Life without Tramp is basically a string of hotels, restaurants and public transport while living out of our roller bags, sprinkled with valuable time amongst good friends but without the joy of travel the way we like to do it.  So it was with mounting excitement that we settled in the greater Baltimore area and positioned ourselves close to the port where Tramp would eventually be released back to our loving arms.

Luckily we had our good friends George and Jane to help us through this traumatic period.  Julie and Jane were particularly good mates from our Bangkok days where we all first met and we stayed with them in Tennessee when Follow the Sun swept through eastern United States in early 2017.

We enjoyed a couple of great days with them in the DC and Baltimore area, going to the Space Shuttle Museum near DC and downtown Baltimore one day and doing a day trip to their old stomping grounds in historic Winchester Virginia on another day.  All the while we were coordinating with our shipping agent and waiting for Tramp to pass through Customs so we could all be reunited again.

And it was a waiting game.  Each day we were hopeful a mail would come through advising us that Tramp was ready to be picked up after clearing Customs.  And each day we heard nothing.  Chasing it with our shipping agent or local handling agent was only met with a scowl. Tramp was not to be rushed. 

We enjoyed another wonderful day with George and Jane, this time going to the Baltimore Museum of Art which featured paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pissarro and others plus the largest single collection of paintings by the impressionist artist Henri Matisse.  If you’re as much of an art nut as me you’ll know that’s pretty cool, and all of it hiding in an otherwise unsuspecting Baltimore.

Baltimore is hard to categorise if you’re an open-minded traveller.  It has a gritty rundown feel to many areas and even the downtown area lacks anything shiny or flash.  But it has a couple of cool historic sites such as the USS Constellation, the only ship from the Civil War that is still afloat, and Fort McHenry where American troops repelled the stinking British in 1814 during which Francis Scott Keys was inspired to write the Star Spangled Banner, now America’s rousing national anthem. 

Baltimore was wearing on us a bit, mainly because we were pining for Tramp, and the next day at about noon we finally got the mail we were waiting for with the documents that would release him from his purgatory.  I raced to the port, met my escort which is a requirement in the secure port area, and in a very efficient and friendly manner after a few stamps, photocopies, signatures and smiles I was reunited with our mighty beast.

And to my delight he started up first time, didn’t have any new scratches or marks on him and seemed genuinely happy to see me again.  I gave him a hug, put the license plates back on him and raced out to pick Julie up from our hotel.  We did some quick shopping and headed out to the nearest state park to camp for the night.

All our belongings were safely tucked away inside the camper, packed up to the rafters in Tetris fashion, and it took us some time to unpack, sort out our stuff, put it all back where it belonged and breathe a sigh of relief.  Luckily a fire and a couple of barbequed steaks that night soothed our soul and we felt very fortunate to be back on the road again.

But we still had this problem with our Webasto diesel cooker which didn’t work.  The next morning we went to another dealer who couldn’t help us, rang another who blew us off and we started to realise the cooker’s terminal diagnosis we received in Holland may be the last chapter on this matter.  Needing a cooking solution we headed for Walmart, bought a new little cooker and more supplies, then hit the road north.

Where should we go in our month-long journey across America?  We had spread out the maps one night in a hotel and decided the best plan was to concentrate on interesting areas to the east of the Mississippi River because they will be harder to get to in the future while the western states are more accessible from our California base on future trips.  We wanted to see a little more of New England because of the beautiful fall colours and Julie wanted to see Niagara Falls.  So that’s the plan for now.

We ended the day in a beautiful setting, okay, it was a gravel car park but it was on the edge of Pennsylvania’s Game Land Number 110, whatever that is, and we had the whole area to ourselves.  The trees around us were all changing colours and it was just magic to be back in the wilds again.  How we missed this feeling in Europe.

The next morning, being Saturday, we were joined by numerous hunting groups because this is hunting season and we were on the edge of where wildlife live.  We even had hi-vis hunters firing their guns at invisible prey within eyesight of our truck.  Time to go.

Ah, not so fast.  About 100 metres down the track we met a pickup coming up the hill and I pulled over to let him by.  Unfortunately I miscalculated the steep slope and slid right into the deepish ditch.  Oops.  Luckily the guy I had pulled over for had stopped and seen my plight, came back and with a little grunt from both big engines managed to pull Tramp back out onto the road.  Not a good start for the day.

A small dent to my pride later, we were ready to head for New England to explore new lands and enjoy the fall colours with a bonus being the lead up to Halloween with all the houses (with children) decorated for this important festive occasion.  But where is New England?  Dr. Google tells us it is the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, sort of the far northeast corner of the US. 

So off we headed in a northeasterly direction, more or less, across this corner of Pennsylvania and into northern New Jersey.  America is designed to be crossed via an extensive series of Interstate freeways which are super-efficient in moving vast numbers of cars and trucks from one place to another in the shortest possible time.  But driving Interstates is a tedious task, using Cruise Control, trying to go around the trucks but not get in the way of the much faster cars.  It is a numbing and soulless way of seeing America.

By the time we hit the New Jersey border, which didn’t take long, we were already over the Interstates so we redirected Tramp onto some beautiful country roads through small towns and rural settings in northern New Jersey.  It was late October and the fall colours were in full force, the yellows, oranges and reds shouting out from almost every tree and falling leaves would drop onto the road in front of us like huge yellow snowflakes.  The pace, scenery and wonderful cultural experience of seeing the quaint homes, extensive farms and rolling country side is what travel is all about for us.

And eventually we hit Connecticut. Connecticut is a new state for Tramp and Follow the Sun, a small speck of a place on the northern shore of Long Island Sound, one of the 13 original states of the US but relatively low profile in most manners.  We headed down to the coast, through the city of New Haven (home to the famous Yale University) and camped for the night in the carpark of the marina in the attractive town of Guilford with beautiful waterways next to us and a stunning sunset.  We had made New England.