The campsites are very trustworthy here. If you arrive after sunset and the office is
closed a lot of them have an honesty box or have maps posted showing which
campsites are available that night and you can pay the next day. You just drive on in and plug in your rig. This site just South of Washington was one
such site. This morning I went over to
the office, paid up for three nights ($107) and got a $10 roll of quarters so
that we could use the laundry facilities.
It cost $2 to use a washing machine here and the same for a dryer. We’d bought some line to try to get our
clothes dry naturally – but two months on we still haven’t used this; partly due
to cold or rainy weather but also most sites don’t let you tie anything to the
trees in fear of damaging them. So,
using the dryers is just easier rather than trying to find space and heating to
hang everything up in the RV.
We had agreed that after a couple of hectic days of driving
and site-seeing, today would be a ‘stay at home’ day. Well, apart from forcing Simon to come on a
bike ride so we could get some exercise!
So, washing done, we set off around Prince William Forest Park. Here’s the sign we saw at the beginning of
the ride…
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| Remember folks.... they're more scared of you than you re of bears, apparently. |
The ride itself was a mix of bumpy tracks but then very
smooth cycle track alongside a peaceful road.
There were some hills, both up and down thankfully, but we didn’t find
any scenery anywhere near as breath-taking at the Catskills. There wasn’t much wildlife either, including
bears, but I enjoyed getting out for some fresh air in any case.
 |
| I felt that we'd worked hard enough to deserve some Kendal mint cake - thank you Heather Saunders! |
It did highlight an issue with the cheap
bikes we’d purchased – my gears were slipping frequently which was taking the
shine off my cycling experience. I had
an attack of DIY…. Despite knowing my own limitations, I figured I could
research on the internet how to fix this little problem myself. Besides, we had invested in a couple of
screwdrivers, spanners and Allen keys – how hard could it be? Turns out, unless you know what you’re doing,
it’s quite hard! I managed to make the
situation ten times worse so my bike only had about two functioning gears and
Simon wasn’t able to rectify it. He was
just frustrated that I had taken it upon myself to try a quick fix. So much for saving money by buying cheap –
there’s a lesson in there somewhere folks!
The other reason we had a cheap day today was that this was
day 7 of the trip and we knew we had already blown the week’s budget.... and
some! We were rapidly realising that we
would have to expand our budget expectations, even though we didn’t think we
had been frivolous at all. Here’s a
summary of our first week’s costs:
Tolls: $47.40
Gas: $258.88
Camping: $251.95
Groceries: $182.25
(including beer)
Parking
& public transport: $40.20
Eating/drinking
out: $55.00
Laundry: $2.00
Shot glass: $10.00
This is a total of just under $850. 850 bucks!! And look at the most expensive things – gas
and camping – two things we were not really going to be able to avoid on this
trip! With the shoddy performance of the
British pound we were getting about 1.24 Dollars per pound. Our initial aim had been to try and live on
1200 pounds a month (AFTER ‘set-up costs!), so roughly 300 quid a week. We had managed to more than double this in
our first week! Eeeeek! We were going to
have to limit our mileage and shop around for cheaper campsites to try and cut
back or we’d be using up funds that we’d set aside for our future travel plans
and/or returning to normal life.
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