#82 – July 2021 – Six states in 20 days
Leaving the tranquility of Casa Kendrick for the open road
was a rude shock. We pulled into Camp Walmart in Oneonta
NY and the bedroom slide wouldn’t
work; the motor ran but nothing moved. Not a crisis you think, but we can’t
open 80% of the bedroom drawers with the slide in. I didn’t know it, but this was
the first of a pretty long list of problems that happened one after the other
right up to today, seven weeks later.
The explosion in RV sales has led to very long leadtimes for
parts and service. I called the local mobile RV tech who came up on Google
braced for the worst. I called him first because he had the only 5-star
reviews. Jason not only answered the
phone but agreed to take a look at the slide the next day. We met him at a gas
station near his house because the road to his shop had washed out a couple of
days earlier and the county crews were still repairing it. He met us by ATV. He
looked it over and decided that he needed his tools and a few parts. The road
repairs were expected to complete by evening, so he suggested that we get a
site for the night at nearby Chenango
State Park and he’d work
on it in the morning. We did, and he did.
Working on that slide mechanism under the bed is best done
by a small contortionist. Jason is a big, strapping guy. Much straining ensued,
and I was able fit into the small space to reach the last two bolts. Once he
had the slide assembly removed, repairing the actual failure required five
minutes and $2 worth of shear pins to reattach the drive gear to the motor
shaft. Getting the whole assembly out and reinstalled took over an hour. When
he billed me $80 I felt like I’d won the lottery.
Chenango
State Park was our first experience with New York parks. Like most northeastern
parks, it wasn’t designed with rigs our size in mind. Luckily, the camp host
recognized a problem as soon as we pulled up. The site we had reserved online
might have theoretically worked, but access to it was really sketchy. He
reassigned us a better site and we spent a couple of days catching our breath
and putting the bedroom back together. It’s a nice park, and we’d stay there
again.
That unexpected delay caused us to rethink our schedule.
Reservations were hard to find, especially at state and federal parks, our
preferred destinations for cost and aesthetic reasons. Weekends were sold out
months ago, and midweek reservations at popular parks were also hard to get. Rather
than trying to reschedule several reservations, we decided to bypass the Wright Paterson
AFB Museum,
again, and head directly to one of our primary destinations, Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula, aka “da’ UP”.
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The waiter liked the "Ducati"
It's a Buell |
That meant that the next four days were one-night stands,
starting with a Walmart in Erie, PA; then the Wayne County Fairgrounds RV Park
in Belleville MI; a Harvest Host site, the Wellington Farm Park in Grayling MI;
Waterways Campground in Cheboygan MI; and finally to our first UP campground
,
Monocle Lake NFS campground in Brimley MI. By the time we got to
Monocle Lake we were ready for a break from the
road.
National Forest Service (NFS) campgrounds are always quiet
and beautiful, but are usually inaccessible to large RV’s or located miles from
anywhere.
Monocle
Lake is an exception. The
lake-side setting is wonderful, the sites are huge and easy to get into, and it
is located fairly close to Sault St. Marie, the
Great Lakes Shipwreck
Museum and several other
places worth visiting. All that for just $9 a day with the
Senior Pass!
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| Entering the Poe Lock |
The city (town, really) of
Sault Ste. Marie
was interesting. The Corp of Engineers visitors center next to Poe Lock, the
main shipping lock, is really worth a visit. The displays are well done and the
folks working there seem to enjoy it, always a good sign. A huge lake freighter
was departing the lock as we were looking for a parking place, and that was
uncharacteristically the only ship we saw in two days. Since 7,000 ships a year
traverse the locks, that was highly unusual.
Sault Ste. Marie is actually two cities sharing the same
name, one in the US and the
other, much larger one across the river, in Canada. Canada’s Covid border closure was
still in force, so all we could do was look at the shoreline buildings. We
hoped the border would be open by the time we arrived because the food is much
better on the other side of the river, but we had to make do with the local
fare.
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| July at Whitefish Point |
The
Great Lakes
Shipwreck Museum is located at the entrance to
Whitefish
Bay on the southern
shore of Lake Superior.
It documents the many wrecks that have occurred in these waters over three centuries, but the central exhibit focuses
on the loss of the freighter
Edmund Fitzgerald,
immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot’s well known ballad. The largest ship on the
Great Lakes at that time, she sank in seconds with the
loss of all hands during an especially severe storm in 1975. Her loss is only
one of literally thousands of ships to be lost on the
Great
Lakes since the 1700’s. Storms are frequent and the relatively
shallow waters quickly develop dangerous wave conditions. Before the days of
Satnav, GPS and radar navigation was very difficult, leading to the loss of
many, many lives.
We wanted to visit the area around Houghton but could not
get a reservation anywhere. Any place close to the lake shore appears to fill
up as soon as the reservation windows open in January. After a couple of days
of fruitless calls and online searches, I went to Plan B: The Klint Safford RV
Park in Iron River in the interior of
the UP. Iron River is an old, small town working hard
to become a destination for off-roading, fishing, snowmobiling, car clubs, etc.
The RV park is the cornerstone of that effort and it’s a real gem. Fairly new,
well designed and immaculately kept, it was a pleasure to stay in while we
explored the area.
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| I wish it still ran |
There isn’t much to see or do in Iron River, but the
Cornish Pumping Engine
and Glider Museum about 50 miles away in Iron Mountain caught my attention.
It was certainly worth the drive. The pump is the largest ever made in the
US. It was
built in 1892 to de-water the Chapin iron mine, one of the most productive in the
area. Pictures can’t impart the scale of it, and the specs are equally
impressive: for decades it pulled 4.5 million gallons a day from the 1,500’
level of the mine. If you like iron, you really need to see this.
I had no idea that Ford bought over 500,000 acres of virgin
hardwood forest near Iron
Mountain beginning in the
early 1920’s. Large scale timber operations began immediately and vehicle
manufacturing started in the early ‘30’s. During WWll the Iron Mountain Ford plant
was one of the largest manufacturers of the gliders used in aerial assaults
like D-Day.
I found the gliders and other war related exhibits quite
interesting, but the history of Ford’s impact on the whole UP area was
fascinating. I could return to that museum with a stool and spend all day just
reading the articles on the walls. For example, Ford sold charcoal thru their
dealerships throughout the country because Henry Ford hated waste. The vast
timber operation created enormous amounts of waste that he was determined to put
to use. That business continues today as the Kingsford Products Company.
The front roof-top air conditioner had died when we were in New Hampshire and we
couldn’t get a replacement before we planned to leave. We have two others and
thought that they would see us through the summer and we’d deal with the
problem when we got to Arizona.
A few days on the road in 90° heat and humidity quickly changed our minds. The
dash AC driven off the engine works until the temp hits 80 or the sun comes
through the windshield. At that point we need the much more powerful cooling of
the front roof unit.
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| Parking in Shipshewana |
RV components like AC’s are hard to find because the
manufacturers of new RV’s are sucking up everything. I finally got a reference
to National RV Refrigeration in Shipshewana,
Indiana. It turns out that they are one of
the largest dealers for Dometic brand AC units in the country, the brand we
needed. They had the model we needed in stock, so we reserved one and rearranged
our plans, again. Two looong days later we arrived in Shipshewana with an
overnight stop in Madison WI. The next morning we had a new AC unit. We spent a
week in Shipshewana before heading right back to
Wisconsin, but more on that next month.
Oh, yes, the folding stair mechanism broke, for the second
time, when we arrived in Erie.
I tried to order the part from the manufacturer but they were out of stock.
That’s never good news. Amazon was also out.
PPL in TX claimed to have it, took the order, and then didn’t ship. It turns
out they were simply incompetent, not actually deceptive. I finally found RVUpgrades.com who
actually had them on the shelf and shipped one right out, but…. it was
defective. The replacement finally arrived while we were in Shipshewana and
after an hour under the coach it worked. We have stairs again.
I haven’t had a chance to do much reading this month, mostly
rereads.
We stocked up at the New Hampshire State Liquor Store before
we left and they carry a very respectable collection of both domestic and
imported wines. That means we had lots of new wines to try and we hit an
unusual number of good ones:
Emma Reichart Ros̩ of Pinot Noir 2018 РGood
L'Envoye The Attache Pinot Noir –
Willamette Valley
– Good
Loudenotte Pinot Noir 2017 France – Trader Joes- Good
Trader Joe’s Reserve Cab -
Columbia Valley
- Wahluke Slope Lot 189 - 2016 - VG!
Pedra Cancela Selecao do Enologo Tinto - Dao Portugal- 2016 –
VG
Dry Creek Fume Blanc – 2019 – CA
Santa Francesca - Pinot Grigio – Italy
More soon,
Bob
More pictures:
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Ain't she pretty?!
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| Tahquamenon Falls. |
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| Monocle Lake |
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| Zoom in on the specs |
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| Wellington Farm - they still run! |
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The neighbors at
Shipshewana |
