Thanks, Garmin! 9/28/2015

Behold Kentucky Route 611

Around a hairpin turn leaving Big South Fork.
I was following in the Elantra.

Our ultimate destination today was Breaks Interstate Park that sits on the border of Kentucky and Virginia. In leaving the Big South Fork campground, our only choice if we wanted to shave at least 1-2 hours of extra driving, was to go out the way we came in--up and down the sinuous curves we negotiated on the way in. To make it easier, I drove the Elantra, rather than hooking it up to the RV. That made it a bit easier to go around those hairpin turns. Ray drove the beast like a champ, and we traveled the 4 miles from the campground down to a place where we could connect the car. It took 15 minutes to go 4 miles.

After a brief stop in Oneida for gas and few groceries, we set off using a directions list Ray had printed out from the Good Sam Club (an RV club) website. Issue #1: we missed the turn for a state road going east. When we realized this, we checked our state paper road map, and saw that another road would connect us to the Interstate to which we were heading. We headed down that road. From that point, our Garmin (specifically designed for the needs of RVers) had a different route mapped out than the Good Sam route. Which to use? Issue #2: we chose the Garmin. All was fine until Garmin directed us to turn onto Kentucky Route 611. Let me stress here that our Garmin specifically routes RVs on roads that are RV-safe. Issue #3: Route 611. OH. MY. GOD. This route made the entrance to Big South Fork look like the Interstate. Route 611 looked to be just slightly wider than our driveway, and a whole lot more steep and riddled with curves and hairpin turns. The road was JUST wide enough for the RV. No other cars. JUST our RV. So Ray carefully (there's really no other way), guided the RV down route 611, through what I imagine the towns depicted in Justified looked like. (Harlan county is actually just south of this area.) And then... Issue #4: THE SCHOOL BUS. To our extreme horror, we came around a bend, and beheld a full size school bus coming down the road directly at us. We couldn't back up. There was no place to go. We couldn't move over to the right. Our passenger side wheels were at the very edge of the pavement, and there was a 2 foot drop off directly at the pavement edge (can you spell "snapped axle"?) we stopped. Our blood pressure spiked (at least mine did). The bus driver advanced...slowly, and eased the bus by, putting his wheels onto a sliver of grass on the other side of the road, with about 2-3 inches (not an exaggeration) to spare between our 2 vehicles. We assume that this bus driver has done this before. we drove on this hellish road for about 8 miles.It seemed like an eternity. In some places, the edge of the road had collapsed, narrowing the already too-narrow road. We met a few cars coming form the opposite direction, and they politely stopped and moved to the shoulder to let us pass. Thanks Garmin, for the great RV directions!

Finally we arrived at Breaks and at our campsite. With some difficulty, we leveled  the rig in our full-hookup spot (water, electric, sewer), and were somewhat surprised that there were no other people on our campground loop. We're all by ourselves. In the pitch dark. In the woods.