DAY 15 – PART II: AVOIDING DECAPITATION WHILE RVing!
As I hinted yesterday, we had quite an interesting adventure last night. After the doctor told us to immediately head back to Maine, in case Richard’s condition worsened, we hit the road. I had to drive because Richard was loopy from the Benadryl injection. I wanted to get back to Maine quickly, but I knew I couldn’t drive all night long because I hadn’t had much sleep the two previous nights.
Richard pulled out his laptop and Mapquested the distance between our location in New Jersey and Bangor, Maine. It was about 11 hours. I thought I could drive another four hours that night, arriving at our sleeping destination just before dark. Richard decided a hotel would be best because he wasn’t up to unpacking/packing the RV and doing the sewer/water/electric hook-ups. I don’t mind driving after dark, but I have a very difficult time seeing the road after dark when it’s raining. And, yes, it WAS raining AGAIN!
We hit some New Jersey traffic just outside of Newark, which slowed us down. We stopped at a diner where Mason and I had breakfast for dinner while Richard and Max had…dinner for dinner.
We got back on the road and saw a highway sign that said “New England” and directed us to two major
interstates. Richard said the GPS was telling us to go a different way that would cut an hour off our trip. So, we did what the GPS lady said. Big mistake…
It was quickly getting dark and it was pouring. We ended up on a parkway somewhere. It was pitch black and I could barely see the white stripes on the road because of sheets of rain coming down. Somebody honked at me at one point. I didn’t know why…at the time. Richard got up to go to the bathroom at one point. After he got up, I noticed an underpass looming within just a few feet. It was REALLY low. Oh my God. I didn’t think we’d clear it. It sloped down in the right-hand side. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to scream. I instinctively ducked in my seat, expecting the instant impact. We cleared it!!!
I started freaking out. A dozen thoughts went through my head at the same time. If we’d hit that bridge, we’d have all been severely injured or killed, especially Richard because he was in the bathroom and not buckled in. I started looking for trucks. None. How many times are you on a busy highway and can’t see a truck? Never! I was looking on our lanes and the oncoming lanes. NO TRUCKS!!! WE WERE ON A CARS-ONLY HIGHWAY!! OH MY GOD!!!!! Another underpass could come at any second. I slowed down dramatically. Richard came back from the bathroom and had to listen to my dozen thoughts in a stream of frantic, high-pitched babbling. We found an exit pretty quickly, got off, breathed two huge sighs of relief. Sure enough, there on the entrance ramp (by the exit ramp) was a sign that showed trucks weren’t permitted on the road. Of course, in the pouring-down rain and in the dark, we hadn’t seen the sign when we’d gotten on earlier. And, the GPS didn’t warn us, either. Richard says we need a new one.
We found ourselves in a dark, pretty darned swank neighborhood somewhere in New Jersey / New
York. I’m really not quite sure where we were. It was dark, still pouring, and there were no street lights. The road was a VERY winding road. I was crawling in the RV at about 10 mph, around and around the trees that hugged each curve. The branches were high enough. I thanked heaven for companies like UPS that drive high vehicles on obscure neighborhood streets, keeping the clearance high for the rest of us. We drove for about half an hour without ever passing another car. I felt like we were going in circles, passing one huge mansion after another, each set far back from the road, with almost no light to lead our way. Richard was using the GPS to guide us through those back roads to an Interstate. It took about an hour to find our way out of that maze.
We finally got back on an Interstate and were relieved to once again be cruising with our trucker friends (truckers are very kind to RVers). I told Richard I didn’t want to drive another hour in the dark and rain to get to that hotel he’d called. I told him to find the nearest hotel with the GPS and we’d just pray they had a room. I had to drive another 15 miles or so but we found a Marriot that had plenty of rooms and lots of space in their parking lot for the RV.
I can’t even describe the relief of turning off the engine that night. What an, um, adventure our day and night had been! After bathing Mason, who had Cheetohs in his hair, the boys crawled into bed and I
was finally able to check my email. There were no emergencies so I posted an emergency note to our
website for our authors, stating I’d be offline all day Friday, and I tried to get some sleep. It wasn’t easy because I was still worrying about Richard.