Mostly musings, no real categorization
No excuses are needed to reminisce about our 2016 adventure. We’ll talk travel with anyone who’ll listen not just to be polite. And fond memories pop up every now and again.
As we start planning the next adventure, and consider how to make epic even more epic, we look back to 2016 for lessons learned – what we loved and plan to continue and what we’d like to do differently.
So here’s our 2016 trip summary, keepers and things we’ll do differently…
After 14,000 miles & 162 days on the road, we’ve arrived back at our home in VT.
…this happened:
There couldn’t have been a better place than Palisade Head, near Silver Bay, MN, on a stunningly beautiful day, to say our farewell to the Great Lakes. On June 19 we were in Cape Vincent, NY, where Lake Ontario becomes the St. Lawrence Seaway, and for the better part of the next 8 weeks we were awed, entertained, and educated on the Lakes. One of the areas in the U.S. that neither Doug nor I had been in, we’re happy that we chose to explore these Great Lakes on our great adventure.
We pulled into Duluth, MN and I started to squeal. We hadn’t even arrived at our destination (details in the next post…) when I saw it! A laker, parked at the marina among a bunch of pleasure boats. You could literally touch it. I did!
A useful mnemonic for the names of the five Great Lakes:
Huron
Since we left in May, we’ve been following the wind and the music and making up our itinerary as we go along. We’ve stayed at an interesting mix of campgrounds, friends’ and family driveways and alternative ‘boondocking’ sites. That worked just fine until we hit MI in July… Kids are out of school, campgrounds in MI are awesome and popular, and State Parks are sold out until well after Labor Day on weekends. We arrived in NW MI and found zero camping options, yet plenty of places we wanted to visit over the weekend. What are a couple of Destinators to do?
The Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent NY is at the start of the St. Lawrence River and the outflow of Lake Ontario, so for us it marks the true beginning of the Great Lakes portion of our journey.
The adventure begins.
Yes! Our rolling home has been freed from winter storage. We hooked up the batteries, checked the tires, started ‘er up and drove off. Awesome!
Now the crunch begins – five weeks to get the stationary house ready for a house-sitter, de-winterize, clean, service, and load up the rig (also fix a couple of things and make a couple of mods), check over the bikes & make sure the new bike rack works, pack up the instruments, check our total weight (and figure out what stays behind? Hope not!), say goodbye to everybody, and hit the road.
