RVing around Lake Erie Part I

A recurring theme of our travel here in North America is that there is so much that we want to see and do, and so little time in which to do it.  In Canada you only get 3 weeks of annual leave a year (and that's as a senior employee - standard is two), and with Vicki working contracts, that causes issues as well.  As such, our scraping together every little bit of holiday time to try to do something sometimes backfires, as a weekend is never really long enough to fly somewhere and see everything we want to see.

We were being fairly ambitious with this trip - we wanted to rent an RV on Thursday night, drive it 1200km across the border and back again, and be back for work on Monday morning, so 3 days and 3 nights.  We also wanted to see things on the way while we were doing it.  It mostly worked out, but a lot went wrong.

One of the first things we discovered was that the RV place was only available for pickup between 2 and 4pm on Thursday - so no picking it up after work as we'd intended, causing us to have to negotiate a half-day on Thursday in order to make it.  At the same time, we discovered that the RV place was actually 40km north of our house, inaccessible by public transport.  As we don't own a car, there wasn't an option of driving up there and leaving the car for the weekend (we would have had to pay to rent a car for the entirety of our trip in the RV).  We juggled a bit, and worked out that we could catch a taxi from our house to the rental place with Jax.  $120 of taxi fare later... we were there.

As per my last post, we figured out a couple of days before we left that most campgrounds were "closed for the season", but we managed to dodge that bullet by finding the only 3 campgrounds that were open and planning our route around those.  What we weren't expecting was to be told on arrival that our RV was also "winterized for the season" - despite the 15 degree days, it was getting close to 0 at night, and thus we weren't permitted to use anything on the RV that used water, in case the pipes froze overnight.  So no shower, no sink for washing up, and no toilet.  That was certainly out of left field.  Luckily we'd booked campgrounds that also took people in tents, so they had showers and toilets there - but you never realize how convenient running water is until you have to walk 200m to get to it.

We had another rude shock after driving the RV out of the parking lot and straight to the petrol station - $100 of petrol covered 1/4 of a tank.  Ouch.  We also quickly discovered that the RV averaged 23L of petrol per 100km travelled (a small car averages 5L/100km on the highway) - so it was costing us over $30 in fuel to drive 100km.  Double ouch.  Over the course of the weekend it cost us nearly $400 in fuel for the 3 day drive around the lake.

We crossed the American border with no issues, and visited our first campground near Niagara Falls in New York state.

Here's the RV we were driving.  It was 23 feet long (7m).

The campground was quite nice - our campsite had a paved area with a BBQ, outdoor setting and a rocking chair, but it was a bit cold to use these.

The campground seemed like it would be a fairly lively place in summer - through the back gate was a small amusement park with a rollercoaster and some other rides.  I guess in school holidays, people probably bring their families here in tents or RVs and camp out for a whole week, packing their children off to the amusement park for some of the days.

Inside our RV - you can see there's a small kitchen area with a microwave, 3-burner stove top and a sink for washing up (when you're allowed to use water).  Behind that there's a bed (a bit smaller than Queen size).  The door at the back right is the washroom which has a toilet and a shower which we couldn't use.  To the right there's another sink (bathroom sink), plus a wardrobe cupboard, fridge (surprisingly big and cold), and then a dinette table and chairs at the bottom right of the picture.  Above the cab there was another double bed, but I think you'd have to be pretty crazy to sleep there - there was around 20cm between where your face would be and the roof when you were lying on it, not very comfortable.

More to come in Part II!

Around Lake Erie - Planning

Like last year, we've been mostly staying at home over winter.  This is apparently a typical thing for people in Canada to do - in winter, they hibernate, with maybe a trip to somewhere sunny like the Bahamas.  In summer, they go and do things.  And thus I apologise for our lack of posts for the last few months - aside from one photo-less trip to Florida to run the Disney Half Marathon, we didn't do much except hang around at home.

This winter has been dubbed the winter that wasn't - we managed to train outside every day except for one, where it was -23 or something with wind chill.  The rest of the time it hovered around -5, and was generally rather pleasant.  I think we only had a few snow days, and they were nothing like last winter.  Similarly, this spring has been nothing like last spring's 2 months of constant rain alternately freezing and thawing and making the sidewalk a deathtrap.  This spring has been mild and beautiful, even hot sometimes.  We even had a few 25 degree days that made us blink and wonder if we'd magically been transported back to Brisbane.

Easter long weekend in Australia is usually 4 days of camping, making the most of the last days of summer.  Easter long weekend in Canada is only 3 days, and apparently it is normally either raining or snowing.  Over "winter" (October to May), everything is generally "closed for the season", and apparently people are too set in their ways to see the heatwave and generally beautiful weather as an excuse to declare the Easter long weekend a weekend for doing things.  Not us!

They're predicting temperatures of between 10 and 16 degrees C, so we've rented a 23ft motorhome, and are planning to drive it around Lake Erie over the 3-day weekend.

The original plan was that we'd just stop whereever we felt like it, but we discovered that the owners of RV parks are set in their ways as well, and most campground and RV parks don't open until May 1.  Some panicked googling found a total of 4 parks that are open (out of about 50 - I'm glad we have the internet and don't have to make phone calls), so we've made some bookings and planned out a route, and hopefully everything will go to plan!  Hopefully!

Jax is coming with us, so we are crossing fingers that there are no issues crossing the border with him as we've never done it before and aren't sure what they'll ask.  We have our ownership papers from the rescue, plus proof of his rabies vaccination, and I believe that is all we should need.

The motorhome part sounds slightly scary.  When I went to book the places, the website had all of these options - pull-through or back-in, full hookup, 50 or 30 or 20 amps... having no idea, I just picked whatever sounded good, and hopefully it will be ok.  Surprisingly, they all seems to have wifi, which is interesting!

So off we go on Thursday night on our big adventure.  Will we be snowed in by a freak snowstorm?  Will we accidentally drive the motorhome into a tree?  Will we even make it across the border?  Who knows!  Stay tuned for photos and hopefully not-too-crazy stories.