And Here We Go

Departure

After a lot of planning, a lot of being anxious, and a little bit of being nervous, the time had finally come for me to leave! I hooked up and took this picture of the last time I’ll see my house for almost six months:

I have been a bit nervous about driving around with the trailer by myself, it hardly makes sense that pretty much anybody is allowed to get a trailer and drive around with 50 plus feet of combined vehicle without any training. So far so good though, and in some ways I think it is easier than driving on a normal road trip. When towing my trailer, I know I’m going to be slow, so it’s easy to just get in the right lane, set my cruise control, and in some ways it seems more relaxing. It reminds me of what I’ve heard being a pilot can be like: a period of intense concentration while getting to an interstate (i.e. taking off), followed by semi-long periods without much to do while cruising, followed by another period of intense concentration while getting off the interstate and to my next stop (i.e. landing).

I left my house around 9:30 AM, and arrived at my Aunt Janet and Uncle Bill’s house outside of Flint, Michigan around 3:30 PM, covering 320.1 miles. I was pretty thrilled at that, as I expected it to take much longer since I’m not able to cruise at my normal speeds while towing, especially since I had to stop for gas twice (more on that later). I believe this will also be my longest drive day, as the rest of my trip is broken up into smaller chunks to hopefully keep things manageable for me by myself.

Fortunately Aunt Janet and Uncle Bill have a pretty large driveway that easily accommodated my truck and trailer:

Even more fortunately Uncle Bill smoked ribs, mac and cheese, and beans for a very delicious dinner.

Mackinaw City

After a large breakfast (thanks again to Aunt Janet and Uncle Bill for feeding me and putting me up for the night), I was back on the road to cover the 238.2 miles to Mackinaw City. Once again, this was a pretty easy drive, even though it really sucks not being able to take advantage of the 75 MPH speed limit in Northern Michigan. The Mackinaw Mill Creek Campground I’m staying at seems really nice. It seems pretty massive (although admittedly I have a small sample size of campgrounds to compare to at this point), lots of mature trees to give privacy between sites, and has some amazing views right on Lake Huron. The Mackinaw Bridge is on the left and Mackinac Island is just right of center:

My timing to be here is not great though, midge flies are apparently having a late season and are absolutely everywhere on the campsite. I even swallowed two while setting up camp, because apparently I didn’t learn my lesson after the first one. All the black dots on my trailer are flys: Every time I open the door about 10 of them get in, so I get to spend the next few minutes killing them (thanks to Katie for the recommendation of packing a fly swatter). There is a freeze warning in effect for tonight, so I have some hope it will kill off a large number of flies, or at the very least slow them down so I can get out without a bunch getting in tomorrow morning.

Fuel

I’m going to try and be optimistic about this, so those semi-long periods without much to do I mentioned earlier will always be pretty short for me while towing my trailer with my current truck, because frankly my truck is not the best setup for towing, as I didn’t have serious towing in mind at all when ordering it. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get much more than 200-230 miles out of a tank of gas while towing, so I’m going to have to stop regularly to fill up. Oh well, it does feel pretty good to get up and stretch my legs every few hours anyways.

I stopped for gas twice yesterday and today, although so far I’ve had about one third of a tank left each time:

Those numbers would put me on pace to spend about $32,000 on fuel over the next six months…sheesh. Good thing I won’t be doing that much driving every day.