R-Pod Adventure

We are working on the plans for this year's epic adventure. Jenny and I have been travelling together for 16 years, the last 6 in travel trailers. We have been in all 10 Provinces of Canada, 2 Canadian Territories and 37 of the 49 United States. We are experienced travelers.

We own a 2017 R-Pod 179, a compact, light weight travel trailer. Our trailer is affectionately named the TaJ-ma-Haul (you will see her referred to frequently in the blog as TaJ (the TaJ stands for our names Tony and Jenny).

We tow with a 2016 Honda Pilot, nicknamed Sully, after the pilot who landed his aircraft on the Hudson River.

We leave our home in Aylesford, Nova Scotia, on May 8 and will spend 5 months traveling Canada. We will post a blog entry every Monday. Along the way we will stop and take pictures of TaJ and Sully with just about any roadside attraction.

One of the things we are going to focus on this year is how to do this without impacting the environment any more than absolutely necessary:

1) No plastic water bottles. We will use a 2.5 gallon reusable water container, and fill it at the campground, or in the closest local community. We will also refill our metal water bottles in the same way.
2) No plastic grocery bags. We have reusable produce bags, and will limit our non-recyclable food plastic by using local shops and getting our products wrapped in paper.
3) Our Honda Pilot will emit about 6.3 tons of CO2 on our 30,000 kilometer journey. We will be paying Canadian Carbon Tax of about 5 cents per liter of gas, so we will be paying for our share of the environmental damage we will cause.
4) We have never used drive-thru restaurants/coffee shops, etc. That will continue to be our practice as we criss-cross Canada this year. If we stop to buy food, we will eat inside the restaurant, not while we drive along the highway. Besides, most food outlets provide free Wi-fi and we make use of that
5) We will not use a disposable coffee cup. We both have re-usable travel mugs if we must get a coffee to go.

The other thing we are doing this year is stripping down our travel kit. When we did a 6 month trip in 2017 we were loaded to the gills, and a lot of stuff never got used, or was used so little that it wasn't worth the effort to have it along.

So we are limiting ourselves to 850 pounds of cargo, split evenly between the car and trailer. We are weighing everything that will be put on board. The lighter the load, the better the gas mileage and the less stuff you have to take out and put back each time you stop for a few days. We estimate we carried about 1,400 pounds last trip, so this will be a real slim down for us.

There will be one more blog entry before we depart on May 8, outlining the 7 week long westward journey as far as Mission, British Columbia. A map of our westward route will be included.

If you want to follow our blog, there is a link at the top of the page to subscribe to this blog. We will be on the road for about 22 weeks, so there will be around that many entries to this blog.