After yesterday we just wanted to vegetate, and so that is exactly what we did. Denice woke up this morning with an ear ache. I'm sure it was from ELTORO's air conditioner blowing in her face all day yesterday, We had to keep it on high the whole day to even get any semblance of it's cooling effects.
Sept 3rd
It was to be short day. We decided to take the Highway #2, that is the old highway, and is right on the St Lawrence River.
We did not want to follow the 401, and not see anything but freeway. Well, #2 was good, but too few places to pull over for pictures. Speeds were slow, but that was OK, and we went through all the small towns along the River. Narrow streets and 25 MPH were the order of the day.
The signage, although most of it is in French, a lot is self explanatory as the photos below show.
Somehow I had put in a wrong way-point, and that is how the problem started, We ended up in some residential areas and went round and round in circles for what seemed hours. A note to those that may use "Streets and Trips" for their navigation: When you put in your highway preferences in the Options section, be aware that on each segment of your trip you should review what your choice for that segment is, Preferred, Fastest, or Shortest. That is where I made my mistake as I had as preference: Low use of Freeway and Toll Roads, and high use of Arterial and Secondary Highways. This was so that we would be able to see more of the local lore on our touring. That was fine, but when we got into MOntreal we should have changed those segments to either Fastest or shortest. Preferred wanted to take us all over the city, on back roads, by passing major throughfares, and I was not smart enough to figure out what was causing the problem until that evening after I settled down somewhat. At one point she wanted to take us across the St Lawrence on highway #10 on the Jacque Cartier Bridge right into the heart of Montreal. It was only with a great effort that I was able to cut off cars in the two right lanes of the about six lanes across he bridge, and get onto a side street. A couple of times we were able to pull over and reconfigure the computer, but it seemed to have a mind of its own, and added some more wrong way points. Finally I just pulled into a small shopping mall of some sort and started a new trip from there to the Campground we had reserved at. From there on we were OK. Oh but first we had to jump a curb to get back out of this maal as there was only one entrance and we did not have room to turn around. It was either jump the curb, or unhook. I chose the curb!! But then on the right roads, the traffic was horrendous. Bumper to Bumper and 5 MPH, then stop, then move ahead 1 car length, and so on and so on. It was hot, and even ELTORO started to heat slightly, not enough to be worried about, but certainly higher than usual. As soon as we were able to pick up a little speed she cooled immediately. Finally we arrived at our Reserved camping spot at about 7:00PM. A trip of only a couple of hundred miles that should have only taken us, even with the slow traffic, about 6 hours, was now about 10. But our problems were still not over. Arrived at the RV gate to check in, and they had no record of my reservation. I told them that they did not take my credit card info as they said they did not need it, when I phoned. Strange!! Anyway they did find a spot for us, but their numbering system was all screwed up, and 164 was non-existant as far as we could tell. We just took the one that looked like it should be 164, and parked. We were too tired and cranky to argue any more, especially with the French receptionist, who spoke little English. WIFI did not work, (I paid $5 for it), no water at site, ( will run a hose to the next site) and only 30 AMP power. Enough for tonight. Denice called it the "Day from Hell"
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