First drive day of part-time RV life...and the drama still found us

Before we turned this year on its head, the general plan was to head south for the winter and then return to New England sometime in the spring or early summer. In other words, we weren't planning a lot of travel. Why? Because we had gotten well past the point of travel fatigue. It started last year, which led us to our first attempt to get off the road. When that attempt failed, we moved back into the RV and endured a full winter at our home-base in MA. When we finally launched, it was just to get out of the remaining snow. We wanted to return as soon as possible for a few reasons. First, we wanted to slow travel to save us from more fatigue. Second, we wanted to save money by parking at our home-bases as much as possible. Third, we left a lot on our to-do list in regards to our land, things we have in storage, and friends we couldn't see before we launched.

The first two reasons don't apply anymore. We don't need to slow travel because we found ourselves a little home to provide us stability for a while. We don't need to save money because we're back on our feet financially. The third reason, however, remains. There are a lot of loose ends to tie up in New England. This trip has always been on the table. Full-time or part-time, spring or summer, it didn't matter. At some point, we were returning to the Northeast.

Now that time was finally upon us. We delayed our return so we could ensure that we had our new inverter installed, which would let us run our air conditioning and appliances while parked at our home-bases. The delay also let us lease our SC cottage right away and spend several weeks moving in. Turns out, the delay was a double-edged sword. Having the new inverter was a must, but we used the trip to get it replaced as a test run before we officially launched into part-time RV life, and it left us more stressed about RVing than we would have liked. Then our cottage move went even better than expected, and we grew to love it during our first month there. We were hesitant to go back to the RV so soon. But we reminded ourselves about some important things:

1. We now had agency and a place to come home to. If things went awry again, we weren't stuck.
2. The fact that we loved the cottage so quickly was a good thing. It helped us regroup and find necessary calm before the big RV trip.

Let's unpack that last one a little more. On our drive out of our cottage community, I shared my thoughts with Anthony:

"If we had gone with Plan A, we would have been exhausted and frustrated as we tried to continue RVing. We also would have had the anticipation of the cottage lease hanging over our heads, and we'd be wondering if it was the right choice and would be filled with anxiety about the move. Instead, we're heading out on this trip knowing we made the right choice and feeling completely settled. We're sad to leave the cottage, but that just shows how quickly we became attached to it. What a blessing to have such a space in our lives."

I was referring to our summer plan, the one that first involved a whirlwind trip up to New England, possibly without the inverter, before renting the cottage. We overhauled that plan and decided to rent the cottage first and push our New England trip until after a wedding we were attending in VA at the end of June. We'd go to the wedding and then continue northward, and by then we'd likely have the inverter.

So basically, we were now onto step 3 of our East Coast Summer Plan B. We had leased the cottage and spent 7 weeks first moving, and then living, in it. We also turned our inverter question marks into exclamation points. Inverter!!! Now it was time to leave SC and journey up to VA.

I sounded in good spirits when we left, huh? That's because I was. We both were. A couple nights before we left, we talked about internalizing the peace the cottage has brought us, and even though we won't physically be in the cottage, the cottage energy can be in us. After all, we're the ones who chose it and who made it a home so seamlessly. It was also important to keep reminding ourselves that the couple that is taking this trip is not the same couple as the one that left New England 3 months ago. We left in the midst of an existential crisis, and we're returning as people who found their way through the storm and are much better people because of it.

Packing went extremely smoothly. We still had some items in the RV waiting for us. For our other items, we packed them and brought them over in a few trips. We were still at our site at Crooked Oaks, a short drive from the cottage, and so we didn't need to do much to get the RV "travel ready." When we parked it back at its site after the inverter weekend, we did the bare minimum, connecting only electricity and Starlink, and leaving most of the inside belongings in travel mode. We made sure that 90% of our stuff was brought over and organized the evening before we left. That way, the morning of our trip would be streamlined:

1. Pack up the rest of our stuff and the pets
2. Head to the RV
3. Let the pets stay in the truck while we quickly bring stuff in, unhook electric/Starlink, and hitch up

We even had time to do some deep cleaning of the trailer the day before we left. We wanted to make things as clean and uncluttered as possible to help ourselves mentally transition back into the small environment. Speaking of our mental state, cleaning the rig was very telling of our mentalities during the first half of the year. To be honest, I hadn't done a full cleaning of the RV since the fall. Sweeping up all the dirt felt like sweeping up the remnants of a mental health crisis. We finally had the capacity to take pride in our little space again, and it felt good.

We were as ready as we'd ever be. We had turned a corner, and we were bringing brand new attitudes back into RV life.

That's why what happened next cut really deep.

I usually blur out gore on the blog in case any readers are squeamish, but I did put one of the bloody photos in the title photo, so I guess the gross part has already been revealed. Nevertheless, scroll quickly if you don't want to see what I've posted below. I'll even leave some extra buffer space for you.

Just be happy I was too distraught to take pictures of what looked like a murder scene in the bathroom.

What happened, you ask? Do you want the literal answer, or the symbolic answer? I'll give you both:

Literal: I was putting my toiletries away and the cap to my razer came off – a fresh, new blade, too – and it sliced the top of my finger, taking a nice little piece of dermis with it.

Symbolic: Packing stopped being easy breezy because we were no longer at the cottage.

I did as much packing as I could with one hand, while holding a massive wad of paper towels over my finger to catch the blood that was dripping out from underneath the Band-Aid. Anthony hitched up and did the walk-around on his own, while I sat in the passenger seat crying. Nice start, I know.

I'd love to say things got better, but as we made our way to the campground exit, I tried plugging our destination into our Garmin RV GPS, and it wouldn't turn on. I tried pressing the power button while it was plugged in, while it was unplugged, and every other hack I sometimes need to use to get the finicky thing to turn on. Nothing was working. Upon closer inspection, Anthony noticed that the USB cord looked broken, right at the connector. No big deal. We have extras! Only, those didn't work either. We think the warped cord connector also warped the port on the Garmin itself when we tried to plug it in. The contacts looked like they had seen their last day.

Nothing we could do at that point except tow our RV without our RV GPS. Funnily, the breaking of the Garmin completed the trifecta of broken cockpit technologies. You might know from previous blog posts that our backup camera busted a while back, and after finding the repairs and replacements more of an annoyance than not having a backup camera, we stopped using one entirely. A few weeks ago, the USB connector for our dash cam also broke. We're guessing that these cords don't enjoy living in SC and have overheated to the point of their metal parts literally melting.

So there we were, about to start our first big trip in months, without so many of our essentials: the GPS, the dash cam, my index finger. We had one saving grace, though: our RV Life GPS. You hear us mention RV Life's trip planning software, RV Trip Wizard, all the time, as it's my main planning platform. We're also avid campground reviewers on the website. As paid subscribers to RV Life, we get mobile app access, and it contains an RV GPS. The app knows our rig's size and our towing preferences, so essentially, it should work similarly to our Garmin. Only, we've never used it enough to know if we can trust it. I only tested it briefly on our very first launch day, and we used it as one of our 3 simultaneous navigation systems on this nightmare of a drive. Guess all that was about to change. I plugged our destination into the app and pulled up navigation, which I supplemented with Google Maps. If all else failed, at least we were traveling familiar routes and could use our best judgment to avoid size restrictions.

Once we finally turned out of the RV park, now well after the 11am checkout time and even later than the time we hoped to leave, I called my mom to let her know we were on the road. It was during this conversation that I sent bad juju into the universe:

"How long is your drive today?"

"Well, it's saying about 4 hours, so knowing our luck, it'll be 8."

And we know full well at this point that when Nicole plants an idea in the universe, it delivers in dramatic fashion.

We knew that our destination was expecting thunderstorms, but we missed the memo on the severe thunderstorm watch as soon as we crossed the border. I was a little busy to have watched the morning's Max Velocity upload, or else I would have been informed that a slight risk of severe weather had been issued for much of our drive area.

I pulled up my weather radars and started timing out the arrival of the storms as best I could. We could already feel the wind picking up shortly after crossing into NC. Gusts were reaching 40mph.

On the bright side, since I was nose-deep in all my apps, I decided to try Android Auto to see if I could bring the RV Life GPS up on the display screen of our truck. I had seen other RVers do this before and wondered if Android had the capability. Turns out it was pretty easy, as long as I kept my phone plugged in through USB. That became a little problematic when I needed to use my phone to snap pictures of scary clouds, but we loved having the navigation readable by both of us.

Now back to the storms. We wanted to take our lunch break at a rest stop along I-95 just east of Fayetteville, but looking at the radar, we'd be cutting it extremely close to a band of thunderstorms. Depending on how quickly they moved, we could potentially beat them by a half-hour, or get trapped in them before reaching the rest stop, or anywhere in between. We crossed our fingers and made this our tentative plan, but I also researched a couple places we could pull off sooner if needed. As we drove, the skies grew dark overhead.

The timing was a nailbiter. We were due to arrive just after 1:30pm, at which point the heaviest bands of rain would be minutes away. The storm seemed to be picking up speed too, as every refresh of the radar brought it closer at our arrival time.

We pulled in and had just enough time to bring the pets in before the skies opened. This motorhome pulled in just in the nick of time.

This trailer didn't quite make it, and the couple had to scurry inside during the downpours.

Thankfully, the storm was mostly rain. No thunder and lightning and no high winds.

We're not sure if the mild nature of this first storm gave the other RVers false hope, but they both left. I, however, was watching the forecast closely and saw that an even worse storm was coming right for us around 3:15pm.

The safest choice would be to wait for that storm to pass, but once we were back on the road, we wouldn't have a minute to spare or else we'd get caught in another round of storms near our destination of Roanoke Rapids. That area had been getting storms all day, most of which we were well behind, except for one remaining cluster. We'd need to thread the needle. First, we'd wait for the 3pm storm to pass over us. Then we'd drive the 2 hours to our campground, hopefully beating the northern storm as it approached from the west.

Staying parked for the 3pm storm was smart. That storm was a lot worse and brought heavy winds. We hope the RVers who decided to leave stayed safe. The motorhome left only minutes before this started, so we know they were driving.

With no time to spare, we headed out as soon as the skies cleared. I was feeling masterful, almost like I was redeeming the poor choices I made last year during severe weather. But sometimes, nature wins against even the most skilled RV-meteorologists. The northern storm picked up speed, and we wouldn't make it to our campground in time. And, since Anthony said he could use a bathroom break anyway, we decided to pull over one final time, about 15 minutes south of Roanoke Rapids. We found a Shell gas station with a nice big parking lot out back, with some unexpectedly nice views. Well, nice on a normal day. Ominous AF on this day.

From this vantage point, we could see the rain clouds approaching. We had just enough time to each use the bathroom before the downpours began.

We sat in the truck while we waited for them to pass. Once again, they were just rain, but they limited visibility, and we had no reason to rush to our campground anyway. I'd rather be safe and dry in the truck than unhitch in the pouring rain! So we waited, and even drove over to get gas and be productive.

But oops, we overlooked a little detail: the juju. We had been on the road for 8 hours, and the drive was stressful. Tanner hadn't done his poo yet. You know where this is going. Yep, a massive mess in the backseat, just like what happened during our unexpectedly long, stressful drive day post-excavation. In retrospect, we should have just taken him out in the rain because there wasn't any lightning, but we had our eye on our destination, which was so close at that point. But Tanner couldn't wait. And this time, it got all over the truck's backseat, the hardest area to clean.

We certainly didn't need to worry about arriving in rainstorms now. Those babies went far east as we stayed at the Shell, trying to clean Tanner and the truck as best we could. Washing diarrhea off a dog while trying to keep my finger wound free of bacteria? That was a challenge I wish I never had to face. But I kept my humor throughout the situation, having a little fun once I washed and rebandaged it. I think I was quickly veering into a delusional realm. Maybe I had lost too much blood.

Completely spent after our drive, we couldn't spend one more minute trying to rid our truck of the stench. This was a problem for future Anthony and Nicole. We hopped back on the interstate and got to our campsite in time for a sunset glow just as dramatic as our drive.

The following morning, Anthony called all the nearby car detailing companies he could find, hoping one of them would be able to squeeze us in for an emergency de-soiling of our backseat. McCain and Korkland to the rescue! A couple-owned mechanic and detail shop that they operate from their home, just a few minutes from the RV Park, Darnell and his partner showed us the southern hospitality we desperately needed. They helped us get Clyde cleaned up and smelling like flowers, before our drive the following day.

Strangely, we planned 2 nights here at the RV Resort at Carolina Crossroads in a totally different life. This was the campground we had booked as part of Plan A before we realized Plan A wasn't feasible. Instead of cancelling it altogether, we switched the dates to use this as our pit stop on our way to VA. We thought we'd only need an overnight and the second night would be extra. How wrong we were! That extra day wasn't just necessary for Clyde. We were able to shower and wash our clothes. We could catch up on all the work we couldn't do when our drive ended up taking an entire workday. And we could process the fact that our first official drive day as part-timers felt sadly similar to the stress we kept having in our full-time travels.

But something was different. We all bounced back really quickly. We had a lovely day at Carolina Crossroads. The weather was clear and cool enough to take walks. We had made new acquaintances that took the stress of cleaning Clyde off our hands. Even the pets found their sense of ease quickly.

Perhaps we had actually internalized the cottage energy, and maybe we cracked the code. Our travels have always been dramatic, but when we were in better spirits, we kept rolling along. Were we now in good enough spirits again to do the same? Only time and miles would tell.