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This took a loooooong time. We left bright and early in the morning with a plan of driving for 4 hours which would have gotten us to the DC/Maryland area so we can do the nation’s capital before driving all the way through Virginia to Tennessee.
We got to Tennessee alright, but that is only thing that went according to plan.
Driving from my parents place to Pennsylvanian was easy peasy. Maybe too easy. We decided to stop at Susquehanna State Park in Havre De Grace, Maryland to stretch our legs and get my brain going again. Then we did lunch in Baltimore. That trip to Baltimore added HOURS to our drive because Baltimore is near the ocean and not near land locked Tennessee. And traffic. All the traffic.
To outsmart the traffic I used Waze, which, as I experienced was not made for an RV. To save sitting in hour of traffic I was detoured through the Virginia countryside. There are no lights on the roads. There are no lines on the roads. There are no flat roads. It was a daylight savings time evening rollercoaster that we persevered through. After that experience we grabbed some grub so the wife and I could figure out where we were going to sleep because we were not making it to Nashville. After some googling, she found a KOA site in Gatlinburg, TN.
We were going to get there well after closing, so the manager left us everything we needed by the managers office outside the door. We go there around 11:30pm and that’s when the fun started. The kids were well asleep, my wife and I wanted to be asleep but we had to turn on the heat. I couldn’t figure it out. I also had to empty the toilet sewage and connect us to the electricity. Both were easy, but harder than they needed to be in the dark, but the heat. We could not figure it out, so we FaceTimed Aly and Al in Australia. They walked us through the ins and outs of the heat as well as other RV things we were going to experience, sang us a classic Australian lullaby, and we were all asleep.
The next day we were going to arrive in Nashville where we’d see my sister and my parents.
LeRoy J. Watkins III 