On the fourth day of my new life in my RV home, I began the journey north. I planned to travel about 300 miles a day to get back by Sunday or Monday.
The trip was complicated by several factors:

• Monday was the Columbus Day holiday. I did not anticipate the problems finding campgrounds to stay. The first night in Tennessee, I stopped at 2 places before getting the last site at a KOA south of Knoxville. For the next three nights, I used the KOA app on my phone to reserve sites ahead of time. While KOAs are expensive, they provide a known level of service.
• My new RV home at 34.5 feet long, 8.5 feet wide and 12.5 feet in height was the biggest thing I’d ever driven. This wasn’t so much of an issue as a mental hurdle.
• This was the first time I had toad my CR-V. Hooking up the tow bar and the auxiliary brake system was a challenge. I stopped several times the first day to make sure everything was setup correctly and I looked for pull thru camp sites. The first two nights I was successful in not having to disconnect to park, but each night after that, I disconnected and re-connected in the morning.

My first night, I stopped a the Sweetwater Valley KOA in Sweetwater TN after about 325 miles of travel. This was the 3rd campground I stopped at and I got the last available site.
The second night and all subsequent nights were preplanned. I stopped at the Harrisonburg Shenandoah Valley KOA. The site was very tight but usable. The campground was several miles off Interstate 81 via a winding narrow road through rolling farm lands. I traveled 414 miles to get to this campground.
The Allentown Pennsylvania KOA was the stop on the third night after 253 miles of highway driving. The KOA was located at the bottom of a 9 percent grade a few miles off Interstate 78. Negotiating the hill was another successful hurdle in my motorhome driving experience.
For the final night of my travels back to New England, I stayed at the Mystic KOA in North Stonington, CT. It was about 230 miles from the Allentown PA stop. This is the only place on the journey that I had stayed before, but also the most expensive.

Overall, the journey north was uneventful. I leaned a lot about the handling characteristics of my RV home. The gas V-10 engine with the new 6 speed transmission is a better combination than I expected. On the first leg of the trip on secondary roads with only minor hills, I got better than 7.5 miles per gallon. Later in the trip at interstate speeds of about 62 over the ups and downs of the Appalachian mountains that went down to 6.7 mpg. That’s OK, I never thought it would be an economy car.