Lou and Larry made us feel so at home in Lagrange that we didn’t feel particularly motivated to leave today! We ended up staying hours longer than we should have, departing finally at 3 pm. Of course, the prospect of spending time on I-90 wasn’t very enticing either — it’s not a highly interesting road through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

We have passed a small milestone today: 30,000 miles on the Armada. We’ve crossed the country from Atlantic to Pacific and back four times towing our Airstream with it since last October. Our tires are nearing replacement time. We’ve roamed everywhere we could find to go from 200 feet below sea level in Death Valley, up to 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. Except for a small transmission line leak, it has been reliable and completely up to the task. I think it’s safe to say that the Armada has proven its worth as an Airstream tow vehicle.

Since I’m dispensing praise, I should also mention the fine folks at Garmin. We sent our beloved “Garminita” in for repair back in Colorado. Email communications with Garmin were very professional and easy. Once I received an RMA #, I was told to expect the GPS back after 4-5 working days. Instead, Garmin diagnosed it the day they received it, and since they couldn’t fix it economically, shipped back a free warranty replacement the next day! Nice job, Garmin.

Today’s drive brought us through rain and thunderstorms for five hours to Rochester NY, where we are … guess … parked at a Cracker Barrel. It’s deja vu all over again — each one of these places is absolutely identical. Even McDonald’s has more variation. If the parking lot wasn’t different, I’d wonder if we had gone anywhere at all. But I still love ’em for their very cordial overnight parking policy.

Northeast humidity has struck since we arrived in Ohio. We’d almost forgotten how thick the air can be. A week ago we were in the dry clear thin air of Colorado, at 8800 feet. I loved it. Now we are down toward sea level in air so heavy you can drink it. I’ve never been a fan of humidity but I guess we’d better re-acclimate because we are going to be in the northeast for a while.