After four months of sitting in one place we are finally on the road.  Yesterday we pulled out of Akron and headed to our first camping destination and our new life on the road.  It took us a while to get everything ready – we had to sanitize the water tank after not using it for a year and wash the rubber seals that had been out.  Tom repacked some stuff to balance the weight so that he felt comfortable hooking it to the truck.  Then we hooked up and moved.  Yeah!  I always feel like singing “on the road again” in my best Willie Nelson impression.

We drove through a little rain, but missed the big storms that were hitting Akron and Cleveland, and arrived at our destination about 3 p.m.  We checked in and headed to the site we had reserved.  One of the interesting things about campground reservations these days is that the campground maps are online and you can get satellite views of them from google maps.  So we had been careful to pick a site that looked big enough – and clear enough of trees – for our rig.  We found the site – and it is big enough – but just barely.  Tom did a great job backing in and we have just enough clearance to let out our four slides.

With the slides out, we feel like we are in a secret garden campsite.  We can’t see any other campers from our site.  There are trees all around us.  You can hear plenty of car noise in the distance, but the campground is very quiet.

Except for one crazy cardinal.  As soon as we got set up yesterday, we started to be attacked by a cardinal.  Tom thinks he sees his reflection in the windows of the RV and is defending his nest against an attack by other cardinals, but every minute, hour after hour, this poor cardinal attacks the RV, flying again and again into the windows.  When he gets tired he sits in the trees around us and yells at us.  He took a break overnight – when it was dark – but he woke us up at daylight this morning back at his attacks.  This morning he was even trying to attack the truck.  I got a couple of pictures of him by sitting very still for a while early this morning.  They aren’t the best – but here they are.

Again and again this tiny little bird flings himself angrily at our huge RV.  He isn’t doing any damage to the RV – only to himself.  It made me think about some people I know like that.  They keep doing the same thing over and over even though it has no effect other than making them exhausted and crazy.  Maybe there is a lesson for all of us in the actions of this bird.