04 Oct

A Thousand Trails to Maine

That is what I said to my husband who promptly said, “Ok.” Niagara to Maine was a bit of a drive when towing a TT. Towing much more than 300 miles becomes rather taxing on the driver. I had been to Saratoga Springs before and was surprised at how much I liked it. We searched for campgrounds in that direction and Lake George Escape, in the Adirondacks, was a perfect in between point.

Campground fees were starting to escalate and we needed to find a more economical way to budget for this. Garrett had mentioned that he saw a Thousand Trails Pass when looking for places to stay. We had already spent two different stays and Thousand Trails campgrounds so it was worth researching. This is how I found out that Garrett and I had two different ideas of how this trip was going to work. I was making suggestions of places to go thinking he thought the same thing. He, on the other hand, thought we would stay at places a month or so at a time. Ha!

Often, campgrounds have daily, weekly and monthly rates. The longer you stay, the more you might be able to save. I, however, chose the more expensive route where we were hopping from campground to campground. The Thousand Trails Pass was made for this type of travel. The pass allows you to stay at any Thousand Trails campground for 4 nights free. If you don’t exceed the 4 nights you can invariable not have to pay for camping fees indefinitely. However, if you stay for 5 to 14 nights at the same campground you don’t pay for that stay but you are required to stay away from a Thousand Trails campground for a week. Now, we had already spent over $500 for 3 weeks of travel. The Trails Pass plus the Trails Collection add on (which gives you additional parks) was somewhere in the low $600s. No brainer, it turned out that the next 3 weeks we stayed in Thousand Trails or Encore parks so we were well on our way to saving at least a little money.

Back to the Adirondacks...Garrett and the girls were able to go on their first big hike of the trip, Prospect Mountain. They came home dirty, holes in their pants and exhausted. It wouldn’t have been a good hike if they didn’t. I was able to do one hike in the Adirondacks. It was very short and not one we originally picked but it was delightful. We were driving towards one of the suggested places on the internet but as we were driving Garrett thought he saw something. I made a U-turn and parked at one of the turnouts. We could hear water so decided to walk into the woods a little. We ended up finding a little lake and little waterfalls. We spent maybe an hour and a half exploring. If we had packed water shoes and a lunch we would have spent much more time there. We came to find it was called Schroon Lake.