“No alarms in the morning!”  We agreed.  Exhausted, irritable, and with aching bodies, we apologized for snapping at each other and reviewed a list of repairs the trailer would need: broken freezer door, malfunctioning power tongue jack, propane leak.  We settled in to the first night of our trip at The Grand Ole RV Resort in Goodlettsville, TN, just northeast of Nashville.

Our first day on the road was not at all what we had envisioned. We were questioning every decision we made up until now.  A 22-foot travel trailer for several months? Really? Did we really need to bring everything we packed?  Then we listed all the things we forgot to bring with us.  Why didn’t we go on a local shake-down cruise a week before we left for our trip?  Are we kidding ourselves here?  Do we really want to do this for the next few months?

We had left home late in the day on Wednesday, a good 52 hours later than the noon Monday departure time we had planned.  The delay was fortuitous because Kevin had forgotten that he had a dermatologist appointment Wednesday morning.  He kept the appointment and had what looks to be a skin cancer removed from his forehead.  It was cold and raining as we finished packing and hooking up the trailer in the late afternoon.  We had been moving much slower than we planned.  The physical strain of lifting, carrying, bending, reaching, kneeling, and twisting was taking its toll on our unhealthy backs and out-of-shape bodies.  Problems began surfacing with the trailer; problems that we had never had to solve before, so they were time-consuming as we researched the solutions.

Just keep smiling. Just keep smiling.

We breathed a sigh of relief as we drove the trailer away from our home.  During the rainy 5-hour drive, we grooved on classic rock tunes and rested our bodies.  Who can possibly be unhappy singing along with songs like Light My Fire and Bohemian Rhapsody?  Kevin, who was driving and playing air guitar, air drums and air piano, did not rest quite as much!  As he drove, pulling the trailer in the rain, it became clear that we would need to get new tires on the Explorer sooner than we had planned.  We smiled as we traveled and sang but noticed that the frustrations and our weariness put a damper on our excitement at getting underway.

We arrived at the campground in Tennessee after dark.  The office was closed.  Some friendly ladies sitting on the porch pointed us to the map the staff had left taped to the door.  It showed us where our site was and gave phone numbers to call if we needed help.  To our surprise, a nice and helpful man named Glen (who has a very impressive Duck Dynasty beard) met us at the site and helped us get situated with a demonstration of southern hospitality.  We hooked up power and water, and leveled and stabilized the trailer using the manual tongue-jack crank.  When the slide-out stopped midway into being extended, Kevin discovered the freezer door had opened on the road, got jammed in the slide out, and now would not click closed.  Our favorite chocolate ganache ice cream sat in a spreading chocolate puddle on the trailer floor along with packages of once-frozen bacon, vegetables, english muffins, and other things Kevin was, no doubt, too irritated to mention.

We left the trailer hooked up to the car because we would need to bring it to a repair shop at some point soon.  Later, we realized the car was jutting out too much into the hopefully little-used road at the back of the campground.  We decided to leave it there rather than unhooking and retracting the stabilizers just to back up a couple feet.  Things felt a little bleak despite our best but weak efforts at humor.

We decided that everything would look brighter in the morning. Sometime around midnight, Kevin said, “We’ll think about that tomorrow.”  Kate replied, “Tomorrow is another day.”  We ate what was left of the melted chocolate ganache ice cream and crawled into bed to sleep as we listened to the train rumble by.

After a good night’s sleep, the overlooked alarm on Kevin’s phone woke us at 7:15 AM.  Kevin went back to sleep while Kate prepared this blog post.

Another day indeed.