August 23 & 24 Travel Days – Let the Habitat 2019 adventures begin

Joe and I are excited to join Habitat for Humanity RV Care-A-Vanners Team 1 in Sullivan, Ilinois.   We now feel part of the Habitat Sullivan family since this will be our 3rd build there.  The amazing Sullivan community support for this yearly build certainly has a reputation among Care-A-Vanners.   As part of the ‘family’, we get advance notice of when the build will be posted on the Habitat website so we can be one of the first to sign up.   This year, all the volunteer slots were filled in less than 24 hours!

So, you may be asking:   what are RV Care-A-Vanners?  We are volunteers with self contained motorhomes that travel from across the country to build a Habitat house together.  The typical duration of a build is two weeks, but it can be shorter or longer depending on need.  For this build, we are part of Sullivan ‘Team 1’.  Our goal to go from bare foundation to fully closed in house in 2 weeks.  That means building the foundation platform, all the walls, exterior plywood, windows, doors and roofing.

So … we’ve begun our adventure!  We flew up from Celebration, FL to Brewster, NY on Wednesday August 21st to pack and pick up Breezy (our nickname for our Tiffin Breeze Motorhome).   We had less than 2 days to get Breezy ready, pack for the trip and make quick visits to family and friends.   Somehow we got it all done, and hit the road Friday afternoon.   Of course, leaving the suburbs of NY on a Friday afternoon in the summer is not fun.   We got stuck in about an hour traffic, and had to reroute our plans because there was a 1 hour 30 minute delay on Route 80 in Pennsylvania.   Thank goodness for Google traffic – how did we ever live without it?

Our new route was what I call the ‘low road’ (Pennsylvania Turnpike/ Rte 76).   It’s a direct route across PA, but as you can see from the picture below, it goes around, over and through mountains along the route.

Joe is an AMAZING driver!   The PA Turnpike is full of trucks, sharp turns, mountains and tunnels.   I was amazed at the tunnels, so I decided to look up the history of this road.  Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was planned in the 1930s to improve transportation across the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania. It used seven tunnels bored for the abandoned South Pennsylvania Railroad project during the 1880s. The highway opened on October 1, 1940 between Irwin and Carlisle as the first long-distance controlled-access highway in the United States. Following its completion, other toll roads and the Interstate Highway System were built. The highway was extended east to Valley Forge in 1950, and west to the Ohio border in 1951  It was completed at the New Jersey border (the Delaware River) in 1954; the Delaware River Bridge opened two years later.

Here’s a picture of one of the tunnels.   I guess that’s what happens when you can’t go over or around the mountain :-).

Our new favorite ‘campgrounds’ are Cracker Barrels.  We’ve found that most of them have RV parking, and allow over night parking.   As a bonus, Joe treats me to a Cracker Barrel breakfast before we head off.   We stayed at a Cracker Barrel in New Stanton, PA on Friday and in Terre Haute, IN on Saturday.    We woke up to FRIGID temperatures … well, at least for us Floridians!

The good news is that Diesel prices were under $3/gallon.   Yeah, we made plenty of stops for fuel.   It would be nice if they provided windshield washer poles that were a little longer than toothpicks… he he.

We’re off to Sullivan tomorrow!