The Road Goes On…

Category: Ontario

  • Southern US Trip Summary

    This morning at home we feel as though we are living between two worlds. Before we enter back into our everyday life with all its responsibilities we look back on six and a half weeks of excitement and adventure. We’re happy we did write the blog so that we don’t forget all the things we saw and experienced. It definitely is a trip to remember and does rival our Route 66 trip from two years ago.

    What worked well:

    WIND Mobile’s Unlimited US Roaming. We’ve been WIND Mobile customers for a number of years now and their price just can’t be beat. For $15 a month we had unlimited voice calling, texting and 1GB of data while in the US. This allowed us to keep in touch and look up things on the road.

    Good Sam Membership: This RV club membership cost $25 a year and give you 10% discount at member campsites.  It definitely paid for itself.

    America the Beautiful Pass: This $80/year pass gives you free entrance to US Parks and other recreation sites. It paid for itself as well.

    Garmin GPS: We love our Garmin GPS system. At the start of the trip we had the RV/Trucking dezl 760 model but it was stolen in Albuquerque so we bought a nuvi 2689LMT to replace it. These GPS units have campground locations pre-installed and provide lots of information on arrival times, traffic conditions, etc.

    Allstays Camp and RV App: We use this app on our iPads all the time to look for campgrounds. It shows the location of campgrounds and gives information about their rating, facilities and distance from your current location.

    NOAA Weather Pro App: This app for the iPad and iPhone shows a map with weather conditions. It also has the ability to send alerts to your phone when severe weather is nearby.

    Visitor Centres, Park Rangers and Bureau of Land Management offices: These are always a source of great information and have invaluable knowledge of local conditions and opportunities.

    Frugal RV Travel Guides: These guides have great route information as well as tips on inexpensive places to stay overnight.

    Here’s a map of the entire trip. This is an image grab from Google Maps as it wasn’t possible to use the entire GPS track on a live map, probably because of its size.

    SouthernUS

  • Cloverdale, Indiana to Dundas, Ontario

    This morning we were all excited to go to Indianapolis to see Kevin Raber again and visit his new gallery. We’ve known Kevin since our 2009 Antarctica trip and our PODAS trips to Death Valley and Iceland. Kevin used to be the Vice President of Phase One USA and is now the CEO of Luminous Landscape, a great online resource for photographers.

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    Kevin has a lovely gallery/workspace in the Stutz building in downtown Indianapolis. Stutz was a car manufacturer and some of the historic cars are on display in the building today.

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    Ruth loved the old freight elevators and we all enjoyed a nice lunch in the building’s restaurant. Thanks for lunch Kevin.

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    After a great visit we decided to drive the remaining 700 or so kms home rather than spending another night so close to our final destination.

    It was an amazing trip and rivals our Route 66 trip.

  • Dundas, Ont to Allegany State Park, NY

    We should have listened to “On the Road Again”, what a great feeling! Departure was 3:00PM but we still had a stop at MEC to return a brand new InReach SE satellite communicator that had decided to no longer charge. Not much use as a safety device if the batteries run out.

    Despite our late departure we still drove 250kms. We had a very smooth border crossing at Fort Erie, Ontario although we almost lost our driver side mirror because an impatient pickup truck driver felt the need to squeeze into an already occupied space.

    We configured our GPS to avoid toll roads which routed us along beautiful country roads and quaint rural towns. A traditional stop at Walmart supplied us with some much needed groceries since we didn’t bring any across the border.

    Pepsi assumed her also traditional position in the van patiently awaiting our return.

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    Now we were ready to find a nice place to spend the night – and it wasn’t Walmart. We use a terrific app on the iPad called Allstays Camp and RV that shows a map with parks and campgrounds in the area we are travelling in and what a place we found. Allegany State Park was created in 1921 and construction of the Red House adminstration building was from 1927 to 1928. In 1929 the beautiful lake was created by building a dam. The park now has a beautiful campground as well as cabins and a few rooms in the adminstration building.

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  • Portage, IN to Dundas, ON

    After a great sleep, we had 7 hours left to go on our drive home. We had an oatmeal breakfast at McDonalds and got on our way.

    The highways we took were quite rough and there was lots of construction.

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    For lunch we had our leftover ribs and Pepsi got to enjoy the left over bones.

    Customs was no problem and we declared our Tillamook cheese, souvenirs and clothes and were sent on our way.

    It was nice to be back in Ontario and we looked forward to finishing the final stretch and to be back home.  At 5:30PM the RV was parked and the unloading began.

  • Dundas, ON to Gaylord, MI

    After a frantic packing session, we were ready and left at 2:20PM. Our plan was to make Harbour Springs in Michigan but this wasn’t going to happen. We made it across the US border at Port Huron after following a horse trailer that had been tagged with contraband by a customs officer who was training their beautiful and talented sniffing dog who succeeded in finding it without any difficulty whatsoever.  The dog was enthusiastically praised by its handler. We were next in line and where waved on after answering a few questions.

    A couple of hours later we were getting hungry and looked for a place to stop and discovered we were near Frankenmuth. The German hearts began to beat heavily and we took the detour to check the town out. The town is pretty, touristy but has charm.

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    Our favourite store was the Woolen Mill, Michigan’s oldest operating woolen mill.

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    At this point we were really hungry and stopped at Zehnder’s Famous Chicken Dinners.

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    We had a great meal with raspberry lemonade cocktail. An endless supply of delicious relishes including a very special cranberry salad, cheeses and pate was followed by fried chicken, mashed potatoes, buttered noodles, stuffing, green beans and gravy. Needless to say, there was only a small amount of space left for a very small ice cream dessert. All this for $19.95.

    Frankenmuth cost us 3 hours and we didn’t make it all the way to Harbour Springs that day but called it a night in the Gaylord Walmart parking lot.

  • Bourbonnais, IL to Dundas, ON

    This morning Martin had a wonderful idea! Since we missed out on the Drive-In Movie Theatre experience on Route 66 he suggested to go to a 50s Drive-In Theatre on our way back home in London, Ontario. Therefore, the driving day home was not all desolate but had a great ending at the drive-in with hot dogs, fries, coke, popcorn and two movies. A lot of fun and early Saturday morning we will be home.

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  • Dundas to Van Buren SP

    Left home at 12 noon, stopped at Costco for cheap gas price for our 98 litres. Proceeded to Port Huron border crossing over the bridge with a magnificent view of Lake Huron. At the border crossing Pepsi’s dog food was thoroughly investigated to see whether it was admissible or not. Next stop was the visitor centre where the staff where extremely friendly and helpful and suggested a state park on Lake Michigan for our first overnight stay. Reservation was made on the spot it was a long weekend in the US after all. Walmart stop for groceries like exquisite swedish coffee, salad, apricots and a prepaid visa to try and activate our iPad data plan. This was unsuccessful and we’ll need to find another way to do this. Lunch at Wendy’s and then off to van Buren State Park. Unfortunately there were two by this name approximately the same distance from us and Martin entered the wrong one into the GPS. So we had a bit of a detour. We finally arrived at the correct park at about 9:40pm and had a beautiful electrical site. The park is situated on the shore of Lake Michigan with dunes along the beach.

  • Haliburton to Home

    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

     

     

  • Arnprior to Haliburton

    Before leaving Breezy Hill campground we emptied and filled tanks and then drove into some stormy weather with a brief but very strong downpour.

    Our routing took us through Bancroft where the annual Gemboree was taking place.  This is a rockhound and semi precious stone collector’s haven and occupies both the arena and community center. Here you’ll find beads, minerals, meteorites as well as all sorts of new age healing crystals. One stand offered a stone from Russia that claims to be “composed of nearly all the elements of the Periodic Table”.  Another stand offered one with only 7 elements but still claimed to be able to cure pretty much anything that might ail you.

    After a quick lunch we drove to the annual get-together of some of our friends at a cottage in Haliburton. About 40 people, mostly kids of our friends now, were celebrating the August long weekend by swimming, water skiing, canoeing, sailing, jumping off cliffs into the water and talking to good friends.

  • Kamouraska to Arnprior

    The morning arrived extremely early – 4:30 to be precise. We quickly got dressed and then drove to the wharf we’d been at the night before but found the light lacking. We then drove to the other side of town where we found the sun rising with a farm in the foreground. Another spectacular sight and many images were captured.

    We then returned to the wharf and photographed some more.

     

    After a quick stroll throught town and breakfast we headed to Quebec City and we lucky to get one of the last parking spots in the lower part by the river. We immediately walked into “Les Fetes de la Nouvelle France”, a celebration of early French Canadian history, complete with costumes, crafts, foods and genealogy booths.

       

    Lunch was salmon with bearnaise sauce and a baked potato at Hotel Ste-Anne.

    From there we drove to Breezy Hill Camping for the night and got the last spot which turned out to be a little too steep for our Roadtrek’s minimal ground clearance. We were then directed another site normally occupied by a seasonal camper who was away that night.