Day 35: Shake, Rattle, & Fall Off

I had forgotten how loud and bumpy the road was. According to Google Maps, today’s drive from Sturbridge, MA to Allentown, PA was 267 miles, 4 hours 40 minutes. We left our camp ground around 11am and arrived at our current spot in PA around 6pm, with 3 stops: lunch, bathroom break, fuel. That’s a long time to be jiggled and deafened with road rattles and thumps. America has some super sucky roads! They definitely wore me out today.

And you may be thinking, “Crap Trina complains alot.” I kind of do… but in my defense, today’s rattling somehow caused the rollers to fall off the track which holds our drop down mattress in place. A big chunk of metal dropped down inches from head. So today it’s justified.

Fred takes the rough bumps, rattles, and noise in stride, just happy to be on an adventure. The man has the patience and outlook of a Buddest monk. I don’t know how he does it. That’s how he lives his whole life. I really respect that about him.

On the positive side… The weather was beautiful today. I was worried we would float away during the night. It started raining during dinner and rained hard all night long. But it was all warm weather and sunshine when we woke up. It was so energizing!

We went up to the camp store after we packed up to pay for our stay. Last night the managers couldn’t decide on a price and kept saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it now. It will be less than $60. Just come by the store in the morning and we can take care of it.”
So we go there in the morning and they still don’t have a set price. They talked amongst themselves and they said, “If you pay cash… How about $50?” It sounded kind of shady, but cheap enough, so what the heck. Who knows where that money will end up.

While Fred drove, I kept getting out of my seat to make adjustments to various things around the rig, to quiet rattles, to rearrange things to be within a comfortable reach. It takes a little while to get it all back into driving mode.

We stopped for lunch at the Chick-Fil-A in Southington, CT. We met a lady named Tamika. She works there as the attendant in the seating area. She was so friendly and energetic. She bussed tables, brought people refills, and pretty much got to know everybody in the room. She chatted with us for several minutes and made us promise to come back in 5 years to visit her. We accepted the date.

We did a little grocery shopping across the street at Aldo’s (We we’re out of Pop-Tarts).

We had this bright idea to go see a taping of the Jerry Springer Show. Oddly enough, Fred is a fan of the show. It’s his favorite background noise for afternoon naps. We remembered the show is filmed in CT so we googled the studio. Sadly, they only film on Monday and Tuesday. So Bummer! That would have been a trip to the circus for sure.

The Poconos and the area around upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey, is so vibrant green and densely wooded. We used to watch this TV show called Finding Bigfoot. I am a big Bigfoot fan. The woods out here are the perfect place to see Sasquatch. As Bobo on Finding Bigfoot would say, “It’s awfully Squachy around these parts.” I have been keeping an eye out.

This area does have some of the worst drivers we have encountered, by far! They don’t know how to use on-ramps or maintain a consistent speed. We almost got hit by a lady in a ratty blue van today. She was accelerating up the on-ramp to enter the freeway. She was accelerating fast like she had stolen the van just moments before and was still hopped up on adrinaline… or meth. We slowed down to give her room to enter in front of us. Suddenly, she slammed on her brakes and came to a stop right at the end of the ramp. We couldn’t change lanes but Fred was able to ease enough to the left and accelerate to just miss the van. Fred is an awesome driver! And he was still as calm as a cucumber. He’s like having the best graveyard partner ever.

We pulled into our camp ground just as they were closing the shop.

It’s a cute little spot. It’s heavily wooded, smells like honey suckle, and sits on a creek. Its straight out of a Hallmark movie. We set up camp and took the Jeep into town for dinner. We had burritos that were so fat they were actually square. I don’t know how they didn’t burst when we picked them up.

We headed back to camp to watch the Celtics’ game but the cable TV hookup outside was not working. Fred had to improvise… Sling TV has been worth the money this trip. Streaming TV is awesome.