Day 1 in Bristol, VT

May 1, 2014 6pm

We’re in the rig!

That’s the good news. Now for the rest of the news.

It’s been a busy few weeks for us on this leg of the journey. We moved the RV out of storage, camped for a weekend to de-winterize and check that everything was working. That trip went well (although the first night of 23 degree weather without the furnace running was not exactly toasty–we did get it working the second night, and it is amazing). Then we drove home, and put Janis back in storage while we packed. Week three or so we moved out of our apartment and into the RV, stayed at a formal campground for the first two nights, and headed out to our summer digs.

We arrived at 4pm and made it back to the field we’d previously determined was the right place for a summer campout. It was a little wet from spring thaw, but the creek was all the way at the bottom of the field, and we were planning on parking at the top.

Jen and I slogged around in the overgrowth to make sure that we would be able to make it in.  We had already gotten stuck in a muddy S-curve that led to the field…but with boards and a little gumption the rig triumphed, and with relatively minimal effort we made it back onto dry road. By road I mean a rut for tractors and logging trucks. But, a road.

In literature, that first trouble would be known as foreshadowing.

There was some water in our future field, sure. It’d been raining. But we weren’t up to our knees, so it would be fine, right? As a preventative measure we laid some boards down where we intended to park the rig. Jenni hopped into the driver’s seat and I piloted her in.

You know where this story is going. Aren’t you clever.

So how stuck are we? The kind of stuck that dies first in the movie. The kind of stuck that gave Lewis (of Clark) a palette tuned for dog and horse flesh. I’ve been remembering those old trailers you see rotting in farmer’s fields. You know the ones. Until this very day I always wondered why someone would just abandon something like that to become such an eyesore.

That’s how stuck we are.

We realized very quickly that we didn’t have the tools to get us out of this deep an entrenchment. Until tomorrow, we’ve settled on doing what we can to keep things from getting worse. Jenni dug a “relief channel” to take the standing water down and away from the tires. We put the jacks down on wide, long boards and lifted the back up to move the pressure and hopefully keep us from sinking in any farther. The tires have, at this point, become so deep they’ve hit harder ground–which gives me the slimmest of hopes that we’ll still come out of this alive. We have about three inches of space before the black tank runs aground.

Our last hope rests in the fact that we are on a farm. There are tractors. They haul things, right? They wouldn’t leave us here to become one of those country field trailers…right?