Our Virgin Atlantic flight took off from Heathrow for Washington Dulles airport at 11.40am after a slight delay. The 8 hour flight landed on time. Then through immigration, but after that we can’t find the hotel courtesy coach pick-up point. So let’s phone the hotel. No phone signal- but here comes the coach, and we get to the hotel for around 5.30 pm US time (UK 10.30 pm). Check in, meal in restaurant up the road, bed.
What is remarkable for such a long, busy day is how smoothly it all went. So a rather pedestrian start to the blog, with nothing horrendous or unusual to report. Thankfully.
Day 2 is motorhome pickup time. I’ll refer to it by the American name from here on: it’s an rv, short for recreational vehicle. We’ll perhaps call it Harvey (ar-vee). Here it is parked in our first campsite.
As you can see, it comes with lurid graphics, but the hand-over was very efficient and included a 20 minute video on how to maintain its vital functions. Get the husbandry wrong and, like a neglected pet, it becomes sick or even dies. The systems in general are the same as our caravan, but the details are all different, even the terminology. The electric hook-up cable, for example, is a “shore line”. Perhaps the rv’s amphibious? The internal heater is a “furnace”, for that extra power in case you’ve brought the horse along and need to shoe it. It’s a pretty standard layout, as the photo below shows, and comes complete with maid called Jane.
Driving the vehicle also takes some getting used to, not so much the 25 foot length or 8 foot 6 inches width, but the spongy suspension. It’s like steering a motorised space hopper. Take your eye of the road for a second and it’s lumbered into the next lane. The technique appears to be total concentration and continuous steering adjustment. American drivers are fortunately very tolerant and proof of that is the absence so far of bullet holes in the rv bodywork.
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