A Loooooong Drive

Well, I kind of messed up. I reserved our next campground after a couple of hours of research along what I perceived to be our route, taking all the different variables into consideration. We knew it was going to be a fairly long drive which isn't great given it's a Wednesday and Brock needs to work.

Since Brock had scheduled meetings this morning, the kids and I went outside and got as much of the outside stuff done as we could to give him a quiet atmosphere for his calls and to help us progress on our readiness checklist. We pulled out of our site around 11:30 feeling a little sad to be leaving this campground. The owner was so nice and the services were good, including wifi, and the price with the Passport America discount was fabulous.

The first thing we do when we get rolling is to plug in Tom and get him routing us to our destination. I plug in the campground we are heading to which I think is around 5 hours drive away and Tom computes 6 hours and 14 minutes. Everyone groans. Then I adjust the setting because our icon on Tom is the car (not the trailer). I make that change and Tom recalculates our drive to 7 hours and 10 minutes! Ugggh! (We have to avoid low bridges and high railroad crossings and we also have Tom set to avoid tolls.)

Well, at least the highway wasn't too bad. We stopped at two rest areas and one gas station. The highlight of the drive was when Tom announced "state line" and we saw the Wisconsin Welcomes You sign and Sky yells "Yay!" in the backseat. We ask him what is in Wisconsin and he says, "The Moseses!!" (Not sure how to spell that, but that is what he said. It was so cute!) We are all really looking forward to seeing you again, Moses Family!

Otherwise we just drove and drove and we arrived at our campground around 8 pm with 25 miles til empty on our gas gauge. Brock still had two hours worth of work that he had to get done because his HTG reports were due before midnight.

We got checked in and to our site and to say that we were disappointed is an understatement. This campground bills itself as a resort, but the majority of the sites are occupied by long term residents. Our particular site is pretty much dirt. There are nice trees, but their position made it so that we could really only be in one spot to allow for our slides to come out and that means we can't use our awning because it's blocked by another tree so hopefully it won't rain too much on all the dirt. The site is unlevel left to right so we had to use our leveling blocks under the tires on one side and then I didn't have enough to put under our jack stands so the back jacks are fully extended making our trailer pretty rocky. The site is unlevel enough front to back that when we put the nose of the trailer where it needs to be so that our water drains properly in the shower, we are so low to the ground that we can't fully extend our entry steps. Grr.

Brock immediately tried to get to work while I quickly started some Hamburger Helper for dinner. Turns out the advertised wifi access wasn't really there and oh yeah, there's little to no Verizon coverage either. Frustrating...I felt really bad for making this choice, but there's no real way I could have known ahead of time. The real pill of it is that this place is more towards the upper end of our price range and we left a comfortable place that was one of the cheapest we've ever stayed at.

Brock was able to connect to the wifi for long enough to get his reports done, but he couldn't submit them on time because the connection timed out and we couldn't get reconnected. Our Verizon mifi wouldn't work at all. We went to bed grumbling and frustrated and wondering if we would have to move in the morning. The campground's policy is that if you cancel within 14 days of your dates, you forfeit 50% of the camping fees. Grumble...grumble...grumble.