Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Does this diesel make us look fat?

Well, we jettisoned as much weight as we could before setting out this morning, hoping that lightening the load might help with speed (or lack of) issue. We threw out the garbage, wasted water, ate all the goodies, I even let the kids into my stash of organic green iced tea - as long as they agreed to take full advantage of the campground facilities ... if you get my drift. And speaking of which, we took our first dump. I mean, we used the campground's dump station to ... ahem ... lighten our load somewhat.

"This is disgusting!" declared Sierra, who was lounging on her bunk and scarfing down a chocolate chip granola bar. "How many times are we going to have to do this?" As if she were the one, not John, who was out there with nothing but a thin hose between him and the flying fecal matter.

Losing weight did seem to help some, as we practically zipped down the road, sometimes getting up to 50 miles an hour! Still, what with truckers helpfully waving us over to let us know that big gray clouds of smoke were billowing out from underneath us, and John stopping to check that we were not, indeed, on fire, and because we are leaking diesel and getting all of 8 miles to the gallon, we have to stop to fill up more often than my grandmother has to pee, we were lucky to make it from Cooperstown to Niagara Falls in only seven hours! My mother was under the impression that we were making this drive on chicken fat - she meant used vegetable grease. Which would have been nice - and smelled ever so much better if it were leaking. But RVs that run on grease are distresssingly hard to find (I know, what's wrong with this country?) and finding an RV that we could run on bio-diesel - while not ideal - still seemed like a more environmentally sound option than straight gas. Not cheap, but environmentally sound. Sane? Well, that's a whole 'nother thing!

So now we are camped (READ: plugged in) for the night at an RV campground that looks a bit like a retirement village and more than a bit like a parking lot. Tomorrow's agenda includes trying to fix the leak and figure out how far we actually can continue on this journey before being declared legally insane. Oh, also it would be nice to see some Falls. I hear they have them somewhere around here.

We might not be making much progress, but we are laughing. It's like a Third World vacation, right here in North America!

I'll keep you posted,
Eve

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