Time Zone: Eastern
Today's Weather: in the low 60ºs, heavy rain
Length of Trip: 4 days/3 nights
Next stop: Tampa, FL
We picked up the unit from storage in Joliet, IL after the Sunday matinee and listened to the Seahawks wrestle with the 49ers for the championship title on the radio as we drove to the RV storage. It was late and we were tired, a phrase which in my experience frequently precedes a recount of trial, near-miss, or disaster.
There was only one minor detail to which to attend before striking out toward Texas: the truck was in need of gas. Luckily there was a diesel gas station on the corner adjacent to the interstate entrance. Filling up was, to our inexperienced minds, expected to be about as eventful as going to the bathroom. Pull in, do your business, and then get on with your life. I did notice from my position in the Mazda, following the truck-trailer rig which Jonathan was driving, that he hesitated briefly before pulling into the station.
“I was checking the clearance,” he told me as we pumped the gas. “I wasn’t sure we’d fit.”
I congratulated him on this foresight. There’s little chance I would have thought about such a detail until after I’d ripped the top off of our new home.
And time it may have been but place it was not. I saw the look on my husband’s face go from clear to cloudy and tried to assess what the developing problem might be. I have only the vaguest of instincts as to how a truck and trailer in a fifth-wheel hookup might function so I wasn’t as certain as he was, but even to my eye it was relatively clear. There was no way our rig was getting out from the place we’d wedged it up against the gas pump.
In the history of our RV life, disaster came even before departure.
For about ten minutes we talked about how very stuck we were. It was impossible to turn to the right as this would swing the butt of the trailer into the gas pump. It was equally impossible to turn to the left as this would scrape the trailer against a second gas pump before swinging its butt into a third. To my thinking the only available solution was to pull straight forward, which would require driving up a snow bank, over a curb, through several shrubs, over another snow bank, and then a final curb in order to access the street beyond.
“We can’t do that!” Jonathan said, aghast. “We can’t go off-roading within city limits! Besides, I’m not even sure the trailer would make it over that curb without capsizing.”
Seeing as he was unwilling to try my “climb every mountain” approach I asked him if he thought backing up would do us any good.
“I guess it’s worth a shot,” he said, although with more doubt than hope.
He’d wanted to take the trailer to an empty lot sometime in the near future for his first attempts at backward motion. Necessity, however, was destined to become the mother of education. He threw the truck into reverse.
In hindsight this was a big mistake.
The only maneuver he was able to accomplish was something akin to parallel parking the RV even more snuggly up against the gas pump. Now, in order to move forward, both the truck and the trailer would be required to drive up onto the concrete foundations of not one but two gas pumps sitting in a row.
By this point everyone involved was close to tears.
The rest of the world seemed dead asleep. Even the gas station attendant, no doubt kept inside by the historically cold winter blowing all around us, pretended not to notice the two people, truck, and trailer in crisis at his or her door.
“What should we do?” we asked ourselves.
I looked at the situation again and saw that, accept for being slightly worse, it presented the same reality as it had before.
“I think you should reconsider driving over the snow bank,” I said. “You can’t go backward and you can’t make a turn, so you gotta keep going straight.”
Needless to say he was very skeptical about this, especially as it required driving over the foot of not one but two gas pumps.
“We could cause a huge fire, you know,” he said. “On the upside, at least then we wouldn’t be so miserably cold.”
He got in the truck, put it in drive, and slowly pulled the rig forward. First the truck and then the trailer tipped far to the right as they went up and down over the feet of the gas pumps. The whole rig shuddered over the curb and the snow bank, leaving the shrubbery much more intact than I’d expected. A final bump to come down off of the last curb and the catastrophe was abruptly over.
I hopped into the Mazda and we pointed our vehicles in the direction of Texas.
For the most part we try to follow the big trucks, which, in their mammoth proportions and layers of filth, are the wizened elders of the road. Their every move is guided by a repository of knowledge gained from instruction and experience, turning them into giant object lessons for anyone out there who might be trying to reinvent the operations of the wheel.
On our way out of Maryland yesterday, two hours behind schedule, we attempted to make a stop at the nearest Shell station. This resulted in a fifteen-minute episode of “backing out because we can’t go in” that only added to our delay without getting us any fuel. And yet we felt lucky to incur this setback seeing as at no point did anyone or anything burst into either tears or flame.
And then just this morning, moments before I began dictating this post to my phone as we roll farther down the road, we found ourselves hovering at yet another gas station entrance. There was a picture of a truck with a big red X through it, but then again there was also a truck with a small trailer that had somehow managed to pull up at the pump.
“What do you think?” Jonathan asked me. “Will we fit?”
“How badly do we want to find out?” I asked back.
We watched an eighteen-wheeler leave the expressway and head toward a sign with the word “trucks” on it next to a huge white arrow pointing up the road. We pulled out behind the wise one and let it lead us to a safer watering hole.
Miles Driven with RV: 5143.3 miles
Days Lived in RV: 75 days
Camps Overnighted in RV: 11 RV parks, 1 Walmart, 1 Casino Parking Lot
States Camped in RV: 9 (TX, AL, TN, IN, KY, IL, NC, WV, MD)