Days 58-60 on the road – Grapevine, TX to Dundalk, MD

We traveled 1400 miles in three days to get from Texas back to Maryland.  Initially, we’d planned on taking it a bit more slowly and dividing the trip up over four days, but when I asked Lex if she preferred getting home sooner and having a day off before heading back to work, she voted for driving longer days.  And so it went.

We boondocked for two nights on the return trip, so we didn’t use our computers.  Thus, no updates from the road.   Since we’re back home and plugged into shore power, it’s time to review the marathon run back East.

Day 58 – Grapevine, TX to Jackson, TN (560 miles)

We spent our last night in Texas at my sister’s place, so we awoke there, said goodbye to Lynn and Shay, packed up the dogs, and went back to the RV park.  At 9 a.m., it was already heating up considerably and our A/C was completely frozen over, so we tried to get things packed up as quickly as we could.  It took a couple of hours to get everything situated, but we eventually got underway with dogs and cat tucked into the backseat, an ice chest full of bottled water, and some snacks for the road.

A brief stop at the Texas/Arkansas line

It turned out to be a long day on the road.  In Texarkana, we stopped at the Flying J where one of Lex’s World of Warcraft guildmates, Shannon, met us to say hello.  It was so hot that no one wanted to hang around the blistering parking lot any longer than necessary, so it wasn’t a long visit.  A  couple of hours later,  we passed through Little Rock.  Sadly, because of the abbreviated trip, we didn’t get to stop there to see our friend, Mindy as we’d planned.  Sorry, Mindy!  I hope we get to see you the next time out.

We did, however, stop in a little town in Arkansas (neither of us remembers the name of it)  to walk the dogs and allow the cat to have a little rest break inside the RV.  We pulled into an empty parking lot, Lex took the dogs, and I took care of the cat.  At some point, I was talking to Alexis through the screen door, and a strange (probably homeless) man passed right between us, muttering something under his breath about man being made for woman and woman for man, not man for man and not woman for woman.  Huh?  He continued on his path and, other than his little verbal outburst, was absolutely harmless.  It was the only overtly anti-gay incident we dealt with on the entire trip, and as incidents go, it was no big.  It seemed pretty clear that the gentleman wasn’t entirely well, so it was hard to take anything he said to heart.

We got back on the road, and by the time we hit the state line and passed into Memphis, it was dark. We kept going until about 11 p.m. before calling it a night and pulling in to the Sam’s Club parking lot in Jackson where two other RVs were already parked.

We hadn’t really had a proper supper, and all the nearby restaurants were closed by this time, so I went to the Wal Mart and grabbed a salad for each of us plus some healthier snacks than the Pringles and beef jerky we’d been snacking on the whole day.  We scarfed down some food and crawled, exhausted, into bed.  It wasn’t a pleasant night.  While the stopover itself was quiet and uneventful, it was hot, hot, hot.  When boondocking, we have lights, hot and cold running water, and refrigeration, but we do not have A/C, and it was a scorcher.  We have two battery-powered fans that we use for just such occasions, and while they helped some, it was still pretty miserable, even with the windows wide open.

Day 59 – Jackson, TN to Roanoke, VA  (570 miles)

I out of bed at sunup thanks to the sounds of traffic starting to move through the lot and the rising temperatures.  It wasn’t easy to rouse Lex since she had only gotten about five hours of sleep, but eventually I pried her up and out of bed, and we were on the road by 7:30 a.m., much to her chagrin.  To get her jump started, we pulled into a parking lot next to a nearby Starbucks so she could get caffeinated.

Because she was so tired, we ended up taking a two-hour break for lunch and a nap in Cookesville, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.  With some trepidation, we stopped in a Cracker Barrel parking lot only because they have RV-accessible spaces.  Since the well-publicized lawsuits against the company in 2004 and again in 2006, the chain hasn’t exactly enjoyed a great reputation amongst Black folks. In fact, Lex refused to go in, so I went in, grabbed some lunch, and we ate it in the truck. I’d never been in a Cracker Barrel before, and I have to say, they are aptly named.  There wasn’t a single person of color anywhere in the joint, not amongst the customers or the employees, and the place was packed to the rafters during a weekday lunch rush. That’s a whole lot of whiteness packed into one establishment.  I think we won’t be using their services again if we can avoid it.  It’s a shame given how often they appear along Interstate highways and since they also allow overnight RV parking in their lots, but, just…eww.  Going to Wal Mart makes us both cringe since we know about their history of mistreatment of employees and their merciless business practices, but at least neither of us is made to feel uncomfortable by employees or customers of Wal Mart when we do shop there.

Mist hanging over the Blue Ridge Mountains

After our little break, continued east.  Eastern Tennessee and Western Virginia are dominated by the Appalachians.  The roads are hilly and curvy, and after dark, it can be pretty stressful driving, even when not towing an RV.  Lex white-knuckled it the last hour or so of the trip, but we arrived safely in Roanoke at about 10 p.m. There’s a Camping World there, and they always welcome RVers who need to stop for the night, so we did.  There were already three other rigs in the lot when we got there, families with kids.  Lots of people stop at Camping World the night before having to take their rigs in for repair, too, so it’s hard to say how many were there just to get some sleep and how many were waiting on the store opening in the morning.

The difference in temperature in Roanoke was immense!  The higher elevation of the Blue Ridge Mountains plus the cloud cover meant nighttime temperatures in the 70s!  Yes!  We slept very comfortably Friday night as a result.

Day 60 – Roanoke, VA to Dundalk, MD (280 miles)

Early in the morning, it began to pour down.  Lex said she woke up at some point thinking I was taking a shower.  Later, when she was out walking the dogs, she realized that our bedroom was directly over the storm drain.  So Virginia was taking the shower, not me.  When Camping World opened at 8 a.m., I couldn’t resist going in and buying some goodies.  I got new carpet covers for our steps, a replacement vanity bulb, some solar insulating foil for the windows, a carrying bag for our patio rug, and some special stakes to hold down the carpet.  I LOVE RV gadgets, the little things that make life in a small, mobile space a bit easier.  Camping World is full of just such things.

While I’d been shopping, so had Lex across the parking lot at Gander Mountain, a gigantic sporting-goods store.  She came back with some bite valves for our Camelbak drinking bottles, but she also got me a dry bag as a little gag gift. When we went on the disastrous tubing adventure a couple of weeks ago, I commented afterwards that if only we’d had a dry bag, our walkie talkies might have survived and we might have been able to take a phone with us, expediting our rescue.  So now we’re prepared in the event that any of us get up the nerve to go tubing again anytime in the next decade.

We were back on the road before 10 a.m. Knowing that our trip today would be our last for a while and would be considerably shorter than the two previous days helped the miles roll by much more quickly.  We were back in Dundalk by 3:00 p.m.   We were concerned that given the rain the area had experienced recently we might have trouble getting our rig into our site, especially since it’s prone to flooding and isn’t paved.  We checked it out before pulling in and found it relatively dry.

As we pulled through the field and into our spot, the groundskeeper, Chip, trotted up and was all bent out of shape that we’d driven around instead of backing down an entire block, across a steep dip  in the very narrow, unpaved driveway, and then over the soft ground to our pad.  Hrm.  I wonder why we didn’t want to do that.

Chip is a strange bird.  He stood there silently and watched us straighten and level the rig and get hooked up.  This is not a quick process.  It took about an hour, and he stood there, not being helpful at all, for the entire time.  Great.  So glad to be back. Oh, and he told us we’re getting a neighbor in the next week or so, someone with a 42-foot rig.  Where they are going to put it, I have no idea.  And how we’ll get out if we ever need to pull the rig out around them, I also don’t know.  It’s going to be a tight fit.  I hope, though, that if we have a neighbor who is as displeased with his/her site as we often are with ours, we might have a little collective bargaining power.  It’s one thing for them to lose one renter but to lose two might put a hitch in their giddyup.  I’m hoping to talk the landlords into putting gravel on the driveway and on the RV pads.  I’d feel a lot safer about continuing to park here if I knew that we could actually get out in the event of bad weather.

The city water supply is leaking, making a massive mud puddle at the backside of the rig, right where I have to stand to pull the holding tank valves.  As I was bent over the water connections today trying to stop the leaks and my shoes were getting soaked, I started to wonder what on earth I’m doing paying $800 a month to these people for such a substandard RV site.  We stayed in some crappy RV parks on our trip, but none of them was quite so poorly equipped as this.  Even the unpaved parks had well-graveled pads and well-maintained utility connections.  Some even had concrete patios.

The only thing keeping us here at this point is that the next-closest RV park is all the way up in Abingdon, Maryland, nearly an hour’s drive away in rush-hour traffic.  It’s not much cheaper there, either, and the sites are all back-ins, and very close together.  Plus, I’d have the expense of all that additional fuel and vehicle maintenance from having to commute so far to work.  I hate driving, too.  Living only a mile from work is a real plus, so we’re sucking it up for now.  I swear if a better option crops up at some point in this next year and is within a reasonable driving distance (say half an hour or less), I will seriously consider moving just so we don’t have to deal with mud and slush half the year.

So now we’re back “home,” and our two-month, 7,000-mile (if you include towing PLUS travel while unhitched) trip is at its end.  We made it back home relatively unscathed.  I owe that entirely to Alexis who did every second of the towing.  I know she’s ready for a rest now, so we don’t have another trip scheduled until December when we will be spending Christmas week in South Carolina.  Until then, we’re staying put.  I may go on a tent camping trip and am still considering buying myself a little teardrop camper or something small that I can use on weekend jaunts, but mostly we’re just going to be fulltiming in place!

Lex and I both have to return to work on Monday, so my blog posts will be less frequent for a while.  I do plan on doing a “lessons learned” post and a highlight/lowlight wrap-up of our journey, so stay tuned for those.  Thanks for following along on our adventures this summer.  I had a great time writing about them, and I hope it hasn’t terribly dull for you to read about them.  I love reading and responding to your comments, so keep ‘em coming!

Tags: Arkansas, Maryland, RV Parks, rving, Tennessee, Texas, Travel, Virginia