Thursday 20th October - finally, time to hit the road.

I awoke to hear that Tash was already home after her early morning flight from California.  She was seeing off David and her Mum with the children – I had slept in well!  There had been a power cut in the area, so Tash was home alone with no electricity.  I was happy to be able to step-in and offer her a much-needed cup of tea - the first to be prepared using our brand new $6 red kettle on our gas hob, in new red cups with our new tea bags and milk.  You get the idea… it was great to be able to cater from our new abode. Tash then drove me to a local AAA store (American Automobile Association) where, due to her family membership and much to the displeasure of the surly shop assistant we requested the AAA Tour books for almost every State in the USA, for free! These books normally retail at around $15 per book so we saved at least 100 bucks this way.  They were going to be priceless for our trip.

My lovely Mum

We returned to the house and Simon had sorted everything else out on the RV; we were finally ready for the off 11 days after our arrival in the States.  This date is particularly befitting, as it happens to be seven years ago to the day that my incredible Mum passed away without whom, as I have mentioned before, this entire trip would not have been possible.  

Ready for the road

I took the first stint, we had decided to head to Hartford, Connecticut to visit the home of Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before heading to a campsite we had chosen in the Catskill Mountains for our first night in the wild!  Looking back now, we were brand new to the experience of deciding how far to drive in a day, being able to look at maps and judge distances and whether to ring ahead and book somewhere or to just ‘wing it’ (the plan is there is no plan, remember).  But we did quite well on this first day I think.  We arrived in Hartford in good time. Well, plenty of time to have lunch before taking some photos of the landmark that we weren’t going to pay to get in, we’re not that cultured!

Mark Twain house.... from the outside anyway!

We try to get as many State line photos as possible - please excuse the bug-splatting on the windscreen on occasion.....

We also started the travel budget for real today, making a note of every cost in the back of ‘the book’ so we could see where our money was going.  The North-East likes toll roads – just on that first day we spent over 10 bucks on them!  

We then had to stop at a gas station for the first fill up – how much would a tank of unleaded for our 5.7 litre V8 beauty set us back?!  I went to pay up front guessing that about $80 should do it (about 65 quid) and then we hit a wall – my credit card was declined.  Unbelievable!  I had ensured that I had told Halifax of my travel plans to avoid this problem - so why had they panicked at my spending? I tried calling the emergency number on the back of my credit card from within the gas station.  At first it worked, I tried to explain to the Halifax in the UK that I was on a mobile phone, from the States, so please could you hurry it along a bit?  It was confirmed that a hold had been placed on my card and I was given a code before being put through to the fraud department where I was placed on hold.  ON HOLD!! FROM THE USA!! Within a couple of minutes my phone died and I received the inevitable message from AT&T that I had no credit left. Brilliant, first day, no, afternoon, on the road.  The gas station had no public phone and Si was in the same position of having no credit.  In the end, I used our reserve cash store (for emergencies) to pay for $92 of gas plus beer (Walmart in Massachusetts don’t sell alcohol – shock horror) – both essential for our stay in the Catskills.  Darkness was well on its way when we reached our first campsite and paid (in emergency cash) $57 for two nights.  That was for a site with no electricity, just a water tap.  There was a helpful sign at the entrance reminding us NOT to try and feed the bears... just in case we were considering it.

Our first ever RV campsite at dusk

This was nowhere near as cheap as we were hoping, to stay in our own van essentially! I guess we paid for the view, which became apparent the next day after the fog cleared! There were rules about how late you could run a generator so we had to quickly turn ours on to be able to make dinner and have some electricity backed-up for lighting before it was quiet time…. 7pm!  But we felt proud.  We had made it to our first campsite without too much drama, we were self-contained and had managed to make chili for dinner which went down nicely with a couple of beers.  We were in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and no wi-fi so the credit card issue would have to wait.  Nothing else for it but to get out the playing cards and put some tunes on.  The road trip had commenced for real.