Crossing Ohio

I slept fitfully and dreamed of flooded subways. Faintly through the earplugs I could hear water still dripping. Sometime in the middle of the night, the insulating panel behind my head fell off the wall and landed on my face, waking me up. My knee ached, because I had badly bruised and scraped it while scrambling over the couch trying to put drip-catchers in place last night. It wasn't a good night...but I consoled myself by thinking that at least the ceiling over the bed wasn't the place that was dripping.

When I got up around 7:30, I found that the original drip had slowed to a few times a minute, but a new drip was falling every three seconds from the corner of the fluorescent ceiling lamp about six inches aft of the vent. I repositioned my bowls to catch the new drips, then got dressed and climbed up on the roof, hoping against hope to see something obvious—a large pool of water, a hole in the roof, something I could fix. No such luck.

Gertie is one of the last Lazy Daze coaches to be built with an aluminum roof in sections—all the LD's in the last fifteen years or so have had seamless one-piece aluminum roofs—and so there are eight or nine roof seams, plus nine or ten air vents, holding tank vents and other penetrations. All of these are sealed with liberal applications of Parlastic, a sealant that doesn't easily form a nice smooth bead. In short, the caulked seams are rough-looking and dirty, and it's impossible to tell where the water is getting in.

The roof itself is filthy with grime washed down from the trees under which I park Gertie when I'm at home. If I were to undertake a major resealing job, I'd have to first clean the roof thoroughly—and with New Jersey in a drought emergency and vehicle washing punishable by a fine up to $5,000, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

As for making repairs on the road...well, I do carry a large tube of Parlastic, but unless I know exactly where to put it (and thoroughly clean off all the old sealant beforehand), it won't do me any good. A better solution would probably be Eternabond tape, but all I have is a 6" x 6" Eternabond patch—suitable for fixing holding tanks or the occasional small meteor puncture, but nowhere near big enough to do me any good in sealing seams. It's not that I'm chintzy when it comes to carrying spares and emergency supplies, but the 4" wide Eternabond tape costs $79 per 37' roll, and I felt that was just too steep to justify buying a roll "in case." Well, I should have bought it anyway. I could at least have applied it around the vent. Maybe I can find some at the Escapade.

It was a rather gloomy breakfast. I had to sit on the opposite side of the table from my usual place in order to avoid being dripped on, and the monotonous plop...plop...plop of water into the stainless steel mixing bowls a couple of feet away did nothing to improve my spirits. I even forgot to put blueberries on my granola. Paging through the Ohio campground brochures I'd picked up yesterday, I found a couple of state parks in northwestern Ohio that looked to be within an hour's drive of Van Wert, the location of the Escapade get-together. I tried calling one of them, Grand Lake St. Marys [sic], but only got an answering machine. Since it was after 10:00 by this time, I figured I'd better start driving and try again later. But truthfully, what I felt most like doing was going back to bed.

Before getting underway I repositioned the drip bowls, using Fun-Tak mounting putty, which is very handy stuff for making things stay put until you want to move them somewhere else. When I plotted my course, I was surprised to learn that St. Marys was only 93 miles away. That was good; I had been anticipating another five- or six-hour day driving halfway across the state. The route involved 14 short legs on tiny country roads, but by this time I was confident enough in Street Atlas's advice that I set off without hesitation.

I've always had a lousy sense of direction. My brain just doesn't retain maps. Instead, I navigate by gestalt—I file away a series of mental snapshots of the scenery and landmarks as I drive or walk around, and when I see a scene that matches one I have on file, I know that's where I have to turn left (or whatever). This is just about the worst way to navigate, because it means that if I come at a well-known intersection from an unfamiliar direction, it looks completely alien and I haven't a clue what to do. But I can't help it—it's just how my brain works.

To get to anyplace new, I need a set of step-by-step directions: "Go 13.7 miles on Rt. 571 and turn left onto Nassau Street. Go three blocks southwest on Nassau and turn right onto Library Place." I can follow these just fine, but if I hit a detour, I'm lost again—no mental map to help get me reoriented. Street Atlas fills in this gaping hole in my mental abilities by providing both a set of instructions and a map for backup (so I can see an important intersection coming up). Its rough edges sometimes irritate me beyond measure, but I'm so grateful for what it does that I'm willing to overlook its multitude of usability sins. It still feels like magic to me. I just wish I could shrink it to the size of a hearing aid and stick it in my ear. Maybe in five years...

I dumped my tanks, got rid of a bag of trash and filled up with fresh water before leaving Mt. Gilead. Going from state park to state park, I keep expecting the next day's stop to be a patch of dirt in some place with no amenities whatsoever, so I'm always trying to be ready for boondocking. But the state parks I've been in so far—especially the Pennsylvania and Ohio ones—have been quite deluxe as such things go. Electric hookups, paved roads—who'd a thunk it? I'm beginning to see these state parks as real treasures, infinitely superior to commercial campgrounds from my point of view—more scenic, less expensive, less crowded. The only thing they lack is a place to do my laundry—and I brought plenty of clothes, so I can get by for a week or so before I need to do a load of wash.

I got on the road around 10:30 and followed my electronic guide's directions through a succession of tiny one-horse towns and long stretches of two-lane country road. The land was just as flat as yesterday's had been, but at least the view from close up was more interesting than the view from the interstates had been. The farms were mostly small, with corn fields and a dilapidated cottage or a mobile home parked out front. Many had RVs parked in the yard. I was delighted to see barns painted with the old Mail Pouch tobacco slogan ("Treat yourself to the best") that I remembered from my childhood trips across Pennsylvania.

The humidity at Mt. Gilead had been a sweltering 93%, but as I headed west and the skies cleared, the dampness abated. I notice that my ceiling wasn't dripping any more either. Had the water on the roof blown away...? Who knows.

I reached Grand Lake St. Marys State Park to find it in the middle of a "Grand Fall Festival"—and incredibly crowded. To be honest, I had feared that I might have trouble finding a place to stay this last night before the Escapade—I had visions of a vast army of RVs converging on Van Wert from every direction, and as the ring closed in I figured that nearby campgrounds would be inundated. That was why I had especially wanted to get hold of Grand Lake St. Marys on the phone this morning, in order to reserve a site if possible.

Fortunately for me, there were still half a dozen sites without hookups available, and I ended up in site number 1. My next problem was getting in. The sites were incredibly shallow—about long enough for a van—and although a number of larger rigs had parked on the grass, in my case the fire ring prevented my backing onto the grassy area behind the "SITE 1" marker. After carefully checking the ashes in the ring to make sure they were cold, I backed up as far as I dared, until Gertie's rear end was completely over the fire ring, and that was just barely far enough to get her nose out of the road. I wasn't especially level fore and aft, but there was no maneuvering room to drive up onto my leveling blocks...so I just figured I'd live with it for the short time I'd be here. I have to admit that seeing Gertie's 50-gallon gas tank hanging a few inches above even a cold fire ring gave me the creeps.

This fall festival was clearly a family event—all around me children were shrieking and parents were hollering at them. The family next to me, in an old "Jamee" motorhome about Gertie's size, was fairly quiet. They appeared to be Mennonites; the men dressed like ordinary guys, but the women wore long, graceful old-fashioned dresses and little gauzy headpieces that made them resemble Victorian nannies. They had Nike running shoes under the dresses, though. Evidently their god is fussy about headgear, but doesn't care what they wear on their feet.

The temperature was in the eighties, but the humidity was down to a very comfortable 41%. I made myself a light lunch and relaxed for awhile, cataloguing the last day's pictures and working on this journal. These are tasks that occupy several hours each day, but I know from previous trips that if I defer them until after my return, they will take even longer. Last year it took me nearly eight months to get the whole chronicle of my fall trip to Maine online! I don't want that to happen again.

After awhile I got up and fixed the insulating panel that had fallen down: since even Dual Lock had proven inadequate to hold it to the side wall, I fastened it to the wall with three long screws and large washers, similar to what I'd used on the slanted front panel. I also soldered new wires onto the reading lamp, whose wires had come off when the panel came down and took the lamp with it. It may sound vain, but I just might want to show off Gertie to somebody at some point during the Escapade—so I want her looking her best inside.

I had a few rice cakes and a glass of juice for supper—too tired to really be hungry. I watched the people passing by for awhile. One girl was "walking" her guinea pig—that is, she had it on a leash, but she was carrying it. Every ten or twelve feet she'd stop and set it down in the grass. It would huddle there with all the animation of a pet rock. After a minute she'd pick it up and move on. This scene was repeated three times while I watched.

As the sun sank in the sky I noticed that there was a large bright area to the west of my campsite, and figuring that maybe this was the "Grand Lake" from which the park took its name, I strolled over in that direction. It was indeed a large lake—I couldn't see the other side—with a nice little sandy beach where a few kids were still swimming and wading.

Back in Gertie I cleaned up my pictures of the lake and plotted a route to Van Wert. Turns out it's only 27 miles away, so I should be able to get there in good time tomorrow. Tonight promises to be refreshingly cool and dry, good for sleeping—and I need all I can get! It's not yet 8:00 but I'm going to read a little in bed and then turn in.