Day 5: When it Rains it Pours
by Andrew JohnsonLiterally.
Okay,so it seems that on this “beautiful, sunny” Connecticut mornin’ that we may actually be ready to rock and roll, still without much of an itinerary still, but hey that’s what the adventure is all about right….. We spent the morning doing little things like visiting the trailer store AGAIN to pick up things I forgot. Taking digital stills of Lenny’s business for his web site (NOW I just wrote off the whole trip!). We had planned on being on the road by noon for the “short” 7-hour drive to Bonnie’s (Andy’s sister) in Virginia. We actually didn’t get going until about 1:30, just when the rain started. Less than a mile from Lenny’s house, and literally on the on-ramp to the I-84, the windshield wipers quit. In the pouring rain. Got ‘em started, they quit again driving 60 on the highway. We briefly contemplated turning around, but decided to go easy an get as far as we could. They teased us a few more times but luck held up and they kept working for the most part. (This was a problem that surfaced in Syracuse about a year ago, but was so intermittent that nobody could find the problem.) We didn’t dare turn them off the entire ride – in fact, during pit stops, we didn’t turn off the car or wipers! We looked a little silly when the rain would stop but our wipers kept going full force.
Like we said, it should have been an easy drive. But those of you who know I-81 through PA know what’s about to come. The construction was horrible. They decided this time to not only squeeze down to one lane, but to make that one lane barely wide enough for a car, let alone a wide trailer. It was white knuckle driving for a spell, coming what seemed like inches to the guardrail on one side and the concrete barriers on the other – in the dark, in the rain, in the fog. Yeah, the fog. We ran into fog starting at that notorious spot on 81 south of Wilkes-Barre and it didn’t let up until we pulled into Bonnie’s in Virginia! At times it let up, but most of the time it was so thick we couldn’t go more than 40 mph. All the time not knowing if the wipers were going to give out. We joked in CT that the next purchase on our trip was a new Suburban, but right now that didn’t seem too far fetched. It was about that time that we vowed not to travel at night if we could help it. We finally arrived about midnight (11 hours!), unhitched the trailer and visited for another couple of hours. We arrived late but safe. A mantra we seemed to have adopted for our trip.
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