After waiting way too long, due to last minute details we needed to get done, and then bad weather, yesterday we finally hit the road and gave our bad case of hitch itch a mighty scratch!
After a week of gloomy sky, wind, and rain, Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny, with no wind. A perfect day for traveling! Miss Terry stowed away the things inside the motorhome that needed to be secured so they didn’t become a deadly missile in the event of an accident, while I unhooked our water, electric, and sewer connection from the campground’s utility pedestal. Then we hooked up our Blue Ox tow bar, I disengaged the van’s driveshaft disconnect, and turned on the SMI auxiliary brake.
While we were doing that, Gypsy Journal subscriber Herb Staffenski came by to purchase several of our books. It was nice to meet Herb and his wife Anke, and they hope to join us at our Arizona Gypsy Gathering in Yuma, in March.
After running the slides in and pulling up our HWH leveling jacks, we said our goodbyes to Greg and Jan White, and I thanked Greg again for all of his help over the last couple of weeks. It was nice to have the time to get to know this fun couple better, and we look forward to many more good times together in the future.
After a quick scan of our PressurePro tire monitoring system, we pulled out of Elkhart Campground a little after 11:00 a.m., got on the Indiana Toll Road and headed east about 50 miles to the junction with Interstate 69, which we followed south to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and then got on U.S. Highway 30 eastbound, a nice divided four lane highway with little traffic.
We crossed into Ohio and continued east past Van Wert, and eventually came to Interstate 75, and took it south to Dayton. There was a lot more traffic on the superslab, and in Dayton we ran into a long stretch of road construction, with narrow lanes and concrete barriers instead of shoulders. I was glad to leave the interstate again and get onto U. S. Highway 35, another nice four lane limited access road that carried us 140 miles southeast through farmlands and rolling hills to Gallipolis, on the Ohio River.
I said in the blog a few days ago that an ideal driving day in an RV is 250 to 300 miles, but that sometimes when the traveling is good, we find ourselves going past that. And so it was yesterday. By the time we pulled into the Wal-Mart Super Center in Gallipolis and tucked ourselves into the far edge of the parking lot for the night, it was twilight and we had covered 387 miles. We had a bad case of hitch itch, and it just needed to be scratched!
After I wrote about their diesel engine monitoring systems for PC based computers a while back, and included a link to Norm Payne’s excellent article on the Silverleaf Electronics moitoring system, the nice folks at Silverleaf loaned me one of their VMSpc cables to evaluate and review, and I had hooked it up to a small Acer netbook computer before we hit the road for this trip. The cable plugs into the data port under our RV’s dash, and the Silverleaf program monitors dozens of engine functions with digital displays that you can customize for your own needs.
According to the Silverleaf, we averaged 8.1 miles per gallon yesterday, most of it with the cruise control set at 63 miles per hour, though there were a few times when I was up around 66 or 67 MPH to keep up with the traffic flow.
The more I drive our Winnebago, the more I like it. Even towing our ¾ ton Ford van, the Cummins 350 horsepower engine had no problems coming up a few rather steep hills, down here in southern Ohio, at 60 or 65 miles per hour. I’m impressed!
Today we’ll cross into West Virginia and continue our trek into new territory to explore and new adventures to discover.
Thought For The Day – If you do what you enjoy and don’t harm other people, you’re living a beautiful life.