my header

Alex Moiseyev photo and video


Saturday, July 9, 2011

Day five - driving south

7/9/2011
Finally, I cleaned up the backlog and writing my travel log "in real time". Today's plan was to put 200 more miles on the odometer, keeping driving south I-81. Given short distance we decided to give kids some more playtime at Yogi Bear camp and took of at 12:50, just 10 minutes before required check-out time. Driving was quite easy, I'm gaining experience and can keep speed around 65 mph most of the time, so we would be able to do it in 3.5 hours if not a funny accident we have had with our GPS.
Peter has requested an urgent bio-break, and given thet we have all the necessities with us in the camper, I simply took the nearest exit and parked on a shoulder for couple of minutes. All is great, but then we needed to get back on a highway. Smart GPS (I was using CoPilot at the moment) bravely advised "in 0.3 miles turn left, left and left" - which we did, and ended up on a long, steep, curvy, narrow private driveway with no chance to make last "left"  because of the house built exactly where GPS claimed the road should be. We made few unsuccessful attempts to make a three-point turn or move backwards along the driveway, figuring out that backing the camper is not an easy thing at all (not surprisingly). Luckily enough, owner of the residence we have "invaded" has been able to help us - her son is a professional truck driver and happened to leave nearby. She called him to rescue and 15 minutes later he was able to turn the trailer around - at the trickiest point clearance from trees on both sides was about 6 inches!
Anyways, after an extra hour we happily managed to get to Witheville KOA campground. Given it's one-night stop along the way, it is OK - but I wouldn't recommend it for the long stay. Campground is quite large, but only small fraction of sites has full hookup - and these sites are made so tiny, that we even had to park our truck perpendicular to the trailer. Luckily, our neighbors have not yet arrived, so we have two sites for ourselves - which makes it about as large as the site we have had at the previous stop. Without such luck, we would have barely 100 sf or land around the trailer.
Other than tiny sites, campground (ooops, sorry, Kampground because its KOA) has plenty of advantages - it is 5 minutes from highway (far enough not to hear it though), nice small pool with a "powered" slide, playground, on-site made pizza, plenty of shade from the trees and WiFi from the office reaching our site. So I'm writing this from the comfort of our dual-site setting next to the campfire :)

2 comments:

  1. GPS was showing you a shortcut ... for a much smaller car :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would buy that - but CoPilot has a feature of choosing "what do you drive", so it was explicitly told that I'm driving an RV. May be it mistook "RV" as a tank or a dozer and expected me just to knock the house down :)

    ReplyDelete