Georg's travel journal – USA 2007
#18 – on the road (1) … and already broken down

on the road … well, it's a start of sort.

Our RV looks tiny behind those trucks – right in the picture, but we're supposed to use truck-parking areas when entering service areas along interstate highways, since the RV is too large to fit in a normal parking-space for cars.

These larger service areas along the major highways are quite essential for both commercial transportation – the big trucks – and us ordinary travellers, and stopping at such places to fill gas and/or get something to eat breaks the monotony of the highways. They are mostly well kept and look inviting.

delay … and we were not singing in the rain.

We didn't park here by choice, actually. The RV rental had given us a defect rear tire when we picked up this RV earlier in the day, and we had to contact them and wait for their service people to arrive and fix what turned out to be a broken valve.
 
That was just the start of the problems with this contraption.

An RV is kind of heavy, so a powerful jack was needed. It was already late in the evening – we waited around 6 hours for the service man to arrive, and it was raining a bit.

the lost schedule.

The delay put our plans for the first day off quite a bit, so we had to drive well into the night – almost till sunup, before we could settle down at a campground and get some sleep.

On our way we first had to stop and buy local maps to make sure we knew where we were, so we could find that campground. I was driving and Ron was half asleep, so we missed it once.

June 11th.