Our trip down through Pennsylvania yesterday was just no fun. Two construction zones where we had to park on highway for half an hour, two accidents which blocked the road, and lots of traffic slowdowns. The 200 mile drive took about six hours … but at least the roads were fairly decent.

We are now parked in a nice suburban neighborhood at the home of a friend who I used to work with in the days before I became an itinerant magazine publisher living in a trailer. We are going to meet up with some other friends from the business today, and go out for pizza tonight.

I forgot to mention our newest trailer accoutrement: a custom-made laundry bag courtesy of our friend J. Rick Cipot. Rick is one of those amazingly handy guys who can handle anything from a sewing machine to an F-14. I spotted his laundry bag at the rally two weeks ago and asked him for one — and he whipped one up for us last Sunday, complete with zipper. It’s amazing that we’ve gone the last year full-timing without one.

I also forgot to mention that on Monday we had an interesting challenge trying to get out of our courtesy parking spot in Connecticut. The way the driveway and turnaround were constructed, we had a comfortably large radius for backing into our space. But pulling out was another story. The radius in that direction was much smaller, and we couldn’t get out.

The alternative was to pull out in the other direction and back out all the way down the driveway. But the driveway was full of S-turns, tricky even to navigate going forward, and the slightest error would have resulted in us hitting a tree. So we yanked the trailer back and forth, gradually maneuvering it toward the garage and increasing our effective radius a small amount.

At one point it seemed hopeless. The driveway was bordered closely by trees and low stone walls, which I managed to scrape a few times with the Armada’s lower air dam. As a last-ditch effort, prepared to unhitch the truck, move it to another angle and re-hitch, then repeat the procedure a few times. This would have worked but it would have taken a long time.

Then we finally got a break and managed to juuuuuust barely scrape by the turn. The front wheels of the Armada were dragging against the stone wall and the entry step of the Airstream clipped a stone wall on the opposite side, but we made it. It had taken nearly an hour.

I’m always cautious about courtesy parking for exactly this reason. We’ve had to maneuver our 31-foot tube very carefully to get it in and out of tight spots before, but this was definitely the most challenging spot — even harder than in Santa Cruz! When we pulled into this spot in Connecticut, I was so enthused at the ease of parking that I neglected to consider what we’d have to do to get out going in the opposite direction. Lesson learned!