We're on our way

 Monday May 3rd

We left Woodstock about 11am and drove over the mountains on Rt 4 into NY State.  Too as many back roads as we cold to make a bee line to Rochester, but ended up on the boring New York State Thruway for about 130 miles.  Drove betwen 55-60mph into a strong headwind to conserve gas.  Candace drove for about two houjrs to give her a feel for the van and allow me to relax and enjoy the stunning beauty of the highway.  We arrive at Denny and Arts house about 7pm.  Parked in their driveway and plugged in.  They had arrived just a little earlier returning from a reunion of Denny's nursing pals over in Manchester NH.   We had a delicious homemade pizza with beer and wine.   Kate Street and her boyfriend Chris came over to say hi and share their experience in driving through Ontario on the way to Michigan.

We fell into bed about 11:30 and slept soundly in a real bed until about 7:30.   Arty had already been up and off to work, but denny met us downstairs and made us toast and egges and sent us on our way by 9am.   We stopped just outside of Rochester and put in 16 gallons of gas at $2.99/gal.  Worked the average and we got just over 15mpg.  This is just about what I expected.

Drove west and crossed into Canada over the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls.  Continued west, arriving in Kitchener, Ontario about  1:15pm  Parked the Roadtrek in the visitor parking lot of the factory and fiddled around until 1:45.   We had a reservation for a 2pm factory tour.   The factory tour was quite interesting.   We saw new Roadtreks in varying degrees of completion.   There wasn't anything we saw that we liked better overall that our old '95 machine.  They are slicker and shinier, but the overall layout hasn'tmproved.

After the tour we drove over to Walmart to get a small storage container and to check about overnight parking. They didn't look very hospitable, so we decided to spend the night in the parking lot of the Roadtrek factory.   We stopped on the way back there at a Swiss Chalet because Katie Streeter said it was a "must do".   We had a good chicken meal.

Quiet evening in an industrial park.   This was  our first night boondocking it.  Nice weather, nice evening.  Had a drink in the van and as the sun set, I sit here finishing up today's notes.