“By yourself? You’re going to drive all that way by yourself?”

I sure as heck am. I drove well over 3,000 miles by myself in a forty year old rickety camper. It was six months ago, and I can already tell some of the memories are a bit fuzzy. It wasn’t all easy or good, but I loved it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done anything totally insane, risking life, limb, and money. If you don’t get hurt, hurt anyone, or totally loose your shirt in the process, it is a ton of fun.

I picked up the camper in east Tennessee. The mechanics who worked on her (and yes, she is her), got her in what I would call workable, but not perfect shape. Even they had their doubts about her making it back to California, but I’m going to set the record straight here. She did great. I regularly got her up to 70/75 MPH (WHERE LEGAL!), and she only had two real problems. The suspension and steering need work, so she was very susceptible (which autocorrected to rustable when I first typed it, hahaha) to being blown all over the road in gusty conditions. There were a couple of very windy spots in north Texas and southern New Mexico, where I found myself yelling into the wind, “Stop it! Just stop!”. Very effective tactic, which worked like a charm. I also needed new brake pads by the time I got to Sweetwater, TX. The brake pads are sized for a tiny truck, not a heavy camper, so they wear through quickly.

I think to avoid a monolithic post, I will need to brake it down into sections. The whole trip was, according to roadtrippers.com, about 3,700 miles. In the big scheme of road trips it was very fast, so I didn’t get much time for stopping to enjoy the sites. That was the only real “failure” of the trip. I still saw many a beautiful things and had a great adventure. This ended up being the route: