Cleveland to Buffalo

Day 1 - Sunday - Cleveland was great! Made it in 7 hours, got settled at the local KOA and took a drive to Lakewood to see my birthplace home. We dropped into Malley's Candies - apparently my mother's favorite hangout back in the day - for some delicious ice cream from the vintage soda shop. YUM!

Day 2 - Monday - The Roof - First in line at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see some pretty cool relics.

From there, we decided to forego the night at the campground and hit the road a day early for Boston, deciding that the long drive would be better broken up over two days. As Murphy's Law was due to swoop in at anytime, we clipped a large tree branch on the left hand turn out of the camp site - scraping the corner of the roof the entire way down the camper. Ronnie got out to look and, sure enough, the rubber roof was punctured and frayed ALL THE WAY DOWN the side of the camper. Called our RV repair guy who told us that those roofs have to be replaced entirely, they can't be patched, to the tune of about $8,000.

The next call was to our insurance agent.

Had to stop at the local Lowe's to get strong adhesive to patch the roof - so our drive out of Cleveland was delayed by a few hours.

Black Tank - That's campers term for poop tank.

Made it to Buffalo, NY to find a KOA with a campsite available just on the other side of the city. We were SO CLOSE to Niagara Falls! As Murphy would have it, it became overcast and started to rain, which brought the daylight to a close a little earlier than expected. So we pulled into the KOA in the dark, in the pouring rain. Have I mentioned that campgrounds are not well lit at night - like at all?!

I'm outside under an umbrella helping to direct Ronnie with a hard left (again) to squeeze into the tiny site that they assigned to us. He is halfway in the site and sticks his head out the window, "I can't go any more - the wheel has hit on something". He puts it to the gas and I heard something crunch. uh oh. Turns out it's a rock that they've put down literally in the grass next to the pavement - to block any camper wheels from rolling over the sewer cover in the ground. Well, our black tank (poop tank) tubing hangs really low off of this rig, so the tubing hit the rock, and the connector came completely off, breaking off two of the four connection pieces for the hose to fit to the pipe. Basically that meant we couldn't connect the black tank hose from the camper to the sewer in the ground.

Try telling two 50+ aged campers they can't use their camper's toilet for the next two weeks - not gonna fly. We were already disgusted from the rain and the roof damage (it's only day 2) that we didn't disconnect the truck or open the slide outs - and slept tilted in the camper that night.