Everything Broke First: Week One with Winifred
Our 2026 summer adventure was supposed to start on Thursday. M had her Keystone tests that week, and by the time Thursday afternoon wrapped up, we’d gotten a good amount loaded but not enough runway to comfortably make the drive up to Corning. So we pushed to Friday, had a relaxed Thursday night, and figured we’d get an early start in the morning.
Friday, we took our showers, finished loading, and pulled out of the driveway in Winifred, our brand-new Winnebago, for the first time on a real trip. I’d been excited about this for weeks — new rig, fresh start, M following behind me in the Jeep in our first-ever dual-drive convoy. It felt like the beginning of something good.
We made it about two miles before every light in the rig started flashing on and off, the fridge started screaming, and the battery readout on the dashboard — sitting at a confident, cheery 100% — turned out to be completely made up. I turned around and headed back home.
Snapshot: Week One
- Location: Corning/Watkins Glen, NY to Lake Placid, NY
- Duration: 7 days
- Miles: 117 to Corning, 351 to Lake Placid
- Must-see: Corning Museum of Glass
- Ariel’s rating: 🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾 (grass nap conditions were exceptional)
Days 1-2: Winifred's Opening Statement
We ended up at a local riverfront campground while I tried to figure out what was happening. It seemed like the battery was trying to connect to something and failing — every few seconds the lights would come on, flicker, and cut back out again, which is exactly as alarming as it sounds, and the fridge beeped constantly because it couldn’t hold power. I finally just switched the fridge off so at least it would stop yelling at me.
Within the hour, a neighbor came over from his motorhome to ask what was going on. I explained. He disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a Reddit thread on his phone — an actual Reddit thread, from someone who’d had the same problem, with a full six-step process for resetting the inverter system. The inverter is what converts between battery power, shore power, and solar power, and ours had somehow gotten confused about where the power was coming from. We walked through the steps together. When the battery finally rebooted, it showed 0%. The screen had been lying to us the whole time.
The RV community really is something else — they are always willing to help, always happy to share what they know, and I would have been completely stuck without that neighbor.
Four hours on shore power to bring the battery back up, then we unplugged overnight to make sure it was depleting normally and not dropping fast, because a fast drop would have meant dead cells and a warranty trip back to the dealer. By morning it was at 95% and losing charge at a perfectly normal rate, and we were finally ready to leave.
Saturday also started with a quick detour to campus, because what I had carefully filed under “important RV documents” was the bill of sale, not the registration Not the same thing, as it turns out. Two copies printed, lesson thoroughly learned, and we got on the road around one in the afternoon, which was later than I’d planned but I chose not to dwell on that.
This was also our first trip running the dual-drive. I’d been thinking about it for a while — rental cars near Montreal and Quebec City run around $500 a week in summer, we were going to need the Jeep accessible at the stops anyway, and M has her full license now. The plan was simple enough: I drive Winifred, she follows behind in the Jeep, and we keep our phones open on speaker the whole way so we can stay in touch if anything comes up. It worked out better than I expected, honestly — the communication was easy, and M spent a solid portion of the 117 miles north singing to me through the phone, which I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy.
We’ve stayed at the Corning/Watkins Glen KOA before — it was our very first stop on the summer 2020 trip, the first summer we traveled after the lockdowns — so we had a specific campsite we liked and had reserved it ahead of time. We were barely through setup when the battery did it again, showing discharging on the screen even with us plugged into 30-amp shore power. By that point M had the entire reset procedure memorized like a boss. She walked through it without me asking, the battery sorted itself out, and I sat there thinking that she’d probably figured out Winifred’s electrical system before I had.
Days 3-4: The Heat Situation
Sunday, we went to mass at St. Mary’s on the Lake in Watkins Glen, then stopped for lunch on the way back at the Holy Cow Meat Market in Delhi. M got a BLT — she’s been mentally cataloging and comparing BLTs from diners all over the country for several years, and this one earned a solid spot on the completely unofficial but very seriously maintained ranking list. I got an Italian sub, which was fine, though the salami was sliced too thick for my taste and they didn’t have oil and vinegar, so it just wasn’t my order. We’d go back, I just know what to ask for next time.
We came back to the camper to find it sitting at 85 degrees inside. The AC had been running the whole time. It had just not been doing much of anything useful.
I hadn’t put the sun shields in the big front windows, which was a mistake I won’t repeat. The sun up in the Finger Lakes hits differently than it does at home — there’s something about the altitude or the air quality up there, but it’s more intense than I expect every single time. We got the shields installed, turned the fans on, and waited to see what would happen. By evening the AC had finally kicked in the way it was supposed to, blowing cold air and dripping condensation off the roof, which is what it’s supposed to do. I thought we’d figured it out.
We had not figured it out.
The next morning was already warm when we woke up, and by noon it was 80 degrees inside. I gave up and went outside, where it was genuinely cooler. M stayed in and started methodically trying to figure out what was actually wrong, which is very her. She looked up into the ceiling vents and noticed a red glow coming from inside the duct system. Her theory was that the sun beating down on the roof was heating the air in the vents before it ever had a chance to cool anything, which would mean not enough insulation between the exterior roof and the duct system running through it. That would be a meaningful design flaw in a brand-new, top-of-the-line, recently completely redesigned Winnebago. We still don’t have a definitive answer on whether she’s right, but I’ll say this: she might be.
We also had the leaf situation. Somewhere between the factory floor and our driveway, a leaf had gotten inside the closed housing of the bathroom ceiling fan and was now sitting directly on the spinning blade. The noise it made was genuinely spectacular. I couldn’t sleep with it running and couldn’t leave the vent open without the fan on, so I just turned the whole thing off overnight, which meant less air circulation in an already hot camper. M, somehow, could sleep through it. Ariel seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth her attention.
Ariel, at least, had a grooming appointment that Monday afternoon — the last session in a PetSmart package I’d bought before the trip, and I wanted to get it in before we crossed into Canada. She came back looking very clean and completely serene, which is the Ariel energy I aspire to.
Day 5: 55 Out of 50
Tuesday morning M had her French oral exam. She texted me when it was over and said she’d gotten a 55, which gave me a moment of genuine alarm – until she followed up to say the exam was graded out of 50 and she’d earned extra credit for finishing early and doing well. I’m really going to need her to be more specific in her first texts.
After that, we headed to the Corning Museum of Glass.
We’ve visited CMOG before — we went last summer too — but this trip was different. M has been building a real jewelry-making practice over the past year and is starting to turn it into something more than a hobby. For her, the museum was partly a fun outing and partly a genuine working visit. She booked an advanced glassblowing session — just her and one instructor, a full hour, entirely focused — and made a vase. It’s deep red and black, a shape she worked out in real time with her instructor, and it’s heavier than it looks when you pick it up. It’s living in the camper now next to the big red, white, and blue artificial flower bouquet she picked out at the museum shop that morning, which has apparently been designated as our traveling mascot for the entire summer.
We both made necklace pendants in a separate session — she made a flat one, I made a twisty one — and then she went back in the afternoon for one more appointment to try a square bead technique she hadn’t attempted before. She’d gotten the slot, she had something specific she wanted to learn, and she went back and learned it. The Corning Museum gave her new approaches to bring back to her bench that she genuinely hadn’t had before.
Ariel stayed at the camper with the windows open and the fans going while we were at the museum. We’d gotten a better feel for what the camper needed to stay reasonable in the heat by then.
We had lunch at Wegmans, in the prepared food section, which is the correct decision when you’ve spent the morning working with molten glass and have no desire to make any additional decisions.
Day 6: The Good Day
Wednesday, I had calls in the morning — students, clients, some university leadership meetings — so M worked on schoolwork while I handled those. In the afternoon we drove into Corning to pick up our finished glass projects from the museum, and seeing them fully fired and ready to take home was its own little reward. M’s vase was even more striking than it had been on the hot shop floor: heavy, deeply red and black, exactly what she had in mind when she made it.
Corning has a three-zone free parking system downtown where you can stay two hours in each zone but only once per day, and there’s someone walking the zones writing down license plates to enforce it. We navigated the zones, moved the car when we needed to, had lunch at Rico’s Pizza, and spent the rest of the afternoon just wandering. M found some new charms and stickers, the weather was nice, and nothing needed to be fixed or reset or figured out. After the week we’d been having, that felt like a lot.
Day 7: 351 Miles
Thursday was our travel day out of the Finger Lakes, and it was a long one — 351 miles from Corning, all the way up to Lake Placid.
When I was towing the travel trailer, that distance would have been a two-day drive. The Jeep could pull about 200 miles on a tank of gas, and I always respected that limit. Winifred changes the math considerably, and 351 miles in a day is entirely manageable, just long.
M drove behind me the whole way, through some genuinely beautiful Adirondack country, and she was steady from start to finish. By the time we pulled into Lake Placid, she had to be exhausted, but she never mentioned it.
I will note that there was some…discussion about the speedometer situation during the drive. My account is that there were stretches where she was going noticeably under the speed limit, which kept opening a gap between us in the convoy that I’d have to compensate for. Her account is that she was going the speed limit the whole time, so if she seemed slow, either I was fast or one of the speedometers is broken. We have not yet achieved resolution on this, but I think we all can agree it’s definitely not me.
The Corning/Watkins Glen KOA, which has been a genuinely good campground for us over the years, wasn’t quite what it’s been on previous visits — the grounds weren’t as well-maintained as I remembered, there was pooling mud in a few spots from the recent rain, and it was quieter and a little less cared-for than I’d expected. It didn’t take anything away from the week, but arriving at Lake Placid made it hard not to notice the difference.
The Lake Placid Whiteface Mountain KOA was beautiful. Immaculate dog area, well-mowed, and we got a riverside campsite where we could see the water from our patio. After a week of battery resets, a heat wave, a leaf rattling in the bathroom fan, and 351 miles of M holding steady behind me through the mountains, that campground felt like exactly the right place to land.
We were only there the one night. We needed to be staged for the border crossing in the morning.
Canada is next, and I cannot wait.
Road Trip Rhythm
“Dog Days Are Over” — Florence + The Machine
Because by the time we pulled into that campground in Lake Placid, they really were. The battery was sorted, the AC was cooperating more often than not, M had just driven 351 miles through the Adirondacks without a word of complaint, and Ariel was stretched out in the grass by the river like she’d planned this all along. It had been a week. This song felt exactly right for the end of it.
Favorite Snapshot
Ariel in the grass outside the camper, completely flat on her side in a patch of sun, legs stretched out behind her, not moving. While the rest of us had been resetting batteries and sweating through a three-day heat wave and trying to extract a leaf from a ceiling fan, she had been doing this. Napping in the grass at every campground like she’d been on a completely different, much more relaxing trip.
She probably had been.
