Putting Down Roots for the Winter

 

October 2024

Okay, so the above pic is not our winter home, except in our dreams.  However it (The Biltmore) is just a stones throw away from where we are setting up housekeeping.

As planned, our departure from Dumplin Valley RV Park in Kodak, TN was early with only about an hour-and-a-half traveling time to our destination in Candler, NC, a western suburb of Asheville.  But it wasn't quite as easy as it sounds.  The last four miles was like running a gauntlet.

As soon as we took the I-40 exit to Candler a four mile obstacle course began.  The roads were just barely wide enough for two sedans to pass one another without taking a wheel off the edge of the pavement.  But that would be ill advised as steep and deep trenches lined both sides of the road.  Getting an eight foot wide and sixty foot long truck and trailer combination down these winding mountain roads was an altogether different drive.  Many of the turns in the road required me to pull into the oncoming lane to keep from dropping the trailer into one of those deep ditches.  And if that wasn't enough there were tree branches, large tree branches, extending out over the road that were eager to scrape my air conditioners and satellite dish right off.  Since most turns on our path were blind, I had to creep along looking for gaps in oncoming traffic so I could pull into that lane to dodge an overhanging branch.  Seen from above I would have looked like a snake slithering over a dark path.

But it turned out that was the easy part of the drive.  Our turn off the county road onto our kids neighborhood's private drive made the county road look like a super highway.  Cyndee got out of her car and walked alongside and behind me telling me when I was clear to start a turn without hitting a tree or mailbox with the tail of the trailer.  It was agonizingly slow but we finally got up to the target driveway without doing any damage.

The RV pad that our kids built for us ran parallel to a 40' metal building, our son-in-law's knife making shop.  As the property is on a slope (everything here is on a slope, it is the Great Smokie Mountains after all) a retaining wall had to be built and then many truck loads of fill brought in to get things level.  The outside edge of the wall ran parallel with the property line and for permitting purposes had to be a certain distance away from the property line.  This left the pad being just barely wide enough to fit our trailer.  And a short time before our arrival a couple of large truckloads of crush-and-run gravel had been laid over the clay fill dirt.

So, we were parked on the neighborhood "cart path" facing uphill.  I was going to have to back into the RV pad by transitioning 90 degrees and going from a front to back slope to side to side slope and then transition to the flat RV pad.  All of the slope changes have an effect on the turning characteristics of a truck/trailer combination.  It's the idiosyncrasies of the geometry of a fifth wheel connection.   So I was going to have to manage all that while truly threading the needle of getting the trailer positioned on the pad as close to the metal building as possible while still allowing room for the slide outs but leaving enough room on the other side so that our entry steps didn't end with a two foot drop.

I wish I could say I did in one stab but that is just not the case.  Getting the side-to-side position as precise as it needed to be took some doing.

So there we are.  All tucked in for a winter's stay.  That gravel layer turned out to be pretty thick.  I had to use 4-wheel drive for the last push all the way back.