North Carolina: where the trip began · Tennessee: current stop
Today was the day. I finally left home.
I got everything packed, grabbed the backpack, did the last couple things around the house, and said goodbye to my beautiful wife and my daughter. I was excited to get going, but yeah, saying goodbye was a little emotional too.
A couple miles down the road I stopped at a station and got the trailer tire pressures where they needed to be. Nothing exciting. Just one more thing off the list, and then I was back on the road.
About two hours later I started doing the mental checklist. What did I bring? What did I forget?
Oh crap. My toiletry bag.
Normally that would not be a big deal. Toothpaste, toothbrush, whatever. I can buy that stuff anywhere. Except all my daily medications were in that bag.
I called my wife and told her what I had done. Without much hesitation she said she would bring it to me. So she drove almost two hours toward me, handed me the bag, and then had another two-hour drive back home. Four hours in the car because I forgot one bag. Yeah, I have a pretty amazing wife.
I told her if I forget something else when I get to California, I’ll call her and ask her to bring that too. She laughed. It was actually really good to see her again, even though I had only been gone a couple of hours.
Then later the trailer tire monitor suddenly showed zero. Not low. Zero. So I pulled over right away.
The shoulder was tiny and I could not get the truck and trailer any farther over. When I opened the driver’s door it was basically out in the road with cars going by, and at that point I still did not know if I had an actual tire problem. That part sucked.
The tire itself looked fine. I swapped the sensor from the back wheel to the front and the front sensor to the back. After that everything started reading normally again, pressure and temperature both. So apparently it was the sensor, not the tire. Good news, but standing on the side of the road was not exactly how I wanted to find that out.
Once I got moving again, the drive through the North Carolina mountains got a little more interesting. This was really the first time I could feel how big the trailer was behind me. Some of the curves were a little gnarly. A couple times it felt like the trailer wanted to lean a whole lot farther than I wanted it to.
I was climbing right along with the 18-wheelers and even passing a few of them, so the truck seemed to be doing just fine. Then, because my timing is apparently perfect, I hit the Asheville area right around rush hour. Traffic, semis, mountains, trailer behind me. All at once.
But honestly, it was pretty damn cool. I have always loved this part of North Carolina, and seeing it this way felt different. This time I was not just driving through on the way somewhere. This was the trip.
And then I crossed my first state line of the trip. Tennessee.
So day one has already had the forgotten bag, a four-hour rescue mission by my wife, a tire sensor that scared the crap out of me, mountain traffic, and the first state line.
Not exactly a boring start.
— The Guy Behind the Desk
