As promised, albeit a little late, the conclusion to the The Grand Tour blog. There will be some dreading yet another instalment of this nonsense but that's too bad because I'm writing it anyway, facts, figures and all.
So, eighteen days in all and a total of 4,197 miles (6,755 kilometres) travelled.
Of those, 2,997 miles (4,823 Kilometres) were towing Towed Haul.
The fuel economy figures, as calculated by the Toadmobile's computer, were approximately 12 mpg US (14.4 mpg Imp.) when towing, or 19.6 litres per 100 kilometres, which is the more scientific way to express it I'm told. Coincidentally, 19.6 l/100km is just about twice as much fuel used as when not towing; it's like having two cars!
We bought somewhere in the region of 350 gallons (US) of Unleaded (291 Gallons Imp.) and spent around $1225 US doing so. That's about $500 (US) less than if we'd bought the gas in Canada and something quite astronomical had we been buying it in the UK! It's still a whole lot cheaper than four return flights to Florida, of course.
We visited eight US states, staying over in six of them, Mississippi and Michigan being the exceptions. The furthest south we went was Universal Studios Theme Park in Orlando, Florida whilst the furthest East was the Kennedy Space Center, also in Florida. The furthest west we travelled was to Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, some miles west of New Orleans. The furthest north was our starting point in Chatham, Ontario. I was going to give the actual latitude and longitude of these places but that's too nerdy, even for me. Georgia was our favourite State, a place we will surely return to, despite the fact that Georgians like to eat boiled peanuts which are quite unnatural; abhorrent, even. Still, they have lovely peaches (you know, fruity things that grow on trees), which does make up for it a bit.
We visited eight campgrounds, three of them privately owned and the remainder being State Parks, completing seventeen nights camping. All our camp sites had 30 amp power provided and had a “city” water supply (a tap!), except the final site in Ohio that only had the power. That was the first time on the trip that we had to fill the on board fresh water tank.
Four of our sites had a “sewer hookup'; a connection to allow us to dump our black and grey water into the site's sewerage system whilst set up on the plot. Unfortunately, three out of the four sewer hookups were too high for our low slung trailer so we couldn't use them! As we're good for three or four days without dumping the tanks, it wasn't a problem for us, especially as the Tadpoles were made to dump themselves in the site's facilities rather than Towed Haul's facilities.
The best meal of the trip was at Flip Flops and Tank Tops Chill and Grill in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. We pitched up there looking like flotsam and jetsam but were treated to meals above and beyond anything else we had on the trip, and the service was excellent, too. The owner, Danny Veltri, was a winner on Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen in the US so maybe that was why it was so good. The worst meal (by a country mile) was at the Cracker Barrel outlet in Munroe, Michigan. The food was school dinner style and the service, well it wasn't exactly southern style; I guess that's the problem with chain restaurants. Honourable mentions have to go to the Waffle House outlets in Macon, Georgia and Meridian, Mississippi where the food was OK, assuming you like breakfasts a lot, but the service and ambiance was like nothing else I'd ever experienced. It was in Macon that we were introduced to Grits (go on, Google it), which were actually not as bad as I'd been led to believe, even when laced with melted butter (everything in the Waffle House is laced with Melted butter).
Of the eighteen days we were away, it rained on fourteen of them, sometimes a lot, sometimes very little. Most days the temperature was around 36 degrees Celsius and the humidity at 100%, which made for very sweaty days and nights. Sing Hallelujah for the Air Conditioning in the car and the trailer.
Highlights were driving on the beach at New Smyrna, having cafe au lait and Beignets in the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, the Louisiana Swamp Tour and Newfound Gap in the Smoky Mountains. Lowlights were the DeSoto Caverns in Alabama and pretty much all of Kentucky, or at least the bits we could see from the Interstate; I'm sure it's a great place once away from the highway.
As if to remind me of my schooling all those years ago, we managed to revisit my first, second and third year geography classes during the trip. We crossed the Mississippi River, the Tennessee River and quite a few besides. We traversed the Appalachian (pronounced Appa Latchian) mountains, saw the swamps of Louisiana and the Intra-Coastal Waterway in Florida. We espied cotton growing as well as sugar cane, both of which were reminders of the South's dubious past. We learned about the Saturn V and Shuttle Low Earth Orbiter projects and moved through Live Oaks festooned with Spanish Moss (which is not a parasite, apparently). We saw the very obvious scars of Hurricane Katrina and witnessed the relative poverty in rural Alabama whilst at the same time felt the affluence on the Gulf Coast and in Orlando, where money seemed to be going out of style.
Would we do it again? Well, yes we would, although quite possibly without the Tadpoles (and therefore without the theme parks!). Getting up and moving around every few days was quite difficult with the little angels, not least because it was a struggle to them moving in the morning (aaah, they take after their mother). I think when we travel with them, we'll stop in one place, you know, like a real holiday!
Now that the summer is on the wane, we'll only have a couple more trips before we put Towed Haul into hibernation for the winter, which is a little bit sad, I think. Anyway, I began with some figures so it's fitting that I should end on some, too. So far, in our first season with Towed Haul, we've pulled her 5,112 miles (8,228 Kilometres) and spent 35 nights in her; a grand first summer indeed.
