WFRV

Day 1.
We’re off to a good start. We leave the house at 9:30am, later than we’d hoped but still early. Driving out of Bedford we can hear things moving in the cupboards and at one point three of the drawers fly open at once. We’d gotten curtain tension rods to put across the cupboards but didn’t anticipate the drawer problem. Ben sits at the dining table with his feet propped against the drawers across the aisle, but this isn’t going to b e along-term solution. Nonetheless, we are excited to be underway and things go smoothly until the intersection of Rts. 495 and 90, when Denise says, “Oh my god.”
“What?” asks Mike, hoping it’s a small thing.
“I forgot my purse.” She says it with horror because she realizes what it means – we’ll have to go back for it. She can’t drive without her license and she can’t have Mike drive over 5000 miles by himself, tempting though that may be.
It’s a mistake that eats up two hours. On the plus side, Sam retrieves her forgotten drawing supplies and we grab some bungee cord and rope to tie those drawers down. Riding in an RV is like a combination of riding on a ferry and a bus; it rocks gently from side to side and the back has a lot more bounce to it than the front. If you’re the driver you feel like you’re in a car (which makes sense because the whole thing’s on a truck chassis).
We make it to Batavia, NY by 7:30pm; our first day has become a ten-hour day of driving but now we know we can do it. It isn’t until late evening that Denise says, “Oh no!” She’s also forgotten half her clothes (the ones she stayed up late washing and drying on Saturday night), all her hair clips and bands (to conquer what Ben calls the Medusa Look when she doesn’t blow-dry her hair), and her jewelry. Replacements will be purchased in Ohio when we rent a car. The queen of organization has been dethroned.

Day 2.
We leave Batavia at 9:15, not bad. We also do our first black water dump. If you’ve seen RV you can guess what our fears were, but it turns out to be very easy. The kids loved the RV park and were disappointed that we had to leave; it had swimming, basketball, a playground, a pool room, a video game room…we reminded them that the purpose of the trip is not to stay in an RV park in upstate NY.
Upstate NY quickly becomes rural; we pass miles and miles of vineyards. At first it’s charming but after two hours of vineyards we’re excited even to see a small clump of cows huddled together like a football team. Maybe they’re discussing the different vintages of clover. Maybe they’re planning an escape.
We’re getting used to traveling slowly, to getting passed by everyone, to letting everyone cut in, in other words, to not driving like we live in Massachusetts. The RV is wide and the mirrors stick out a mile; we come within inches of whacking them off at a few toll booths. The tolls themselves are incredibly expensive, $18 here, $25 there. Never mind the gas – we are reminded of a Daily Show segment where Rob Corddry drives his stretch Hummer limo out of the gas station and it runs out of gas before the back ends hits the street.
Nonetheless, we are enjoying the driving; we take two hour turns before stopping to stretch, use the bathroom, buy a cold drink, and get gas if we need it. (It’s a 57-gallon tank and we get 8 miles to the gallon.) We have iPods to listen to, and the kids alternate between those, DVDs, and the PS2. They can even lie down on the bed to listen to books on tape. As long as we’re driving they’re allowed screens; this is the best part of their vacation so far.
We arrive in Streetsboro, OH around 2:30pm. It’s a back-in site, another aspect we’re not looking forward to, but the RV area isn’t too crowded and with Mike directing it’s a breeze backing in. We call Enterprise for our rental car, and by 3:30 we’re on the road into Cleveland to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of us is very excited to be going, one marginally, and two not at all. Can you guess who? Unfortunately the Rock Hall closes at 5pm – what’s Rock and Roll about that? The place should open at noon and close at 3am! – so we hurriedly see what we can. There are so many costumes from different musicians, great fun to look at. We notice that most of the musicians are short and skinny – do they overcompensate with monstrous stages and elaborate sets?
We watch a video about the music scene in the 60’s in San Francisco. It covers the turbulent politic and cultural times, and we have to explain to the kids that long hair and beards were once unacceptable on men. They watch the video a while longer and then get bored and want to leave; Denise asks them to count the number of naked women on the collage next to the video. Sam finds three, one more than Denise had noticed. At least it keeps them busy until the end of the video.
We see Jim Morrison’s elementary school stories, Jimi Hendrix’s middle school drawings and so much more. One of us could have spent more time there, but the old-fogie Rock Hall is closing at 5 so we head out. It is extremely hot and humid in Cleveland and we’re glad to find an air-conditioned restaurant for dinner. Denise gets dropped off at Target to get some shorts and tank tops and we still have time to watch a movie together before bed.

Day 3
We’re off by 9:30am to Canton, OH to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Denise and Sam are going to drop the boys off and head to the Harry London Chocolate Factory in North Canton for a tour. The chocolate factory is very cold (chocolate starts to melt at 70 degrees, a fact we learn on the tour and which we should, but don’t, remember) and it is again very hot and humid outside. The tour is well-done; you can see the workers down below as you walk in a glassed-in hallway above the factory floor. This place supplies 90% of the chocolate to Disney World; a few years back Disney made chocolate CDs and sold them in jewel cases and the tour guide shows us the mold for that.
They also supply fundraisers; they make something called Joys that we’ve definitely seen before. The “oops”, candies that didn’t pass muster for aesthetic reasons, are served to the employees and as samples to the visitors, as well as being sent to various charities in the area. One little boy stares at the people who obviously have his dream job and says breathlessly “Can they eat the chocolates down there?” He’s told that employees who eat on the job are fired. Another boy asks where Willy Wonka is. We all enjoy the sight of two men wearing not only hair nets but beard nets. After the tour we buy some dark chocolate cherry cordial oops and are delighted to discover that they were mistakenly made with too much chocolate. We also buy assorted other chocolate to share during the trip. It isn’t until the cashier hands us our bag that we realize buying chocolate on a hot and humid day when you’re heading to the zoo for the afternoon.
Hello, Target. We purchase a small cooler and one pint of sorbet which does a good job keeping the chocolate cool until we get back to the RV. We pick up Ben and Mike at the Football Hall of Fame and head to lunch. After lunch Mike and the kids get dropped off at the Akron Zoo while Denise goes to the nearby hospital.

THE FINGER
My right ring finger hurt when I woke up Friday morning. Nothing major, it just felt like a paper cut near my nail. By that night it was swollen but still not hurting that much. But Saturday morning it was swollen and tender so I went to our walk-in clinic where they told me it was an infected cuticle, gave me a prescription for antibiotics, told me to soak it 3-4 times a day, and said I should come back in if it turned yellow (!) or got worse. I explained that we were leaving Sunday morning for a month. The doctor had a dubious look on her face but wished me well.
Soaking your finger in warm salt water 3-4 times a day while traveling in an RV is tricky, but I managed to do it. I started taking the antibiotics first thing Saturday so I expected the infection to be gone by Tuesday. No such luck. By Tuesday morning my finger was more swollen, throbbing, and yellow. Nice! Hence my visit to the emergency room of the Akron General Hospital. I checked in at 2:45. The woman at the desk was stymied by my driver’s license, thought my first name was Waldron because it’s last-name-first on the license, and asked if MA was Massachusetts. (When I said Yes, she asked me if I lived in Massachusetts. I have no idea what she was thinking.) After 25 minutes she called me back to take my blood pressure and temperature. Then I sat in Hell’s waiting room, a bare-bones area with no magazines to speak of and a TV blaring courtroom reality shows. I read two issues of Conde Nast traveler and a Woman’s Day magazine. A woman sat next to me and proceeded to start sobbing; she finally got up and moved away. Another woman had to go to the registration desk repeatedly for new gauze because the cut on her finger was bleeding profusely. An extremely obese man sat down across from me, slumped in his chair, and placed a hand towel across his eyes. Shortly afterward a woman approached him and handed him a Big Gulp cup into which he proceeded to vomit. I composed a haiku in my head which I don’t remember anymore, then I got up and told the woman at the registration desk that I was leaving. She said I should come back in the morning before all the people who were suffering heat stroke arrived, cut off my hospital ID bracelet, and wished me well.
That night I found a walk-in clinic on the Internet (most campgrounds have Wi-Fi) close to the RV park and called a taxi service to drive me there (the only downside to not towing a car is you have to take your house if you need a ride somewhere, and not surprisingly no one wanted to pack up and drive to a walk-in clinic at 6pm). I waited an hour and finally saw a doctor who took one look at my finger and said in heavily accented English, “Yes, you need new antibiotic.”
That was a relief to me; I thought he was going to have to do something more invasive.
“I going to cut your finger to drain. Come. Come with me.”
He led me over to a cot, told me to lie down, dragged the curtain around it, and called the nurse over, giving her a list of items that he needed as he went to write the prescription. She assembled them on a tray and he returned, calling her back once because he didn’t know how to open the scalpel. When I heard “scalpel” I started to worry; I thought draining was something that could be done with a needle or perhaps a tiny faucet. Then the doctor said, “I going to spray your finger. It very cold; it going to hurt. That is to numb. Then I going to cut your finger. That REALLY going to hurt.” And that’s what happened: spray, pain, cut, extreme pain. Then he started squeezing my finger, hard, to get out the pus that was in there, and that was also really painful, although when he giggled and said “Eeww, pus” both the nurse and I laughed.
So I missed a trip to the zoo and a quiet barbecue dinner with my family, and now I have a swollen and cut–up finger that I have to keep an eye on, and why did this all happen? Because I bit off a hangnail. I did it to myself. I gave myself the finger.