Our last drive to get home was a doozy

In our first season of travels, we prided ourselves on not falling into the trap that many newbies do, which is moving too quickly due to the excitement of new adventures. We planned a shorter travel distance, set aside time to work, and booked most of our reservations ahead of time. Alright, that last one had some disadvantages because we also needed to cancel a lot of reservations when the inevitable breakdowns and route changes happened. However, it did allow us longer stays, often a week or more.

This year, the advanced planning went out the window, as did most longer-duration stays. A shorter distance was definitely not in the cards, as we set out to get from Massachusetts to Utah in less than 2 months and then continued even further west from there. Our quick moving didn't happen because of newbie excitement. It happened because of anticipated FOMO. We expected this to be our last year of true, rootless, full-time RVing. We still had so much ground we wanted to cover! Turns out we should have just banked on some enjoyable excursions during our future part-time travel adventures, because this year was a recipe for burnout. By the time we got back to MA, we were more than ready to be home. We needed the comforts of family, friends, and familiarity. We needed the slow travel in places that we didn't feel pressured to explore.

We celebrated our homecoming to MA with one last stop before reaching our home-base. We booked a site at Pine Lake RV Resort in Sturbridge, MA, a town we knew would provide just enough adventure without overwhelming us. You can read about our time in Sturbridge here, including a review of the campground, which is important to fully understand the story I'm about to tell.

With the comforts of home comes the pervasive attitude that is a stark contrast to hospitality we experience in other parts of the country. We hope it doesn't deter people from visiting New England. The best way to deal with it is to find entertainment and humor in it, or perhaps use it as fodder for travel content like we do. At this resort, we had already seen our fair share of Boston bluntness. It's like a big "welcome home" hug! As much as we saw the good in this resort, after 2 nights, we were ready to drive our final leg back to our home-base on my parents' property south of Boston.

We were still adjusting to our packing up timeline now that we had 2 new kitties in our lives, so when we were ready to hitch up at 10:40am for an 11am checkout, we gave ourselves a pat on the back. This should get us out of our site with about 10 minutes to spare, which is pretty much perfection.

Oh, but we're not perfect, and contrary to our previous belief, neither is Jacques Trois. Our beloved new tongue jack, which we finally got as an upgrade after years of issues with our first one, had been functioning just fine minus a few loud noises during times of added pressure. We thought nothing of those sounds because our first tongue jack sounded like this:

And that was on a good day! This jack lasted us until we replaced it.

Well, we should have taken the screams of Jacques Trois more seriously, because while we were hitching up to leave, we went to retract him, and...nothing.

Extending the jack worked just fine, but retracting did not. At first I thought maybe a wire was loose, but after grabbing tools to retract it manually, we discovered that it would retract, but only when less weight was bearing down on it. This jack has a 4000lb load capacity, so this should not have been an issue unless something else was wrong, but we had no time to figure it out. Digging through the truck to find the right ratchet and then manually retracting the jack took us past checkout time. It also took Anthony a lot of strength. The fact that it started to rain didn't help matters.

Right around 11am, one of the staff members came over in his golf cart to check the firepit. I told him, "Don't worry, I swear we're trying to leave." He responded, "I can see that." I told him we were having trouble retracting our tongue jack and he let out an expressionless "Hmph" before driving away. Oh, how we missed Massachusetts hospitality! It's fine; we didn't need his help anyway, and at least he didn't show any impatience. That's a common Massachusetts trait, too.

We only left 10 minutes late, which was a win given our situation, but we worried about what our jack might do – or not do – when we got to our home-base. We park on a downward slope that requires us to retract our jack a lot in order to get level from front-to-back. We kept our fingers crossed that maybe after a break, Jacques would wake from his coma.

Turns out, it would be a very long break. As soon as we got on the interstate, we hit tons of traffic. I checked Google Maps and up popped a notice that were in a 21-minute delay before even reaching the Mass Pike (I-90), which was only a few miles away! Then the map showed even more traffic once we got on the Pike. It's strange to think about, but in all our tens of thousands of miles towing, we've hit surprisingly few traffic jams. This is mainly due to the fact that we travel at off-times and spend a lot of time in the country. We should have known better being back in MA. We didn't check traffic before we left. If we had, we could have stayed on the frontage road heading north before reaching the Pike.

An electronic sign was flashing time estimates to get to Worcester via the Pike, and US20 was a few minutes shorter. The exit for US20 was coming up and we wondered if we should get off. At that point, we expected the road to be backed up because lots of people had probably already gotten off the highway. We also knew we couldn't try too much funny business because we were towing. US20 would be fine, but if Google Maps told us to take smaller local roads, we would need to ignore it. We decided to take US20 anyway. It was exactly as terrible as we expected. Maps predicted an 18-minute delay. Cars were backed up so far that people were turning around. Small cars have that option a lot more than we do, but we did see one driveway for a commercial building where we could have if we wanted to, but we decided to stay the course. Then the rain picked up.

I searched on the apps to see if any accidents had been reported, but nothing came up. This seemed to be pure congestion. Where was everyone going at 11am on a Sunday in Central Mass?! This isn't the Bible Belt!

In terms of traffic jams we've hit on travel days, this day easily made the top 5, and possibly even the top 3. To add to our stress, our kitties were still adjusting to car rides, and we knew that pulling off for a break would be difficult and stressful, as rest stops in this area always are. Thankfully, the cats were a lot quieter than our previous drives. We thought "Yay, they're finally learning the routine!" Not so much. Turns out it's the motion that bothers them the most, and they were quieter because we were moving slower in the traffic. When we finally hit the Pike in Charlton, a less congested area, we moved faster, but the kitty cries resumed.

Our ETA was saying that the traffic delayed us about 40 minutes, which was actually not as bad as we feared. We didn't have any time constraints in getting to our home-base, except that mentally we were itching to finally be back. We couldn't let this rush us, though. Haste and RVing do not mix. We just focused on our appreciation for being back in familiar territory. We knew where we were going, and it looked like the obstacles were behind us.

Well, the traffic was behind us, but the worst of the weather found us further east.

At least this came nowhere close to the top 5 worst storms we've towed in. Those would be tough to beat. It did slow us down a little, but soon we were out of the storm and on the final routes to our home-base.

What a dramatic homecoming! Anticipation was already high. We would be seeing all the new renovations to my childhood home. My parents would be meeting their newest grandchildren. We would finally relieve my parents of the massive pile of mail and packages that had been accumulating.

But all of that needed to wait until we were parked in our spot and safely unhitched. Would Jacques Trois come in clutch?!

Unfortunately, no.

Since we only got this jack 8 months ago, it's still under warranty. The problem is, it's not usually in stock. We ran into an issue last winter when we ordered it from eTrailer and it came damaged. We wanted to exchange it, but eTrailer had no more. So we ordered one on Amazon, and as soon as we got it installed, we sang its praises. We loved the speed, sturdiness, and sleekness. Problem was, Amazon was then also reporting it as out of stock, so everyone we recommended it to couldn't even get their hands on one!

We're happy to report that, at the time of writing this post, Amazon does apparently have 2 currently in stock, so here's our affiliate link. (Editor's note: Before publishing, the stock had run out. Seems that you need to hit it just right or it's gone in the blink of an eye).

Yes, we still recommend the jack even though it's currently causing us issues, and here's why. A lot of the low reviews mention the unit failing and being unable to get a response from customer service. Yes, our unit seems to be failing, way sooner than we'd hope. But, we were able to get in touch with customer service, and they helped us diagnose that the issue is likely the motor. They told us we could remove the motor, which would make manual maneuvering easier, but we thought better of it. The motor is still working for extending the jack, and we don't want to deal with manual extension and retraction, at least not at this point. The customer service rep said that they wouldn't be getting more jacks in until September, so we'd need to wait until then to get a replacement under warranty. We knew this meant more travel days with Anthony spinning a ratchet around like a crazy person, but we'd worry about that another time. We just wanted to focus on being home.