In early August, we decided that we needed to leave our Montana adventures and return to my (Liz’s) hometown area of NY. We had some family issues boiling up, and finally, we realized we just needed to be in my family’s area of residence to help.
A perk of having a house on wheels… we can just bring it with us. And then we have the comforts of home, wherever we need to call home at a given time. Which is highly comforting when you are working through a stressful situation.
We spent 4 days hauling 2,075 miles across the midWest. We just drove. We re-fueled nearly every day. Sometimes we stopped for lunch or dinner. Jake and I switched off driving. Andy and Dex read, played legos, napped, and watched T.V. We paid a lot of $ in tolls in Indiana. Freaking Indiana and their shitty pockmarked roads with their high tolls.
We slept in rest areas, but in our own bed. We woke up to choruses of engine brakes releasing as truckers headed out to start their days.
Theodore Roosevelt NP – the “sleep at a rest area” version. 
Quick Teddy Roosevelt NP hike. 
Rest Area digs 
Pitstop for nutrition near Kansas City 
Weird ass trucker bathroom wall art… hey Leo?
Here were our overnight locations:
Painted Canyon Visitor’s Center, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND
Definitely the quietest of our long haul overnights – and offered a hiking trail for a morning walk.
Black River Falls Rest Area, I-94 E, Wisconsin
Typical ass rest area. We got in around 10pm and left by 7am.
Vermillion Valley Ohio Turnpike Rest Area, Ohio Turnpike Eastbound, OH
While multiple Ohio Turnpike Rest Areas offer ‘RV Lots’ – which include electric hook-ups for ~$20, by the time we arrived at night (~9pm), the RV lots was mostly full. So we parked with the semis and paid $0. This rest area was awesome. They offer free showers (which we all used) and multiple restaurants for eating at. Dex also enjoyed one of those coin operated shaky-massage chairs with some of the coins he garnered by being the ‘swear’ police.
We pulled into Hickories Park Campground around 1pm on a Monday in early August, exhausted and ready to rest. We were surprised to find that most of the campsites at Hickories were full-up. However, there was a pull-through site in the full-hook-up, less bug area of the park, so we snagged it. After chatting with the park attendant – who remembered us from a few years ago – we transplanted Andy and Dex back to their house a few miles away and set about cleaning the shit out of Dyna.
A clean rig sets for a good home base to tackle some of life’s more challenging times.