First Day Travel Challenges

 The first week of January I hitched the trailer to the truck and we headed south, on our way to the Florida Keys. The first day was a challenge. 

1-   I was just getting over diarrhea from medicine to kill my sinus infection, and the Boss was feeling really bad.  

2-   I activated the hydraulic leveling jacks in preparation to hitching the truck, but nothing worked. Not known to me, there's a switch that isolates the trailer's 12 volt battery. Instead of being kept charged by the house power, it was dead. The hydraulics are powered by 12 volts. So it was 1:00 before we hit the road on the first leg, that was estimated to take 6 hours of driving.

3-   I-75 near Lexington Ky. was closed a day before we were to leave due to heavy snow. When we left it was reported as clear. That was almost the case. For several miles the pavement had thick ice, with intermittent small clear areas. It was rough as all hell, reducing our speed down to about 40mph.

4-   We arrived at our first overnight stop very late. I think it was around 9:00 or 10:00. The office was closed, but a map showing where to park the trailer was posted. Misreading the map put us in a dead end, in the dark, where my fatigue and inexperience didn't allow me to turn around.  I saw a way of driving forward, making a turn between 2 trees. In the dark I didn't see that one was originally dual trunked, with one cut off a few feet from the ground. The trailer caught it just in front of the axles. There was no functional damage, but it did a fine job of bending and tearing thin sheet metal.

Thankfully, our trip got a lot better from then on.