Detour: Peru and Machu Picchu

peru-passport-stampsMonths before we embarked on our travel trailer adventure I booked a trip to Peru.  I try to take one solo trip per year, usually to somewhere on my bucket list.  Machu Picchu was calling my name!  That made for a conundrum. Where will I be in August and what city should I fly out of?  I knew we’d be headed south on our RV adventure, so I looked at ticket prices at every major airport from Virginia to Florida.  Not surprisingly, the cheapest flights were out of Miami.  I booked through Miami which meant we had 70 days to get from Northern Virginia to the bottom of Florida.  Well, we made it and I left Florida for Peru on Aug 1, 2015.

The trip was organized by a Virginia/Maryland/DC Meetup.com travel group.  I went to Costa Rica last year with the group’s organizer, but the other travelers were strangers.  It turned out to be a great group of 6 guys and 25 gals. Continue reading →

Traveler or Camper?

Are you a traveler or camper?  Or maybe both?

For us, it’s mix of both.  Over the last several years, I started to nearly hate travelling.  Not all kinds of travelling though; more specifically airplane travel.  Going on long ice hockey road trips as a kid gave me my fair share of long car rides that I can tolerate.  It’s just my luck that many plane trips, that were supposed to only be 4 or 5 hours total, ended up taking 13 or 14 hours just to get home.  I hate the idea of going somewhere, especially for fun, only to have to burn 2 full days on travel.  Even for some recent business trips, I ended up getting stuck somewhere or really delayed.  Thus, I’ve grown tired of it. Continue reading →

“You’re Living the Dream!” Yeah, Right!

Yeah, right!  That’s what I’ve felt like saying this week to that statement.  After camping locally at home for 2 weeks prior to this, all was going well.  Then, we got on the road for the first long term trip.  We had 2 days of travel lined up to Smith Mountain Lake and Pigeon Forge, TN.  Should have been about 8 hours over both days.  Instead we ended up being on the road, most of it stranded, for 22 hours total.  That was because of these 3 tire blowouts. Continue reading →