Getting Home!

After some trouble with the tongue jack deciding not to go up or down via it's crank, we got on the road with a focus of getting home more than sight-seeing. While there's some interesting stuff to see between Illinois and New York it's an area that we can explore during a shorter trip sometime in the future. The first day is one we had looked forward to the least, traveling past the the Chicago and South Bend area on I-80. At the beginning of this trip we found this area to be the most stressful high-speed highway driving that we had ever been in with the trailer. Now heading the other direction it proved to be super slow congestion and construction zones that made this area difficult. We had considered several alternate routes, but in the end made decisions that still in the thickest traffic of the trip. One high point while in crawling traffic was the interest that the Shasta would get from truckers and others asking about it from adjacent lanes. Mostly the typical questions like "what year is that?" and "did you restore it yourselves?" We also found that folks did pay attention to us and would make room if we needed to change lanes, etc... something that would not be happening if we looked just like any other vehicle on the road. Our goal was to stay at Pokagon again near the Indiana/Ohio border where we spent the first night, but when we go there we found it to be full. Oh yeah, Friday night.. We had been traveling for so long without reservations that this caught us a bit by surprise. A few phone calls later we ended up one town over in Angola, IN at Circle-B Campground. Over the course of the trip we stayed in a huge variety of campgrounds but Circle-B was different. Most of the guests in the park used it as a summer place at the lake and while they had a site for us, it was unusual for a one-night stay, especially in a small vintage camper. As I was setting the jack stands a golf cart drove up asking if we were in the Tin Can Tourists. Turns out the couple had the resident odd-ball camper in the park, a 70's Airstream and they had been to the the big TCT rally at Camp Dearborn in Michigan a couple of times. The next morning we pulled out early and made an uneventful dash for home in time to have Sunday to recover before getting back to our routine lives. So that's it for our trip... 3 weeks, 4,200 miles, 11 campgrounds, and 12 states. Time to start planning next years trip!