Today was a gorgeous day for sailing and a swim. Unfortunately a gorgeous long weekend and vacation need to come to an end. At 4:30 we started our final trek home, only sweetened by an ice cream at Kawartha Dairy in Minden.

After that we still had to find one last dumping station to clean out our tanks. We found one at Hammock Harbour RV Park in Orillia which charged us $16 for the privilege.

The traffic on the rest of the trip wasn’t too bad, except for the area just south of Barrie. We hadn’t been in any real traffic for three and a half weeks, so it felt a little weird.

What worked and what didn’t:

The Roadtrek 190 Popular performed very well with some minor exceptions such as a furnace/AC/heat pump controller that didn’t work right and some moulding and an interior light cover that came off. The Roadtrek allows us to go for about 3 days without needing water or dumping and the built-in inverter allowed us to charge our laptops, phone, GPS and camera batteries. The Roadtrek has level indicators for the grey and black tanks but these are unreliable. We found flushing the black tank with water and then dumping it again helped with it reading empty when it really was empty.  The macerator pump worked well. It is surprising how much fits into the Roadtrek and one develops a real admiration for the design and though that went into its construction. Ferries and rough terrain can be a challenge given its low clearance and long wheelbase.

Ruth needs her coffee in the morning and a stainless steel Italian coffee maker on the stove worked really well.

The SiriusXM receiver built into the Roadtrek wasn’t really useful except for the last two days when we were driving south or south-west.  It was totally unusable in the maritimes and was busy acquiring its signal more than it was playing music.

The 4 ton hydraulic bottle jack I bought for $29 to lift the Roadtrek when changing spares worked well.  The scissor jack that comes with the Roadtrek isn’t all that useful because of all of the tanks located underneath.

The Telus Huawei E587 Mobile WiFi device provided us with 3G/4G  Internet access on our trip and worked very well as long as there was cellular network coverage. Telus and Bell are the only providers to have any coverage in Labrador, many parts of Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. The E587 allows up to 5 wireless devices to access the Internet simultaneously so we could use our laptops and iPads all on one data plan. We used Skype on the iPad to make outgoing calls when necessary.

If you’re looking for information on the Trans-Labrador highway, these sites are very useful:

http://www.tlhwy.com
http://www.tourismlabrador.com/home/files/pg/trans_labrador_highway_guide_may_2012.pdf