Our travels have come to an abrupt end. We were at our last park in Canada, Lake Superior Provincial Park, and it was pouring rain. Imagining a quiet night with some hot chocolate and a movie, we started setting up our camping. The pop-up has a crank that raises the top part of the camper. As I was cranking to raise it, the damn thing collapsed. Slammed down, and luckily Mark wasn’t inside yet! With the weight of the air conditioner in addition to the top, it is really heavy, and could have seriously injured one of us. Now the “tent” part had now billowed out, and the door wouldn’t shut. We put a tarp up over the doorway and crawled inside to ponder our dilemma, and sleep out of the heavy rainfall.

Luckily, Mark has a bit of an engineering mind, and came up with a solution. We needed to raise the heavy roof to tuck back in the canvas AND be able to shut the door. Calls to the dealer and designer of the crank weren’t helpful. Mark and I couldn’t budge the roof by pushing up, and with the downpour, we didn’t want to go around knocking on tents, asking for help. So he rigged a system using the camper levelers. Systematically, raising the roof enough to close the door.

We could have continued and slept in our little tent for the rest of the trip. But we decided to come home and get this camper issue resolved. It may be resolved by getting a different truck camper, maybe a hardshell??

So I’m not going to get my Lake Superior Circle Drive patch…yet. We still have Michigan’s upper peninsula waiting for us.