Trip One: West Palm Beach -> Alachua

 Today was our first day on the road! So exciting!

We picked up the camper from West Palm RV and hit the road toward our first campground. Because neither of us have any meaningful experience with towing, we decided to have our friend Matt fly down from Alabama and stay with us the first few legs of the journey. Matt has crashed towed everything, so his guidance in the early going is clutch!

I assure you that is the look of a man who is terrified

Our first trip from West Palm Beach, FL to the Travelers Campground in Alachua, FL is 279 miles according to RV Trip Wizard. BTW, if you don't have RV Trip Wizard yet, you need to get it. It's an amazing tool for planning your routes.

During this trip we had some VERY interesting first experiences (or FFTs as Brené Brown would say). The first major set of experiences came just hooking up for the first time and pulling the camper out of the Palm Beach RV parking lot. Honestly, that was probably the most daunting part of the entire first day of driving.  During that period we:

• Couldn't figure out which way my truck needed to be facing to get the RV out of it's spot
• Took about 10 tries at aligning the hitch with the receiver before realizing that our truck literally has a camera that points down the bed and provides us with LINES that show us how to get it perfect
• Had to weave in between some trucks and some other campers in the dealership parking lot without causing mayhem
• Had to make my first unprotected left across three lanes of Palm Beach traffic and onto a major road
• Got flipped off by a tow truck driver for (I presume) going too slow
• Successfully negotiated a whole bunch of turns en route to the freeway entrance without bouncing off any curbs, people or unsuspecting infrastructure.

It was amazing. It was exhilarating. I am hooked.

We did it! We made it to our first rest stop. Biggest mental hurdle down!

Once we negotiated the meandering nonsense that is West Palm Beach and got onto the Florida Turnpike, things got much easier. I swear that West Palm Beach is like Fury Road, except everyone is old and blind instead of young and intent on reaching Valhalla. I generally tend to drive pretty slow by nature, so just chillin' in the right lane and going 60 mph is pretty second nature.

The drive went spectacularly smoothly (even through Orlando) until we were about 50 miles from the campground, when we encountered a shredded tire in the road and had to make a quick adjustment to avoid it. I must've either hit some stray steel belt in the road or just had bad luck, but shortly after we started to experience some fairly jarring (and worsening) shaking in the truck.

After a couple of miles I got out of the truck and inspected all of the tires. They all looked fine and had full pressure, so I figured we had some kind of balance issue. We slowed to about 50 and limped the rest of the way to the campground as at that speed the shaking was fairly minimal.

After we made it to the campground, got deployed for the first time and unhooked, which went remarkably smoothly (other than ripping a chunk of my thumbnail off). I took the truck for a drive around the neighborhood and confirmed that the issue was in fact with the truck and not with the trailer.  Because I couldn't see anything obvious that was wrong, I made an appointment for first thing in the morning at the local Tire Kingdom which was only about 15 minutes away.

Well... there's your problem...

It only took about five seconds for the service advisor at Tire Kingdom to identify the problem and get us scheduled for repairs. They were amazing! 

Apparently the two times I got out and inspected the tires, the fist-sized HOLE in the tread on the driver's side inside dually was facing down. This was actually a big sigh of relief for us, as we were dreading some kind of more expensive problem. Three hours and $250 later, we were ready to go again.

We really enjoyed our stay at the Travelers Campground in Alachua, FL. It's a lovely camp site with nice pull-through spots, lots of trees and giant open spaces, and fenced areas populated with assorted rescue animals, including emus, donkeys, pigs, goats and llamas.

I genuinely wish that we could've stayed there another few days, but we had a pretty tight schedule as we were eager to get to our next stop in Birmingham, AL.

We were also extremely happy to wake up the next morning and have the opportunity to enjoy one of our favorite daily rituals...

Yes... this is living again...