We did something most RVers avoid...

Continued from RVing to and from Long Island is nuts!

TRIGGER WARNING: Those with a fear of bridges should avoid reading this post. I'm looking at you, Did!

After a nice New Year's weekend with the Vicari clan, we packed up the RV and hit the road to continue our way south. We had never left Long Island and headed south before, and so we took extra care to plan our route. The tough part about Long Island is that you can't really avoid New York City. Even circumnavigating the city still puts you smack dab in the middle of busy concrete roads with lots of traffic, big trucks, and bridges and tunnels - many of which have regulations against large vehicles, including RVs. We thought we were prepared to drive from MA to Long Island, having done it plenty of times before, but we ended up having a record long trip. Heading out of Long Island toward the Jersey Turnpike, we had no choice but to either go through Brooklyn or the Bronx. After planning it out, we decided that I-278 was the lesser evil. I-278 goes to all five boroughs and is a road many trucks use. There are low clearances, but tall enough for our RV to go under; bridges, but weight rated for large vehicles; and some off-limit parts of the road, but as long as we kept our eyes peeled and made no errors, we'd stay out of trouble.

The problem with this route was that our Garmin RV GPS - the main GPS we use for all our travels - didn't recognize this as viable route. I poured over each section of the trip and couldn't figure out why the GPS wouldn't route us this way, no matter how many pinpoints I added. All the clearances were above our height. The main bridge allowed trucks on the upper level. No matter what, the Garmin wanted to take us to I-95 via the George Washington Bridge. Now let me tell you a little something about the GW. That bridge causes anxiety in a normal car. RVing it is something we avoid like the plague. We're not alone. The number of times I have been a part of RV Facebook Group threads about traveling I-95 in the northeast, so many of us scream at each other to take the Tappan Zee (Cuomo) Bridge and not the GW. Many RVers also say to avoid I-95 altogether, but I-95 is home sweet home to us!

What's wrong with the GW? There is always traffic. How can there not be, seeing that the bridge is built over one of the biggest cities in the world? There is always construction. The road to get there is already intimidating because the signage is complicated and you need to make sure you're in the correct lanes to go to the correct level of this double-decker suspended nightmare. Not to mention the impatience of the New York drivers who need to deal with scared tourists on the bridge every day. The tolls are ginormous; in our quadruple axle rig we're looking at at least $50. And it's just plain scary! Nothing about this bridge depicts what we seek from RV life. As my mom likes to say, "What's Zen about this?" The answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing.

We took to our 3rd GPS - our RV Life app GPS - and saw that it was giving us the option to either choose the GW or I-278 to the Verrazano Bridge (also a double decker but less rawr). We breathed a sigh of relief that at least one RV GPS saw it as a traversable route with our travel trailer. Only it was saying the route would be over an hour longer than taking the GW. We went to bed the night before our departure still unsure of what we were going to do, but we figured we'd check traffic in the morning and decide once we were on the road.

Was that the best decision? Meh. Typically it's a smart way to go when there are multiple routes to choose from, all equally decent (or in this case, equally miserable). Only problem is that we cornered ourselves into making quick decisions during a time of stress. The GPS devices all changed their minds about 50 times by the time we were halfway up the Long Island Expressway. One GPS was telling us to get off an exit and go into a residential area, while the other was squawking at us to stay the course. We kept reminding ourselves that, until and unless we come to a road with no large vehicle access, it's best to just stay on the interstates. Then came the moment of truth. Our RV Life GPS had been the one glitching and telling us to get off the LIE, so it turns out I-278 was merely a half-hour time difference, not over an hour like it initially thought. But as we got closer to the point of no return, that GPS changed its tune and started routing us toward the GW. Oh dear God. So there we were, with only minutes to decide our fate, with both of our GPS' ganging up on us, taunting us to take the bridge we swore we'd never take. We could either white knuckle our way over Manhattan, or we could try and navigate I-278 through Brooklyn without a GPS, or hoping that the GPS would eventually learn what we were doing and recalculate accordingly.

I left the decision up to Anthony, something I never do as the navigator and passenger...ahem...backseat driver. Anthony is either the king of optimism or too afraid to go against the GPS in dire circumstances such as these, but he decided to route us toward the GW.

We spent the next hour weaving through hoards of automobiles, cones, and jersey barriers. We tried our best to read the signage, but the problem is, traffic patterns around there change so often that one sign will read one thing and another will read something completely different, and there's no way to know which sign is most recent. We ended up just following the trucks, who became our dear friends on the road. They know what it's like, so they took it slow with us, let us in front of them, and put on their hazards to alert of impending obstacles.

The bridge itself isn't even the worst of it; the road leading up to the bridge is when all the work needs to be done. We needed to make sure we were heading to the upper level, where large vehicles were allowed. We needed to get over the Harlem River before even crossing over the Hudson. We needed to inch our way through the most narrow single lane, as if the construction workers don't know how many giant semis go this route in a day. Then, to add to our terror, it started to rain.

Visibility off the bridge became practically nonexistent...but maybe that was a good thing.

And on top of it all, of course we had those incredible concrete bumps on the road over the Concrete Jungle.

After the longest hour and a half of our lives, we made it off the bridge and into New Jersey. We had never been so happy to reach the Jersey Turnpike, and thankfully, the rest of the drive was as smooth as we could expect, and by the time we got to our next campground in Delaware, the rain had stopped.

However, we didn't come away from that trip totally unscathed. Once we arrived to our Delaware campsite and Anthony went to hook up the sewer, he realized that we had lost our cap to our exit port, our secondary valve had come off, the cap to our sewer hose holding tube was partially broken and hanging loose, and the sewer hose we keep in there (thankfully not our main one) was missing. So somewhere on those concrete roads are pieces of our sewer equipment, floating down the highway. All easy, cheap fixes on our end, but we're stumped as to what actually happened. The lanes were insanely narrow but we don't think we scraped against anything. None of our sewer outlets or valve releases were bent. No vehicles honked at us alerting us to damage or to our stinky slinky colliding with someone's windshield. The best we can assume is that the road jolted our trailer so much that everything just broke and rattled free.

I shared the story of our missing sewer valve in the RV Miles Instagram. Jason, the owner of RV Miles who has yet to RV with his family in  the northeast, responded and said "That must have been a really rough road!" Jason, you have no idea.

Now that we've voyaged along the very roads that give most RVers all the fright, we've come away with mixed thoughts:

1. That was one expensive nightmare, having needed to pay for tolls, gas, sewer equipment, and months of therapy.

2. Now that we've done it, at least we know we can get through it with minimal damage.

3. We have no way of knowing if I-278 would've resulted in less gray hairs, but if we ever muster the courage to RV south from Long Island again, maybe we'll take this route to compare the two.

As for advice to those traveling in and around NYC in their RV? Hold onto your slinkies, because you're in for a rough ride!