Well - probably most of you know that we are home! Today is Monday, August 23. We arrived home at 1:20 a.m. on the 21st. Took a couple of days to decompress, and here is our final post.
We left Iron Mountain, Michigan at about 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 19. We went to the parts store and picked up the air bag and headed east. When we found a level, paved rest area, we parked and changed the bag, which took about 1.5 hours. After completing the repair, we continued.
Since we got a late start, we didn't make too many miles on Thursday. We wanted to avoid the traffic of the U.S route, which would have taken us through Chicago, Cleveland, etc., so we chose to return to New Hampshire through Ontario. We crossed the Canadian border at Sault Ste. Marie at about 7:30 p.m. and found a campground a couple of hours later near Sudbury. Not a very restful night -- heavy truck traffic on one side of the campground, and freight trains on the other!
We left pretty early on Friday morning, not sure how far we would get. We thought we might have a chance to make it home, but we knew it would be a very long day. The day was nice - quite sunny and warm. Traffic wasn't too bad. We avoided going through Ottawa by taking an alternate route to the NY border. We crossed into the US at Orgdensburg, New York - our final border crossing - at about 5:30 p.m. We paused to eat at Rouse's Point, NY, and crossed into Vermont at Alburg just above Lake Champlain. By that time, we figured we might as well keep going, since we were only a few hours from home.
We went south to Barre, then crossed into NH at Woodsville, and came home through Warren and Plymouth. We drove into our driveway at 1:20 a.m. on Sat. morning.
The odometer on the camper read 43,140 when we left on July 6. When we got home, it read 57,141 -- 14,001 miles!
We were both very tired and happy to be home. It seems good to sleep in our own beds, and to cook on a real stove in a real kitchen. It will take a long time to process all that we saw and experienced on this "trip of a lifetime." We met lots of interesting people, saw some incredible sights, and had a truly wonderful time.
My personal favorite experience was visiting Chicken Alaska. Donny loved being able to see the legendary Snow Trains in Fairbanks.
Don and Cheryl
No comments:
Post a Comment