The Final Report

Well, the laundry is in the washing machine, the fridge has been restocked, and the mighty Mirada is safely back at the RV place. Man alive, what a trip! A special thanks goes out to all of you whose homes we invaded, and a thank you, too, to all of you who have been keeping up with our adventures on the blog. Hopefully this won’t be the last time we pilot one of these babies, but for the immediate future, this chick is glad to be back on solid ground.

Here's a quick snapshot of our route for your appreciation:

And here are some official trip-ending stats and superlatives.

Days on the road: 21
Total gallons of gas consumed: 492
States visited: 18 (plus a drive by of the District of Columbia)
Miles driven: roughly 3,637
Black water dumps: 7
Large fiberglass items photographed: over 104 (counting all the dinosaurs at Dinosaur World, of course)
Best meal: Amish all-you-can-eat lunch and the cinnamon buns that followed (Amanda),
lobster boil on Cape Cod (DJ)
Place we’d most like to see again: Boston (Amanda), Niagara Falls (DJ)
Most hours driven in a row: 11 (DJ, from Indiana to Niagara Falls)
Coolest campsite: Cape Hattaras KOA in the Outer Banks
Craziest thing we fed to the baby: Sticky rice at dim sum in Boston
Worst driving experience: Detour through downtown Baltimore at 5:30pm on a Friday
due to our inability to go through a tunnel because we had a freaking propane tank
Favorite memory: Roxie getting her picture taken by crazy Japanese tourists (Amanda), Being on the Maid of the Mist with Roxie on his back (DJ)
Likelihood that Roxie will be subjected to an extended RV trip again in her lifetime: high

Thanks for tuning in, guys, and we look forward to having a chance to empty our chemical toilets into all of your storm drains someday soon!

BONUS PIC: Although this has nothing to do with our trip, I had to include the following picture for you Roxie fans out there. This is her Halloween costume -- she's a "cool chick," of course! :)

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Well, we have stayed at our last campsite (featuring a lovely duck pond, but no jumping pillow, dammit), eaten our last meal of microwave mac and cheese (for a while anyway), and have successfully dumped our chemical toilet for the last time, and we are precariously close to reaching home base in Atlanta as I speak. Due to Roxanne’s amusing sleep schedule (napping during the day in the car makes for a sleepless night), DJ and I are both happy but exhausted, and we’re looking forward to sleeping in our very own beddie-by in a few short hours. All that’s left to do tonight is remove every scrap of our stuff from the RV, clean all the available surfaces, put all of the stuff back in our house where it goes, eat dinner, go grocery shopping, pick up the mail … sigh. Maybe we’ll just stay in the Walmart parking lot tonight after all.

Although we are anticipating a triumphant return to Roswell in just a few short minutes (we are on 285 as I write this – if you are familiar with Atlanta, you can appreciate that driving an RV on 285 is an experience in itself), our trip, and our blog, is not quite over; I’ll be giving all the final stats here at the blog site in the next few days. Stay tuned for the post-game wrap-up!

The Outer Banks

It’s the last weekend of our big RV adventure, kids, and we’ve been parking in style at an oceanfront KOA campground in the Outer Banks on the coast of North Carolina. I say ocean front, not beach front, because between the whipping wind and freezing cold 8-foot waves, this is not so much like the “beach” (palm trees, drinks with umbrellas) as it a reminder of the many ways Mother Nature can kill you using 10 gabillion gallons of salt water. Just driving here on the ¼-mile wide island in the 20 mile-an-hour winds made me appreciate that in a hurricane, an RV in the Outer Banks is not the place to be. However, it really cool to see the water, and seeing as how we’ve been so busy throughout this trip, we decided to take inspiration from our beach environment and generally bum around all day.

We spent the morning camping in true Dobbs style – watching a few episodes of Project Runway with the trailer door open and eating microwave s’mores. When we got up the energy, we walked around the campsite and discovered, next to the mini-golf, what could possibly be the funnest way to hurt yourself ever: the jumping pillow. This is basically a giant inflatable bag thing that puffs up so that you can jump on it like a trampoline. Apparently, many of the KOAs we stayed at had these, but today was DJ’s and my first time on one (of course we didn’t discover these until the end of the trip), and we loved it so much, we did what any responsible parents would do: abandoned Roxie in her stroller so we could concentrate on double bouncing one another. It was awesome.

We also toddled down to the beach, but seeing as how it was only about 70 degrees and the winds were blowing, it was a bit short-lived. DJ was actually brave enough to get in the water however, and you can see below how he is having a great time nearly drowning in the rip tide and happily fleeing from the icy water.

David Hasselhoff, eat your heart out!

Tonight, we ate dinner at a little roadside joint within walking distance of the campground, and wandered back to the beach after sunset to check out the lovely full moon. Not too shabby as far as relaxation goes, and check out the nice view.

After 19 days, it’s hard to believe we have only one night left on the road, but we’ll be stopping through our last campsite tomorrow night in Florence, South Carolina, so we can arrive home in Atlanta on Tuesday. Here’s hoping they have a spot for us -- and a jumping pillow!

Special Bonus for Facebookers

By the way, for those of you on Facebook, DJ has been posting lots and lots of pictures on his home page. If the blog is just not enough Dobbs for ya, send your friend requests to DJ Dobbs on the 'Book and get the behind the scenes footage.

Jersey Girl

So despite my polite demeanor and complete lack of bangs, I was in fact born in New Jersey --and yesterday my dear buddy Jessica took us on an old home tour so I could show DJ and Roxanne the place from whence I came. For those of you who are fans of director Kevin Smith, I was technically born in Red Bank, the town made famous by his movie Clerks. Seeing as how I would have been in junior high school in rural New Jersey in 1988 – the very height of the acid wash and big hair years – I think I may have dodged a bullet by moving to Atlanta in 1986. However, it is lovely to have a chance to go back and see the old homestead off exit 109.

Although I was born in Red Bank, I grew up right around the corner in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and as it turns out, this little town is now a high dollar burg that boasts residents including the likes of Queen Latifah. But somethings never change – and thankfully one of them was my very favorite farmer’s market, a place called Delicious Orchards. They have the best freaking chocolate chip cookies in the history of the world (I measure all other chocolate chip cookies using these as the bar), and these cookies are such a hot property in my family, that I literally bought enough to fill the RV’s freezer to take home. God, they’re good.

Anyhow, for those of you who also grew up in Colts Neck (namely my siblings), here’s a shot of Jessica and I in front our old house on Dana Lane …

… and here’s us looking very maternal in front of the Delicious Orchards sign. (Her son, Julian, is 6 months old.)

We had a fabulous time.

On a fun, unrelated note: Roxanne Patricia has taken to saying the word “apple” when she’s hungry. She’s not really asking for an apple-related product, just putting together word sounds that happen to sound like a food. But when we showed her a real live, unpureed apple at Delicious Orchards, and she said “apple,” so we decided that after “momma” and “dadda,” apple is her real first word. Go Roxie! Other fun Roxie firsts on this trip have included going up an entire flight of stairs by herself (supervised of course), letting go and standing by herself for a minute (still in reach of momma), and blowing a kiss. She’ll be driving and heading off to college as soon as we get back, I’m sure.

Anyhow, this afternoon we’ll be braving the outskirts of Washington, D.C., on our way to an oceanfront campground in North Carolina where we intend to spend our last weekend on the road. More adventures soon as we head for the Mason-Dixon line!

Week 2 Summary and the State of State Signs

Miles traveled: 2,400
Additional states visited: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey

(for a total of 14)
Gallons of gas consumed: roughly 300

The State Signs
If I haven’t told you guys before, one of DJ’s very favorite things to do is stop by the side of the road and take pictures of the state line signs as we drive by. This does make for excellent pictures; however, the logistics of getting these pictures is a complete pain in the you-know-what. Typically, we are driving down a busy major highway when these signs occur, which means DJ slams on the brakes and pulls off on the precarious, often non-existent shoulder where the RV is steadily rocked by the backdraft of the huge semis rolling by just inches from our parked vehicle. I then have to unhook the baby from the car seat, stumble out of the RV, avoid getting hit by the semis, and then walk across an unmowed, bramble-filled, and snake-ridden field, rain or shine, and hold a heavy and squirmy Roxanne for 10 minutes so we can get the picture, praying that both we and RV will not get hit.

Needless to say, I hate these stops, but I do love DJ and the resulting pics, so I usually don’t grumble too much. Here are a few of the state sign pictures we’ve acquired so far – we missed a few states due to extremely precarious picture-taking conditions or darkness, but I feel confident that I will be subjected to many more of these by the time this trip is through.

Cape Cod: A Wicked Pissah

It’s hard to believe it was only yesterday, since we’ve had more adventures since, but yesterday we took the day to drive from Boston to Cape Cod. Seeing as how I’ve never been to Cape Cod before, I thought it was something like a single town on the beach – turns out the Cape is a whole region packed with cute and picturesque little towns filled with t-shirt shops and cheap lobster restaurants. In keeping with our spirit of adventure, we decided to drive to the furthest, most pointy end of Cape Cod to visit Provincetown, and therefore got to see lots of the lovely Cape Cod highway along the way.

While we were in Provincetown, I am proud to say that I achieved one of my culinary goals – I ate a real clambake, complete with lobster, that wasn’t mail-ordered. I achieved this at an awesomely tacky joint called the Lobster Pot, and I wore the plastic bib and everything as I sat amongst several retirees who had just been dropped off at the restaurant by a huge tour bus. For those of you Atlanta folks who have ever had lunch at the Colonnade, you can perfectly picture the environment of which I speak. Once again, Roxie, being the only person under the age of 30 for several hundred miles, was the belle of the ball and made lots of new blue-haired buddies as she played with her lobster.


It being the end of the season in Cape Cod and a weekday to boot, we basically had the place to ourselves (read: there ain’t nothing going on in Cape Cod on a Tuesday in October), but we amused ourselves anyway by finding two exciting new additions to the oversized tourist objects list.

Exhibit A:
Although this whale may technically only be oversized from Roxie’s perspective, we feel that it clearly counts due to the fact that it achieves a critical role in tackiness: displaying the name of the place you are visiting as proof to your friends that you’ve been there. There is no fiberglass whale that says “Atlanta,” I assure you.


Exhibit B:

Although I would like to claim this is fiberglass, the single vineyard on Cape Cod was actually classy enough to use wood for this giant wine barrel. But again, the tackiness is still inherent. To enhance your wine drinking experience, this place sells most of their wine in lighthouse-shaped bottles (raise your hands if you have one at your house), which make lovely hostess gifts. Note: if we are staying at your house during the remainder of our trip, you will be getting a lighthouse-shaped bottle of wine as your hostess gift.

We also took a few minutes to stick our toes in the sand at one of the many beaches and took some cute family shots with the pretty sky in the back. Sears Portrait Studio, eat your heart out.

Today, we made our way down the coast and over the Tappan Zee Bridge to visit my buddy Jessica and her husband Neill in the town I grew up in: Colts Neck, New Jersey. We have already had an amazing dinner with them, and tomorrow, I am looking forward to dragging DJ and Roxie to old haunts that they could care less about as we eat the awesome chocolate chip cookies from my favorite local farmers market.

More on that tomorrow!