Successful Launch. Whew!

 

Departure ready.  It "only" took three and a half hours to get travel ready this morning.
And that is after a solid week of getting ready before today.  But the reconfiguration is done now.
From here on out we should be able to break camp, leisurely, in an hour.

A lot of anxiety about getting the new truck to hitch up and go down the road has been tamped down.  All the effort put into designing and selecting auxiliary equipment seems to have worked out, everything did what it was supposed to do.  I'm still going to have to get the guys at the trailer's factory to help me adjust the king pin box while we are there for other work.  The trailer is still riding nose-high from the previous truck's setup.  The king pin box is a big hunk of iron and will take at least two stout fellows or one small fork lift to hold it while stabbing the bolts into the next position. 

While the mechanical stuff is working great, my insecurity of my abilities is still pretty high.  It has been so long since doing a heavy tow that I feel like a rookie again.  Having an uneventful day today has helped and having arrived at our destination without being totally wiped out is doing a lot to give me a boost.  I think something else feeding my insecurity is our new way of traveling.  For the first time since starting fulltiming ten years ago, we are traveling in separate vehicles.  Cyndee in her little SUV with an  equally little cargo trailer and me in the truck with a giant trailer.  First time I have full-time towed without a co-pilot.  Now I have to keep track of everything, Cyndee is not there to provide advance notice of a rest stop or Flying J.  I now have to actually pay attention to road signs and billboards.

In the meantime, we have arrived at a Corps of Engineers campground, Deerlick Creek, on Holt Lake, just to the northeast of Tuscaloosa, AL.  Super nice, very similar to the wooded campgrounds of where we just left in Georgia.  However, I have NEVER been in such a huge pull-thru RV pad.  We could have easily put two of our rigs end to end and have room left over for visitor's cars.  The park itself is gorgeous.  In addition to the large and widely spaced campsites, there are paved foot/bike trails.  Really nice.

I'll end this the way I started it:

What an RV pad!  So long I had to take a panorama to get it all in.  Not only was it long but wide too.
At least half again wider than what we are accustomed to.  We're going to enjoy this for a couple of days and then be on our way.