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!

Special Bonus Post -- Part 3: From Boston

DJ was so fast in uploading pictures that I am able to share a special bonus post tonight of how we spent our day today in Boston. After schleping our 8,000 pounds of crap from our hotel room into the rental car, we drove into Boston and went on the famous Boston Ducks Tour. We were familiar with the Ducks from our time in Seattle, but for those who are not, the Ducks are huge amphibious vehicles made popular during World War II. Nowadays, many major cities honor the noble history of these crafts by painting them strange colors and packing them full of tourists who make quacking noises when commanded to do so by the tour guide. (See below. We were on the orange one.)

We had fun taking Roxie on the Duck, and she managed to stay awake for much of the history portion this time. We learned interesting things, including the fact that Boston had the first public borrowing library, and that our tour guide thought the movie The Departed was "awesome," but "had a lot of swears." Here's Roxie taking it all in.

We also went to the "Top of the Hub," which is local slang for visiting the observation deck on the top of the Prudential Tower. It was really cool to see everything from above. In the pic below, you can see the big green space that is Boston Common above DJ's head toward the top of the picture as well as the Longfellow Bridge (named for the poet) that connects Boston and Cambridge over to the left. Once more, Roxie was so enthused, she fell asleep in her carrier.

DJ also put together this awesome panoramic -- it's pretty small here, but you can see Boston on the right, Boston Common, the Charles River, and Cambridge across the water.
We're back in the RV tonight, and if all goes well, we're going to spend the day in Cape Cod tomorrow. I'm looking forward to sharing some fun cod-related facts then!

P.S. Our passing through town seemed to have a negative effect on the post-season hopes of local baseball teams. The Chicago Cubs were eliminated shortly after our visit, and the Red Sox had an error filled game that they lost in extra innings last night. However, please do not riot and tip over our trailer, Red Sox fans -- we got out of town and the Red Sox won tonight, so we took our bad luck out here to the suburbs.

Boston: History, Schmistory … Where’s the Food?

Ok, part 2 to make up for my lack of posting ... Boston, Massachusetts!

We spent this past weekend in the greater Boston area with our host and hostess with the mostest, Jean and Jay. Boston sure is chock full of history – and we appreciated this history to the fullest extent by lurching from eating establishment to eating establishment and looking at it out the window as we consumed mass quantities of food that had not been heated up in our RV microwave. In fact, this was the first time since we left Atlanta nearly two weeks ago that we abandoned the beast for more than a day or two – we parked it safely at a campground and rented a car to drive in to Boston, a wise move based on Boston’s notorious streets and drivers.

On Friday, we met Jean at Legal Seafoods in Cambridge and admired the MIT campus out the window as we ate clam chowder and drank sangria. From there we ventured down to Fenway Park, where Roxie celebrated the home of the Red Sox by falling asleep in her carrier.

We actually walked from there to Boston Common by way of Newbury Street, Boston’s high-dollar shopping district, which was about a two-mile hike. To compensate for this exercise, we promptly went to lovely brew pub in Cambridge for dinner and ate duck sausage and drank pumpkin beer.

The next day, we wanted to celebrate Boston’s history as a hub of international culture and its long years as a welcoming seaport for immigrants of many nations. We did this by eating ridiculous amounts of dim sum in Chinatown and then walking to the Italian neighborhood in the North End to buy pastry. This was both DJ and Roxie’s first dim sum experience, and they both rocked out with some killer hum bao (Chinese barbeque pork in a sweet dough) and other items selected by Jay.

On the way to the North End, we saw Faneuil Hall, the State House, and some other historical stuff about Paul Revere and Sam Adams, but really, how can one compare seeing authentic Revolutionary War landmarks to the sugar-laden glory that is a “Lobster Tail” from Mike’s Pastry? I was remiss in not getting a picture of this delicacy – it is flaky triangular baked thing about 17 inches long and piped full of sweetened ricotta and pastry cream. I guess you guys will just have to settle for this picture of us in front of some statue instead. (Sam Adams in front of Faneuil Hall for those who care about patriots more than pastry.) Roxie also chose to celebrate this historical site by sleeping in her carrier.

To complete our food-induced-coma tour, Jean and Jay invited us for dinner last night, and we had a lovely night reminiscing about high school and eating prime rib and sweet potato casserole, as well as the pastry Lobter Tail. They took us on a late night tour through Harvard Square, so once again, we were able to appreciate the history of this city as we sat on our well-satiated behinds. I love this town.

OK! OK! I'm blogging! I'm blogging!

Hi guys – we were off having adventures and I haven’t have a moment to stop and write until now. Little did I know that my humble blog was regular reading material until I got yelled at by friends and relatives alike for my lack of posts! My bad! I'm so glad you guys are having fun reading our updates, and as a reward for your patience, I will be doing a double dose of blogging tonight and will cram this puppy chock full of pics. First, I must post the promised pictures of Niagara Falls … see if you find Roxie as fascinating as our 10,000 Japanese tourist friends.


Here's Roxie and DJ enjoying the Maid O' the Mist. Note the handsome blue ponchos that we were asked to wear, which were pretty much a dry cleaning bag with a hood glued on. Although they did give us a child size one for Roxie, we erred on the side of non-suffocation, and kept her in her little pink raincoat.

You can see just how beautiful the weather was from the pic below. When your lips are blue, you know you're having fun. See how the wind is whipping my poncho around in a jolly fashion?

Our reward for braving the rain was this purty rainbow over the American Falls. It really set off the handsome colors in the many ponchos.

Below is a picture from DJ's favorite part of the day. It was when he got to take off his perfectly dry hiking boots and socks in a damp and humid public place and put on his free foam safety sandals so that he could walk down slippery wooden decking directly next to the waterfall in 50 degree weather in what amounted to bare feet. They call this the Cave of the Winds tour. Between these shoes and the suffocation-dry-cleaning-bag ponchos, we've never felt safer.

Roxie P, as usual, found this whole experience to be hilarious and fun. Holy crap, she is such a good baby!

Those are some of the highlights, but as anyone who knows DJ knows, there are literally hundreds of thousands of additional pictures of Niagara Falls available on his hard drive from this day of our trip. We will no doubt send a link to these at some point, which you can delete at your leisure. Also available for your enjoyment is a shaky handheld video of the ENTIRE Maid O' the Mist experience, from the time we left the dock until we were back on land. Why go to Niagara yourselves when you can see what DJ saw? Why indeed. :)

Ok-- that's post #1. Post #2 from Boston is above!

Niagara Falls

So after 8 hours in the car, which included a few hours of white knuckle driving in the pitch black and pouring rain (DJ was calm, I was the one white-knuckling), we arrived at Niagara Falls on Wednesday night. After I vowed we would never drive the RV at night again, we slept late, and when we woke up, we decided to do the most awesomely touristy thing possible: a 4-hour tour of the greater Niagara Falls area, which included such exciting stops as Goat Island, Prospect Point, the falls themselves, and the required-by-law boat ride on the Maid of the Mist, a precariously small boat that takes you in the scary, swirling water direclty below the falls.

The weather was cooperating in the morning, but by the time we did our tour it was roughly 50 degrees and raining – just the sort of weather one hopes for when visiting icy cold spraying waterfalls. I must say, though, that despite the weather everything was really cool to see, and Roxanne Patricia officially wins the Best Baby in the World medal for both good humor and endurance. This 10-month-old kid was in a backpack for 4 hours in the soaking wet rain (we did have a very cozy fleece-lined rain coat and warm clothes on her, for those dialing Child and Family Services), getting in and out of the car, doing what some would consider boring touristy things, and she literally did not make a peep. In fact, during the Maid of the Mist boat ride, she would smile and giggle every time the freezing-cold spray from the waterfall hit her in the face. Remind me to buy this kid a college education or something.

Roxie was so good that apparently we weren’t the only one who noticed: after we got off the Maid of the Mist, the copious Japanese tourists who rode with us were fascinated by Roxanne and her fancy American-style backpack carrier, and they literally asked us to pose with her in front of Niagara Falls so they could take a picture. I’m not sure if they were doing this so that they could secretly steal our wallets, but I can tell you that somewhere in Tokyo, someone will soon be sitting through a boring vacation slide show that will include a smiling and soaking wet Roxie P.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the pictures yet from DJ’s camera, but I’ll definitely post some as soon as he downloads them. We got some awesome shots of a rainbow over the falls because of the rain, as well as some good pictures of DJ wearing the handsome free sandals and yellow poncho that were required for the “Cave of the Winds” tour.

As we hit the road from upstate New York today, we are heading toward Boston, Massachusetts, to visit my good buddy Jean and her hubby, Jay. We are very excited to see them and to show Roxie yet another city on the mighty RV tour. Look for tales from Boston soon!

P.S. We didn't make it to the cutesy town Niagara-on-the-Lake, but shout out to my buddy Meggan H. anyway for the info. We'll keep it for next time!

Week One Scorecard

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been on the road for one week today! Here are a few fun stats for you making wagers at home.

Miles traveled: 1,422
States enjoyed: Georgia, Tennesee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan (technically just a border crossing, but still enjoyable), Ohio, Pennsylvania, and, if all goes well tonight, New York.
Gallons of gas consumed: roughly 150 (two full tank fill ups)

And I just wanted to share a few snapshots of RV living, too.

Here’s Roxie’s regular bathtub.

And the kiddo waiting for momma to go grocery shopping.

And here is one of my favorite random signs -- it reads "Exotic Meats: Direct from Nature!" and has an elderly Asian man on the the side. I'm not sure if the Asian man was the propietor or if typically meat DOESN'T come from nature, but trust me, if we had had time, we would have stopped here to find out.

Full report from Niagara Falls tomorrow -- we're still on the road in Pennsylvania, so hopefully we'll be there in time to catch the tour bus in the morning!

Cheese curds for everyone!

Greetings from Wisconsin and Indiana! Yesterday morning we got up and moving relatively early at my Aunt Shirley’s house, and we were on the road by 9:00 am for a full day of driving. However, we were forced by the RV gods to make an immediate stop at the International House of Wine and Cheese right up the street in order to acquire a critical item from the state of Wisconsin: cheese curds. Typically these little nuggets of cheese are battered and deep fried, but let me tell you, after a long day in the car, they are freaking tasty right out of the zip top pouch. We enjoyed them in true RV style – off a paper plate while drinking wine out of brightly colored plastic wine glasses. Klassy.

We spent the night last night in lovely Middlebury, Indiana, which as it turns out is not only in the middle of Amish country, but also is home to many major RV manufacturers. Had we known that in advance, we would have certainly allowed more time in this town to see a good ol’ fashioned Amish RV raising (“Ishmael! Hand me ye olde comode seat!”), but as it was, we had a good time threatening to run the little Amish buggies off the road with our menacing RV girth.

We did eat at a lovely family style Amish restaurant and bakery called Der Essenhaus for lunch today, though. The menu was all you can eat fried chicken, dressing, mashed potatoes, bread, corn, Amish noodles, and various other carbs – plus a slice of home-made pie for dessert. As I type this, I am swinging between the best sugar high of my life and a complete Thanksgiving-style carb coma. It was fantastic. Even Roxanne was logey after chomping on several handfuls of Amish noodles. The same goes for DJ, unfortunately, since our schedule for today involves driving nearly 8 hours from this point to Niagara Falls, and that means pulling into the RV park at 10:00 p.m. As anyone who has ever attempted to hook up a hose to a chemical toilet in the dark knows, this may make for an interesting night. Ah well, wish us luck.

More to come tomorrow, but before I go, I wanted to share this little piece of RV humor that was published in the newsletter of the KOA where we stayed. If I ever cross-stitch this onto a pillow, you’ll know I’ve gone over the edge.

Camper’s Prayer
God bless our traveling home,
And guide us everywhere we roam.
Help us find the roads we seek,
But please don’t let the plumbing leak.
Save us, Lord, from engine trouble,
And mechanics that would charge us double.
Lord, as we cross the USA,
Bless us with sunshine every day.
As we travel the country near and far,
Let us remember who you are.
Our Lord who watches over all,
Could you please let gas prices fall?
Lead us safely to good food and friends,
And when at last our journey ends,
Grant our rolling home sweet rest,
Until its next endurance test.