On to Northfied, MN

 

Pretty Barn in Kankakee

 

We left Kankakee, Illinois and drove to a nice campground in Wisconsin. We wanted to get away from Chicago so we found a KOA in Wisconsin that positioned us for the drive the next day to Northfield easily. KOAs provide water, electric, and sewer, but for us they put us too close to other campers. We like them when we're just staying for the night. The one we stayed in was small, and there was a pool within a stones throw of our site. The pools are usually small and are loaded with kids so, generally we just don't use them.

Odd signs in WI

The park was kind of empty, and at one point, the sound of the kids was gone. We actually heard the sound of silence. It was so hot, and we were tired from driving and navigating. We rushed to get our suits on, and had the most peaceful half hour in this peaceful pool. Ahhhhh.

The next morning we hitched up and drove to Steve's sister's farmhouse. The drive was nuts! Construction was everywhere! And to say it rained is such an understatement. The most eventful part was leaving WI and entering MN. It was pouring, and the Interstate was down to two lanes of traffic facing each other with next to no barriers between the cars, oh and trucks. We should be dead right now. Two trucks, one behind the other, passed us and splashed tidal waves on the windshield. We barely took a breath from truck 1, when truck 2 did the same thing. I'm shaky again just thinking of Steve driving while blind and hauling a trailer.

Kris, Richard, and Steve

No caption necessary! Yum!

We had a very nice relaxing stay at Kris' house. Steve's friend Richard joined us every day and we did simple friend and family things. We went to IKEA, it's weird how they all look alike. We went out to eat, chatted, did laundry, played with dogs, oh and Kris made caramel rolls for us. Kris is known for her caramel rolls. And they are awesome. We enjoyed seeing the remodeling on the house. She even had the yard sprayed for mosquitoes, which I thought was nice, but unnecessary. Until I left her property taking Sophie for a walk. I was attacked by mosquitoes. So, thank you Kris!

We said our goodbyes and left for the pure site seeing, tourist part of our trip. We were off to Michigan!

 

 

 

 

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Our First Big Trip---The Rally

The AltoGroup

We took our first long trip in the Alto in July, 2015. The whole trip was centered around meeting up with my Alto friends on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. We decided that since we were already on our way "out west" we would "swing by" and see Steve's sister and his friend just south of Minneapolis. Then on the way back we'd go to the Upper Peninsula, MI and visit Sleeping Bear Dunes, National Seashore.

Leslie, Barry, and Nella.

We arrived at a ferry to get to Kelleys Island. So many firsts for us--first long trip, first time with a trailer (and kayaks) on a ferry, first time for Sophie on a boat of any kind. The ride was great and we arrived, quite nervous, to the campground. This was the first time we met my Facebook friends in person. The smiles and hugs were genuine, and the spouses who do not participate in the FB group hit it off. How special. One by one the families arrived. We had a meet and greet the first night, and wow, everyone had fun.

The next day we toured each trailer getting ideas and inspiration. We went to the beach with my friend Leslie, her husband Barry, their daughter Nella. Later we met for dinner and a training session on towing! We met for breakfast and planned the next rallies, next year on the west coast, and two years from now on the east coast. Leslie and I will plan the east coast rally, and another friend, Alissa will plan the west coast rally with the help of someone yet to be named.

Steve and I met a couple at the campground, who had nothing to do with Rally. This young couple just became engaged, the guy was a chatty fellow. They had a golf cart, and I swear, no matter where we were we saw them. The chatty one knew us as Karen and Steve and would pop out of nowhere and offer us rides. The Alto clan thought we knew people on the Island, but we were from Maryland... They were curious about the Altos, saying they'd never seen one before, and wondered how so many of these things they'd never seen before ended up in Ohio, here, at this campground. Was it a coincidence? They were a cute couple and we wished them well.

Kelleys Island was pretty. We had free time to drive and walk around the island. So many people had bikes. The bikes will be a subject for another post down the road. Here are a couple of pictures from the island.

 

 

Alissa and Richard

We said goodbye after our breakfast, knowing we would chat with each other online, and see one another at a future trip. We headed west towards MN and camped south of Chicago with Alissa and husband Richard, our Alto friends from CA. We went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Kankakee. The food was great and so was the company. We also sat through a huge mid western style rain storm, pretty scary.

 

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Learning the Technical Side of Blogging

When Life gives you lemons...

So far, I've tried WordPress, Blogger, and now Blogsy with Blogger to get this blog up and going. If I just wanted to blog from my PC at home, it would be easy peasy, but nooooo, I want to do this on vacation, on an iPad. Oh, and I forgot to mention I want to include pictures. Really, I didn't think I was asking for a lot, but given Apple's level of sharing pictures, and expecting an app or a mobile-ish browser to deal with this gets complicated.

WordPress was too deep in functionality for what I wanted to do, and when I tried to share the blog I discovered that the reader had to sign up for a WordPress account. That didn't seem like a reasonable thing to ask people to do. Also I couldn't figure out how to include images unless I was on the PC, which was absolutely unacceptable. So I looked at the blogs some of my friends are using, which led me to Google's Blogger.

I'll surf for a minute and mention that what I'm blogging about has to do with travels in our Alto. Keeping a blog like that open to the public doesn't seem like a good idea. We're away from the house for weeks at a time, and I just don't think it's a good idea to put that out there in the public space. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'd like to say I'm playing it smart. So, I want to be able to control who can see what I write.

Back to Blogger. Blogger seemed easy enough although I had to reorient my brain to the software. Steve was working with me through all of this trial, so that was wonderful. I was able to start the blog on the PC, cut and paste my posts from WordPress, include pictures, edit, etc----but that was all done on the PC.

Now for the iPad. I could get to it from the browser, and there was even an app. The problem with the browser is that I can't edit anything. The post will not scroll in the edit window. I tried Chrome and Safari, no go. But wait, there's an app! I noticed the low rating for the app, but I still had hope. I'll just summarize and say the app received the ratings it deserved.

Steve to the rescue. Steve found the Blogsy app that works as a front end to lots of blogging software including Blogger. Yet another interface to try out, but I want to do this. Blogsy works quite well on the iPad except for the picture problem. I just moved all of my pictures to Google Photos and love it. I even deleted my Camera Roll pictures. But Blogsy works with Google Picassa. The process we finally worked out is to move images from Google Photos to Camera Roll outside of Blogsy. Then I move from Camera Roll to the blog. Lots of steps, but I can manage it. I can size and place the images and add captions in the post. I couldn't do that with any other method I tried on the iPad. I still have to test how this works offline since I won't have wifi at many campgrounds. I have faith it will work. ;-) The line spacing hasn't been conquered, but I'll proceed from here.

So I'll close with the security/privacy concern I have. If I invite people to my blog they have to sign in to Google first. If you got this far, you know that! Let me know if you thought that was objectionable.

 

 

 

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Catching up 2014

The proud parents picking up the Alto. Look closely for Denis.

Since I didn’t start this blog until August 2015, I thought it would be helpful to run through our first trips.

We went on our maiden voyage September, 2014. Driving to pick up our Alto was such fun, we both felt like kids on a special trip. Sophie dutifully put up with our long drive by riding in her kennel, taking potty breaks whenever we did, and staying in her first hotels. We ate lunch at parks along the road, and started the habit of giving Sophie a piece of apple for a lunch snack. A habit that continues.

Lake in Up State NY

There were so many little stories during that trip. We camped for a couple of days near the showroom just in case we needed help. During that trip we imported our little gem, got Sophie across the boarder in both directions, without anyone caring, and we drove for 12 hours approaching a campground in New York in the dark. I even asked Siri when the sun set. We discovered you can never believe Google when it tells you how long it will take to drive from here to there. We also learned to recalibrate our thinking on how often to get gas. And we became aware of just how much we didn’t know about backing up. We discovered what a Jerry can is. There were close calls of all kinds, but we made it.

We made it home proud as can be. During the fall we camped within three hours or so from home, taking quite a few trips. We went to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, camping at Janes Island State Park, my personal favorite in MD, and took short trips to Berlin, and Assategue. We saw the ponies up close for the first time. We chased the beautiful turning leaves near Harper’s Ferry, Swallow Falls, and the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Assategue National Park

After camping in beautiful weather, pouring rain, wind, freezing and hot temperatures, and we never tired of it. In mid November, we put antifreeze in her veins and put her away for the winter.

In the fall I found the Altoistes group on Facebook. There were only a handful of members at the time. Finally, there were other owners to talk to. The group slowly grew throughout the winter. We shared stories, stuff, campgrounds, and most importantly we became buddies.

We drove over 2,000 miles! Wahoo!

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Where Do I Begin?

We’ve been asked lots of times how we found the Alto, how we even started camping. So, I’ll do my best to connect the dots.

Everything started with retirement. We both worked for lots of years in IT, and loved our jobs. That all changed at the end of our careers. My job became painful after so many years of pure joy when the job I loved the most fell apart after my political boss was forced to leave my agency and I was “placed” somewhere. That had never happened before and after 35 years it was time to go. Steve had a similar feeling about loving his job, but then things got really slow, after so many changes, acquisitions, and offshore kinds of things. Oh well, we both had great careers for so many years and it was time to quit. I retired a year before Steve, and then he joined me. All was great. I had my cooking, gardening, and volunteer activities and Steve had his wood shop, politics and Internet reading. We were never bored.

One day, coming back from Annapolis we saw a little teardrop going down the road. I had never seen one, Steve couldn’t believe that, and so later we started Googling. I remembered the fun I had as a kid in a truck camper, Steve remembered camping years ago, and I guess we started dreaming. Oh, and did I mention the dog? We, I should say I, knew I wanted to travel but I didn’t want to leave Sophie in a kennel a lot. Sophie problem solved. A couple of days later I had scheduled knee surgery, and couldn’t walk well for a couple of weeks so there was plenty of time to chase down this new dream we were developing.

And dream we did. We Googled every thing we could think of from “teardrop” to “cute teardrop” and kept ending up at the Safari Condo Alto site. I even subscribed to a magazine the Pop up Times just so I could read the article they wrote on the Alto. We chewed on it for 2 months. It all seemed so mysterious. We would have to buy it in Canada, there were none in US showrooms, it was expensive, and we had to call the dealer to find out anything. After seeing what other companies had to offer, we just couldn’t get the Alto out of our heads. We made the call to Alto.

We spoke with the salesman, we arranged a visit with an owner in Northern Virginia, and we were in love. We placed our order, waited 10 months for our maiden voyage. And we haven’t regretted a moment.

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