instead of getting upset, I decided to be calm and supportive. There’s nothing we could do at that point, so what’s the use of being mad about it? Let’s just get it cleaned up, tarped up, and sort it out in the morning. And that’s what we did. Our neighbors and the staff were so nice and helpful. We partially set up our camper in that spot, since we’d have to move in the morning, cleaned up the glass, and covered the window.
Living in this thing full time…there is bound to be issues and accidents. We move our house every week to two weeks, and I feel grateful that so far, we’ve been able to do so, safely. Ben has driven through terrible traffic, mountains, storms, you name it. I am thankful for his ability to do so. He’s a pro.
So with that, our Maine adventure was off to an interesting start. The next day, I got in contact with a local RV shop that was able to order us a new window. However, since we move so often, we didn’t have time to have them install it there, so we picked it up and brought it with us to the next stop, where we found an Aspen Trail dealership. They ordered the replacement side panels and squeezed us in so we could get it fixed before we left there. Now, it looks nearly brand new again.
The lesson here is that this lifestyle has many challenges, ups and downs, but so far the amazing experiences out weigh the challenges and harder days. For that I am grateful! Stay tuned for more on our amazing trip to Maine, one of my favorite place thus far. Time to catch up on some blogging!
Stay happy my friends!
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