August Travels (Kentucky, W. Virginia, Pittsburgh, Niagara, and More)

It was a strange feeling after our Beachbody Coach Summit in Nashville.  In years past that event comes to an end and we go back to Minnesota and go back to our normal lives.  So it was strange when this year we just packed up the RV and moved on to our next location.  Slowly this full time traveling thing is starting to feel like the norm.  

One place that was definitely on our radar that we wanted to check out was Niagara Falls.  From Nashville we plotted our course to get there and it took us through Kentucky.  We did just an overnight stay at a little park in Renfro Valley.  It was actually a cute park that hosts a bunch of country music concerts.  

A mid-walk dance party

This little hill kept him busy for a solid 10 minutes

Woke up to some serious fog

After Kentucky we had heard great things about West Virginia and how beautiful it was.  Our original plan was to stay at a state park or Army Corps of Engineers park called Bulltown Campground for 4 days.  It was up in the mountains and right on a lake, everything looked fantastic.  Well... we didn't think about cell phone coverage.  We didn't have any on our ATT phones or our Verizon hotspot.  Had we known that we could have planned for us to be unplugged but unfortunately we had some business commitments that we needed to be a part of which meant we needed to find some service.  So our 4 day stay turned into 1 night.  

Not a bad view from our campground in WV

Our only communication to the outside world! Who knew payphones still existed?

It actually didn't turn out to be so bad that we left West Virginia.  Our plan was to drive up to Pittsburgh for a quarterly Beachbody event anyways that Saturday so it did save us some mileage and time in the car.  The spot we moved to was a fun little park with a lot of full-timers a little southeast of Pittsburgh.  We spent a decent amount of time at the playground in the park and met some pretty cool people, even some fellow Beachbody coaches.  

We spent a great day in Pittsburgh.  Our morning was filled with our Beachbody event where we got to hear some amazing stories from fellow coaches.  Laura and Eli got to meet Autumn Calabrese, the trainer behind 21 Day Fix and Country Heat.  After our event we walked around downtown a bit.  It happened to be Regatta weekend and we were in the neighborhood so we checked out some of the boat races.  

After our 4 day stay in the Pittsburgh area we made our way up to Niagara area.  We stayed at a great campground literally right Lake Ontario.  Our view was looking out at that lake.  Here's one at sunset, pretty incredible!

I was a little worried Niagara Falls was going to be underwhelming.  Let's just say it wasn't.  Such a cool spot and awe inspiring to see that kind of power in nature.  We only walked around on the US side of the falls but walked all way from the horseshoe falls down to the US falls and up on the observation deck that hangs out over the river.  

We did drive the road that runs parallel to the river and falls on the Canadian side.  It definitely looked like you would get better views of all the falls from that side!  Now we know!  

Our travels went international at this point too.  We decided to make a day trip up to Toronto.  We had heard great things about the city.  We wish we would have done a bit more homework ahead of time and it would have been fun to spend more time there.  We spent most of our time in the distillery district.  It had some fun restaurants, coffee shops, and boutique style shops.   

One mistake we made due to poor planning was walking to Cherry Beach Park.  Let's just say Canadian beaches don't really compare to others we have visited.  We wish we would have went and checked out some market areas of town instead.  I wish we had more time but we tried to get out of downtown before rush hour.  We left downtown around 3:00 and our 2 hour drive turned into 3.  Who knows how bad it would have been had we stayed another hour or two.  

Canadian Beach on Lake Ontario

We did all of that in just over a week!  Are you tired just reading about all of that?  Yeah it was pretty exhausting moving that fast and doing as much as we were doing.   We had one more stop in central upstate New York before we would settle into a campground in southern Massachusetts for 2 weeks.  We did pretty well in keeping the whirlwind going.  We spent some time in Rome, NY, a petting zoo, washed the RV, and spent an afternoon checking out a local lake town.  I almost forgot we also celebrated Eli's 2nd birthday!  

We had such a good time during this part of our trip.  This is really why we wanted to go on this adventure.  To be together as a family, see places that are popular spots and quite a few that are off the beaten path.