Habs on the Road

Day 32

We ate at Tim Horton’s (yet again), and then drove from the hotel in Moncton, New Brunswick the rest of the way back to the RV in Maine. It was a pretty drive! The fall colors are really vibrant here!

You can tell there are more French-speaking people in New Brunswick than in Nova Scotia by all the French spellings on every sign.

It was good to be back in the USA!

Ahhh, glad to be back to US units of measurement for speed, distance, and gasoline prices!

Here is how the gas prices looked in cents per liter in Canada:



It’s a good thing I had spare fuel with us, because we needed it today! We were in the middle of nowhere in Maine and we’re running on fumes. We pulled onto a dirt road and put all 5 gallons in.

We made it back to our RV and emptied everything from the Jeep.

In case you are wondering, the yellow letters on each bin are abbreviations for what is inside each one. K=kitchen/food, U=utilities (toilet, flashlights, lanterns, cords, heater), B=bedding (sleeping bags and pillows), T=tent. It makes it so much easier to know which bin to go to for something, and where to pack everything when leaving.

I am the king of bungee cords!

I checked out the bottom of the bin that flew off the roof and skidded across the freeway. You can see where it scratched the bottom of it but not as bad as I expected.



There was a gorgeous sunset tonight and people were pulling off the side of the road to take pictures. Carla took these photos while we were driving over a little bridge going into Bar Harbor last night. The photos look exactly like it looked in person. 



Day 33

Today is a normal work and school day.

Still having trouble uploading photos and videos to the last couple of blogs, likely due to our really slow Internet connection. 

We are heading back home Sunday and will probably spend a week getting there.

This evening we went down to Bar Harbor to walk around the shops some more. Man, the streets were packed with people! Could hardly find a parking spot.

Had some awesome Wild Maine blueberry pie!

Tomorrow I’m off work and we’re going to hike in Acadia National Park! Looking forward to that.

Day 34

I took off work today and we went to Acadia National Park to hike and eat at Jordan Pond House for lunch. The place was packed as usual and I had to park about a mile away, but the hike to the restaurant was pretty!

The trails in Acadia are beautiful and remind me of when we were in Skagway, Alaska and had headed off into the woods away from the touristy shops we were tired of seeing.

We then went downtown Bar Harbor to walk around the shops.

Day 35

Today we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain (1530′) with an Acadia National Park. It was awesome! The road winds along the edge of the mountain and you can see the entire town of Bar Harbor and ocean all around. People come here to watch the sunrise because it’s the first place you can see the sunrise in the United States!

We found the geological reference point where they measured the elevation 200 years ago. I took the opportunity to set the altimeter on my watch to match it. That was really neat!

The wind was really strong at the top! Tripp was a little scared by it, and I don’t blame him because it was pushing me around!

We found a neat little place to get cheesecake today called Momo’s Cheesecake. It’s basically someone’s garage and they have several different refrigerated units with slices and whole cheesecakes. It’s the honor system where you simply put your money into an open box, sign your name in the guestbook, and take your cheesecake. People also post the little messages using Post-it notes all over the place! The cheesecakes were amazing! We kind of went overboard...so many different ones to pick from!

We had a fire this evening and roasted hotdogs. We then started packing up everything to get ready to hit the road tomorrow. We will end up somewhere near Utica, New York tomorrow, but we are going to take a route that goes through Vermont so we can mark that state off of our list (our 45th!). That will leave only Nebraska, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Hawaii!

We’ve both said multiple times lately that we feel like we have now really seen the Northeast, and at the best time of the year. We both prefer the Pacific Northwest, though…it’s hard to beat!

I can’t believe we’ve been to so many states in the last three years! We then have mark off all the Canadian provinces. One city I want to be sure to go to is Quebec City (Pronounced “Keh-bek city”). Just Google it and you’ll see how neat it looks. I had heard about it from a helicopter mechanic I met at an RV park in New Jersey. He’s traveled around the world quite a bit and said visiting Quebec City is very similar to being in France.

Day 36

We hit the road and worked our way to Albany, NY. I first had to air up all the tires, as the colder temps lowered the air pressure quite a bit. By the way, this was a totally fake photo. In reality, it’s a pain in the rear to keep the air hose into the valve stem! My hand is usually killing me by the time I’m done airing up several tires! I need to find a better connector.

Mmmm…eating Carla’s stew was a nice break from driving! (Sorry the photo wont rotate correctly)

We routed through Vermont so that we could knock that state off the list, but it took some work! There was a detour for trucks because of some bridge work, which took us 20 minutes out of the way. Oh well, it was worth it! The drive was really pretty, but after 423 miles I was mentally exhausted. Most of the drive was on a winding 2 lane highway through the mountains. Vermont has a lot more mountains than New Hampshire, at least where we went.

We came across a few neat little towns, but Wilmington, VT was the neatest along Hwy 9. That highway runs along the southern part of Vermont.

While we were driving through Wilmington, there were lots of people walking around the town and one guy was wearing a German outfit. He was looking at our RV really curiously and grinning as we went by (we hadn’t seen any RVs in this part of the state) and we were staring back at him wondering why in the world he was wearing those clothes. It was a hilarious moment, as both of us stared at one another as we drove by slowly. We were all dying laughing. 

We were aiming for Utica, NU, but we were ready to call it quits at Albany. We ended up staying in a nice quiet Walmart parking lot for the night (makes up for the fact we left a day early from the RV park and forfeited the money we paid for that last day). One interesting thing is that it’s a two level Walmart! That’s a first!

Also, we’ve got a decent cell signal here, so I’m finally filling in some blog posts with photos!

Day 37

We had a nice quiet night at Walmart and slept really well.

We drove west from Albany along the Erie Canal, which was neat! We listened to the original recording of the Erie canal song.

We drove by the finger Lakes and got to cross over one of them. It was so skinny!

We have been on I-90 all day long, headed toward Cleveland Ohio. We keep seeing these service plazas about every 30 miles that have various fast food places, gift shop, Starbucks, etc. It’s funny because they give you several advertisements before you get there and there’s always one of them hanging over the road like this one:

We just paid a $60 toll! Here’s what our route looked like today between Albany and Cleveland:

It’s weird that we were just up this way a few months ago!

We made it to Grand River Valley KOA in Thompson, OH. We were a little worried when we had to drive on a gravel road to get to the campground, but it’s a really nice place when you get here! The part of the park we stayed in looks brand new and has really nice pavilions with glider rockers and barbecue grills!

Really glad to be off the road! We did about 440 miles again today.

Day 38

Neat sunrise!

We are on our way to the Indianapolis area today.

We stopped at the Indianapolis KOA in Greenfield, which is a great campground! Super friendly staff, very clean park with brand new hookups at our site. They even make pizza here and deliver it to your RV. Also, they have an off leash dog park so we requested a site right next to that, which is nice. The road coming into the park was a little awkward and tight, but didn’t have to unhook. You just have to really plan your turns. I would not want to arrive here at nighttime, though.

Day 39

On our way to St. Louis this morning! We are excited because the next leg of the trip will be to our house!. We are spending two nights in St. Louis since it’s familiar territory and we want to do a few things.

We parked the RV at a mall and walked to Chick-fil-A, which was a treat. Haven’t seen many of those in the Northeast!

We stopped on the side of an on-ramp to let the dogs do their business. The grass was super high! We could barely see them at times as they roamed the Serengeti.

We arrived at the last RV park of our trip! Kind of sad! It’s the 370 Lakeside RV Park just outside St. Louis.

We ate dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory (of course!).

Neat old building near the Mississippi River:

We were going to stay for two nights, but decided to finish the last 6 hours of the trip tomorrow and get home. We are anxious to see everyone and to have our house back!

Day 40

Tripp wanted to light just one more of his windproof / waterproof matches this morning! I love that he likes them so much.

Got caught in the morning work traffic!



I can’t believe it’s the last day of our trip! It’s fun to think about all the things we saw and did over the last 40 days. What a journey it’s been! We clocked over 4000 miles in the RV alone, plus many more in the Jeep. We also got to see several new states, leaving only 5 to go!

The next RV trip will likely be in early March to the west coast for some off-roading on the infamous Rubicon Trail in California, near Lake Tahoe. We’ll also visit Yosemite during that trip, so some fun, new things ahead!

Until then, see you later!