Wednesday, April 4, 2012

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.  

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