Thursday, June 10, 2021

Day 1 (5/27/21) -- miles traveled: 0.0008

Heartbreakingly, I was already about a week behind -- missing time with my good friend Tema Okun at her beachhouse in Topsail, NC. Should have been there Tuesday.......but repairs and trailer work in general got in the way. I spent this day literally (truly, I mean that word the way it was meant to be used) throwing everything I thought I might need into the car and unfinished trailer (I had yet to cut out the starboard door and the top vent, among other basic things) to just be able to get on the road so I'd have at least a day with Tema.......I said goodbye to Ilana, Hannah, Rosie, Kemuel and Gremlin (as they embarrassingly left for their Cape Cod adventure before me), tested the trailer lights at 9pm to be sure it was at least road-legal, and by 11:30pm I was ready to head out, with the idea of stopping at a rest stop somewhere along the way. I locked the house up (escaping out the side door because I had no key), took one long look at 146 Franklin Street in the dark, and then was off. 

I got into the car, feeling a momentous sense of relief to be finally getting on the road, pulled forward 4 feet to the end of the driveway, and checked my mirror to be sure the trailer was following me. It was, but with no lights -- tail, brake, all were totally dead. 

I sat in the car for a bit, wondering what I was going to do now. I had no way to get back into the house. I had no idea why the light system would not be operating suddenly. I contemplated the possibility of sleeping in a car in my own driveway on my first roadtrip day.......until I remembered the random backdoor key Ilana had handed me earlier in the day when the entire family was helping me search for the key to the hitch for the trailer (we never found it -- I think I gave myself a hernia getting that lock off with a pair of wire cutters)........after sliding around under the trailer for about half hour to check if there were some obvious loose wires or something that could fix the problem, I sadly went back into the house to sleep at around 1am. That is where I discovered that I had left my car keys inside -- somehow one of the bags already in the car must have had the extra key fob for our hybrid in it (I did not find that until yesterday) that had allowed me to almost drive away.

I would discover the next day that I had been foiled by this tiny 15amp fuse:




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