First Haul!

Sheila has embraced our new home on wheels - christened Solomon - and moved it into our neighborhood!

For months, we've been pondering a puzzle. When we get a trailer, how will we move into it? Our stuff is in the house. The trailer moves, but could it move next to the house? Would the trees and wires in the neighborhood be high enough? Would the streets be wide enough? How would we get here from the highway? Lots of mapping, measuring with a pruning pole, carefully watching any large truck that comes by the windows, and worrying ensued. 13 feet 6 inches is pretty tall, as tall as a semi trailer, and unlike such a trailer, the top of it is covered with fragile air conditioners and solar panels. Not something you'll casually hit stray branches with.

And then when you got it here, where would it go? The street frontage by our house isn't nearly wide enough. Some houses in the neighborhood have more space, but would the residents appreciate having a massive RV parked there for a week or more? We didn't know. But we had to try. Moving into it any other way was going to be very hard, so even a tough slog to get neighborhood permission was worth it. We scouted properties and identified a handful, then made the cutest requests we could. I hand-wrote letters. Audrey decorated them with drawings of our RV. We offered to pay, we included phone numbers, the works. The first neighbor we asked declined, and the second wasn't home so we left the letter... then heard nothing. That second neighbor had the spot we really wanted, with plenty of room just a block from our house. But we hardly saw hide nor hair of them, and wondered if we ever would.

Then, after a week of waiting and a providential meeting of a neighbor that did know that second neighbor and knew her to be friendly, we received a call. Marge let us know that she'd be delighted to help us out, and we were welcome to park our trailer there as long as we needed! What an answer! After a few are-we-sure conversations, it was decided - Friday the 16th would be our RV First Move Day, our first towing experience!

So in the week leading up to it, we made detailed checklists, we watched towing and backing tutorials, we tried to tutor ourselves as best we could. Nothing really cures the nerves, but we could at least trust the guidance of those who have gone before. We put the hitch in, which was thankfully simple, packed tools and lots of checklists. We fired up the air compressor and made sure all the tires were happy. We packed a bunch of food and headed out to Sauvie Island!

When we got there, we went through the RV insides and closed things up, tidied for travel, and checked all the slides and tires. I had to learn the leveling system enough to move it through the hitch/disconnect sequences. (The list says to retract all but the front jacks but... how do you do that?) The excellent manual that came with our RV helped a great deal, along with the checklists from Changing Lanes.

I was surprised at how tricky it is to back exactly onto the pin. Backing into a driveway is one thing, imagine lining up your hitch receiver onto a target the width of a parking stripe, when the receiver is 15 feet from your front tires. It took a few tries! The slightly muddy, uneven ground at the farm did me no favors either, though 4 wheel drive helped a great deal. Once I lined it up close enough (ca-chunk!), it was the moment of truth - time to lower the landing gear, and have Sheila bear the kingpin load for the first time. There was more squat than I expected, the load still put the truck bed about level though. It was weird to see, having driven the truck only unloaded, how much the springs really compress!

After checking all the safety bits - electrical, breakaway, hitch up, etc. we made a toast to Sheila and Solomon, may they be our heavenly, peaceful home on the road.

It was time to leave the farm. We did not want to have our first experience backing up the rig be that of trying to park in our neighborhood. The pressure of a) having to park it there no matter what and b) having real obstacles to avoid, making mistakes costly was too much. So we planned to take a detour on our way home to a large parking lot and try backing up a few times. We took careful notes from the KYD backing up video and tried as many of the moves as we could, though even the large lots at Jantzen Beach were not big enough for our rig to really maneuver! Lots that look huge on satellite feel small real fast when you pull 50+ feet of rig into them.

After about 30 minutes of sweaty backing and turning, the daylight was fading fast. We moved everything across the parking lot and found a bar we could get some takeout from so we'd have the fuel to get home from there. By the time we got our food the sun had set, which was not ideal but we sure weren't going to hurry now. The path from Jantzen to home was long-planned and scouted, so we felt good about that.

Audrey expressing what we all felt in that moment.

In the end, we accidentally landed perfectly in our neighborhood spot. It was bigger than we realized, and we didn't even have to back in! Kristin spotted us in and went, that looks great - just leave it. I didn't believe it until I got out and looked. It was late, so we didn't disconnect but just secured things and collapsed into bed. The next day we went back out to disconnect and level, which resulted in more checklist scouring and youtubing. Once you know what to look for this stuff is pretty straightforward, but I'm in no hurry to toss the checklists!