While we really enjoyed our overseas trips this year, we have always wanted to explore more of North America. Since both our kids are living on the east coast, we thought it would be good to explore that side of the country this fall. I originally thought a road trip would be perfect for us to take our time and explore the coast. We would drive and stay in motels or maybe camp here or there. I even looked at those tents you put on top of your car. I also looked at hotel prices in several of the areas we intended to visit and was a bit surprised just how expensive things have gotten – even for small town motels.
So, thoughts of tents soon moved to small campers we could pull behind our Pathfinder. Since we might be gone for a month or two, many of them were just too small (I couldn’t stand up), or didn’t have a kitchen or bathroom. We finally found the perfect fit – an Intech Sol Dawn Rover, we call him Rover!
Before heading out for our big trip east, we took Rover for a couple trial runs in Minnesota so we could work out the kinks. Some of those kinks were literal – in that our backs didn’t like the dinette that converted to a bed!
Our first trip was to Gooseberry Falls along the North Shore of Lake Superior. This is a fantastic MN state park with large, private sites. We took our bikes with and rode them on the Gitchi-Gami state trail all the way to the Split Rock Lighthouse.
We enjoyed the refreshing water of the lake when we got back to camp, the water was so clear!
We also spent a night in the Iron Range beside an old iron mine lake called Lake Ore-Be-Gone. We intended to bike some of the Mesabi Bike Trail, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Instead, we spent some quality time in the camper figuring out how everything worked.
Our second trial trip was to one of our favorite towns in southern MN, Lanesboro, where we try to bike once a year. We camped in their city park and biked about 40 miles the first day. The next night we moved to Forestville Mystery Cave Park – a fantastic state park we had never visited before. We toured the cave there (which even had an underground lake), and did a short hike.
We did get the kinks worked out – including buying two kinds of memory foam for the bed, sewing a mattress pad to fit, hanging lots of hooks and organizers and downloading a list of stretches for sore backs ;-). I think we are ready for our big East Coast Adventure!
Leave a Reply