Day 1

Well, this is the first night on the road for this trip. It was, fortunately, a short day of 238 miles. We departed at a leisurely 0930. But the day was like a honeymoon full of first night jitters. Before we got out of the housing development, I had to reset the position of the ignition key and the steering wheel in the towed Jeep. I tie a white handkerchief at the top center of the Jeep steering wheel that I can see it with the rearview camera. It wasn’t turning properly so I fixed the Jeep. Then we picked up I-526 to 17N in Mt. Pleasant. 17 was fine up to Georgetown and south of Myrtle Beach where we picked up 31 around Myrtle Beach. That’s a great bypass! We basically followed 17 through Wilmington to NC172 which runs right through the Marine base at Camp LeJeune. The campground is right on the ocean at Onslow Beach. We have to get out of here early tomorrow because the bridge to the beach is going to be closed for a week starting at 1000 tomorrow. Getting back to the first night jitters, the refrigerator…it runs great on AC but doesn’t want to run on propane. When it has been idle for a while, we have solved that problem by running the propane into the stove and the furnace (heaven forbid at these temperatures), and the propane seems to catch hold. Today it didn’t. We just kept the doors to the fridge closed and listened to the annoying beeps. At noon, when we stopped for lunch, opened the fridge and realized that the temperature was 45 degrees, I started the generator and ran it on AC. The jitters continued when we arrived at the Marine campground. The satellite antenna was locked on, but the TV demanded that I unplug it and plug it back in before it would condescend to work. Then I discovered that the reason we didn’t have water pressure was that the water hose had passed under the left rear jack pad, so no water was getting through the hose. We have been doing this thing for a long time and the numerous examples of “pilot error” are embarrassing. Hopefully the first night jitters are behind us. Tomorrow should be a long slow day through the Outer Banks. We took a couple of pictures here but will post them later