OurBigAdventure

OK, I'm lying... the road trip began July 20th but instead of posting the trip live I wrote it all down in a book (ie. Offline Blogging) so I could post every detail once we got home. Other than this first post which should be first thing tomorrow morning (before you guys wake up), I will try to keep everything posting as if the trip was going live but even if I don't I hope you will be happy with what I have for you. It's 28 days of adventure... starting now!

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As usual we are up late packing but we have gotten much better because we are done and it's only 1 am!

So here is the basic plan for our trip. We are driving up the East coast of the U.S. to Maine, then heading west to Montreal, through Canada then down into Wisconsin for a family reunion then back through Alabama and home again. We've planned four weeks for the trip and the only hard part is... we're taking the dogs with us, so everything we do has to be dog friendly.

We've planned this trip for months to make sure we wouldn't hit any snags along the road. I've got my PC sending it's IP address to a secret website incase I need to connect to it and I have Remote Desktop installed on my Mac to work remotely if I have to. Everything else should be easy with an iPhone and some time at Starbucks.

One thing you are not going to see much of on this trip is video. Video is the reason I never finished last year's trip out west. (which I hope to work in as time permits) But photos are easier to work with unless you have nothing else to do and can edit video 8 hours a day.

So it's off to bed, we're loading the car at 6 am and heading out. It should be an awesome trip!

I think we were both so excited we didn't sleep well at all but 6 am came and without protest we got up and began loading the car. Our goal was to leave at 8 am.

The biggest problem I had loading the car was the rain, especially since I had planned to put nearly everything on top of the car in a rain-proof bag. What this meant was that more things needed to go in the car because the rain kept me from having time to understand and organize the rain bag.

We ended up leaving around 9 am, but it was no big deal because we didn't have a hard deadline at our first stop in Charleston, South Carolina.

On the drive up to Jacksonville, where we were picking up some things from Sandra's Dad, Sandra was reading her Grandmother's journal. (1936-1940) She read about her Grandparent's courtship, wedding and the birth of her Aunt Barbara.

At one point I asked why everything she read to me seemed out of order and she showed me that the book was only 365 pages with a page for each day of the year, each page was lined with the top three lines being for 1936, the next three for 1937 and so on for the five years that the journal was to be used. At my first glance, I immediately saw this as the same format as the popular micro-blogging site Twitter.com where you only have 140 characters per post! Sandra's grandmother was apparently far ahead of her time!

We met Sandra's Dad around noon in Jacksonville and traded stuff. Layla and Blair were with him and made sure the dogs got some love.



So back on the road, we had about 4 hours to go and since we will eventually hit Canada we started our French language program right away. "Escu-vous comprenez l'anglais?" yeah, that took us about 30 min and was funny as hell the entire time.

So after our first 30 min French lesson we were quiet for a minute when I said something about Canada and just like in "Home Alone" where the Mom remembers that they forgot Kevin, Sandra's face turned to shock, she got a death grip on the seat and said, "We forgot out passports!"

Oops...

But 4 hours in to the trip we couldn't go back. What do we do now? In just over a week we have hotel reservations for 5 nights in Canada, we have all of the papers for the dogs proving their rabies, bordetella, heart worm, distemper and everything else you could possibly need for a dog but we don't have our passports. How could we forget something like this?

We can't cancel the hotels because some of them we prepaid using Priceline and got some really great rates. If we decided to skip Canada we would have to rework our entire trip... time to hit the phones!

The problem with calling your neighbor to ask if they can go into your house, dig through your safe and find your FedEx packaging to send you something is that you have to tell them your alarm code, your safe code, have them dig through your valuable documents and then pull out your FedEx account number and send whatever they have pulled out of your safe to a destination that you hope to be in a day or to. And you hope that is all they do because they already know you are going to be gone for a while. A little nerve racking to say the least.

But lucky for us our friend Lisa, who I've know forever, was going to be able to stop by our house. Also lucky for use that we hid a key in case of emergencies because we had just changed our locks everyone that had a key had the old key. We had done almost everything we could to make this trip into Canada go wrong, now all we had to do was decide where to have her send the passports because most of our stops were campgrounds until we got to Canada anyway!

Another phone call later and we made sure we could send everything ahead to our friends Ann and Ryan who we would see in a few days. So crisis averted, and now we knew what to do incase we forgot anything else...

After all of the passport hysteria settled down and we made it to James Island County Park (campsite map) we set up our tent and fed the dogs and dug all of the stuff out of the car that we needed to cook dinner and hang out at the campsite. (We probably overpacked...)





After they ate we headed over to the dog park for the last 30 min that it was open. They made some new friends and went for a swim in the lake which was great because we are all sleeping in a tent tonight.





We had enough time for a short drive to Charleston's downtown before heading off to bed, it's up again at 6am to reorganize the car and make it to our next stop by 11:30 am.

We didn't have time to visit with any family in Charleston on this trip, we have to get North to see the New England coast and we only have so many days. We will have to plan another trip to visit everyone when we get back.

And off to bed, the first night camping with the dogs. They've been asleep since they got into the tent, definitely not what we expected.

Killer gear for our first night:
Coleman LED Lantern - lasts 16 hours on 8 D cells and lights up the entire campsite.
Coleman Tent Fan - awesome for cooling down the tent, especially in the summer time.
Sandra's new Therma-Rest Dreamtime sleeping pad. 3" of air matress and memory foam heaven!

We woke up at 6 with only a little sleep and found the entire tent soaked with dew and condensation. There's nothing quite like waking up early and folding up a soaking wet tent. But we made it work and set out to reorganize the car.

My goal for repacking the car was to eliminate the need for the rain bag on the roof. It was no fun trying to get things out of it when it was wet, so I repacked everything in the back of the car and we put the dogs in the back seat. (We definitely overpacked...) We both hit the showers and left only 30 min behind schedule.

On our way out we stopped at Whole Foods to get lunch meat for sandwiches on the ferry, then the race was on! We had to be at the ferry terminal by 12:30 to catch the 1:00 ferry.

With about 30 min. to go we were right on schedule. Sandra decided to read the description of our next campground and calculate when we had to leave in the morning to catch the next ferry... go figure 6 am.

But wait, something else in the campground description... the gates are locked from 8 p.m. to 8 am. LOCKED! as in you can't get in or out.



Time to make a plan B, we bailed on the ferry and headed for Wilmington, North Carolina instead. Now we needed to find a hotel and it had to take dogs. Thank goodness for the iPhone and the lack of 3G coverage... at least we could get an Edge connection (the equivalent of dial-up).