What a Day!!
Today (Sept. 12, 2015) started out on a bit of a high note. Molly slept until 7:45am, practically unheard of in our household. She usually wakes at 6:00-6:30am. After our nice little lie-in, we got up, Justin and I noticed it was very smokey outside from wildfires (#ButteFire & #ValleyFire) to the south and west of us. We put packing up in the fast lane so we can get out of dodge. Unfortunately, Lady Luck was not favoring us today.
After packing up, we try to back out of our nice narrow and bordered with boulders campsite. Did I mention we recently, in the past 3 days, picked up a tow dolly for the Fiat and are still learning the nuances of driving while towing? Yeah. So that complicated things. Justin is a awesome at driving the RV and awesome at towing from years of experience driving delivery vans and towing boats in the Low Country, but this is kind of different for us.
We ended up unhitching the car after trying to back the car/dolly/RV up and having no luck getting it all out without hitting rocks. Well, we hit one rock. Sorry rock. We unhitch the car, but not before I try to take Justin’s finger off a couple different ways. Today was my klutzy day. I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed today.
After we unhitched the car, we pulled out of the campsite, mapped directions to South Lake Tahoe and searched for a nice flat straightaway to reattach the car to the dolly. As we are hooking the car back up, I’m trying to figure out how to lock the Fiat’s steering column so the wheels don’t turn while we drive and I’m still screwing things up. This is one of those times where I should’ve gone and sat in the RV so I wouldn’t take off my husband’s hand. Spoiler alert, I didn’t amputate his hand, but it was a close thing.
The car gets hitched up and we start driving, all of us, in the RV, YAY! Except not yay, the road is a paved logging road with massive potholes, bumps, and washed out shoulders. I think we were lucky there weren’t washed out stretches or joggers on the road. Finally, we got down the mountain to highway 50 and couldn’t turn left because it’s bikers weekend in South Lake Tahoe and there’s a million bikes headed our direction and no break in traffic. We’re slow. We can’t just zip out in any break in traffic and make it, it’s got to be a good long stretch of free road so we don’t cause an accident.
We finally found the break we needed, got on the highway, and headed towards South Lake Tahoe. Traffic is traffic, Justin is the bomb for driving our crazy train. I call and made us reservations at Tahoe Valley Campground, and all is good. Too good…
As we’re pulling off highway 50 onto Road C (a residential road into the RV park) it happens. We’ve driven 30 miles of climbing and descending roads, had several thousand feet of elevation change, transversed switchbacks and bumpy roads, dealt with stop and go traffic on a descent into South Lake Tahoe. We round this turn, and as we do we hear this squealing noise, a clunk, and then double squealing noise. Yup, the car fell off the Mother Fucking dolly. We stopped. In the middle of the road, blocking all the traffic, because the wheels are dragging (locked in park per owners manual recommendations). Thankfully people stopped to help us out since we were right outside the campground’s gate, and our breakaway chain kept the car from falling off in the middle of the road and being left behind. I hate the dolly now. Justin got the car unhitched again, and there was no damage to the structure of the car. Our stress levels have been sky-high today. It’s been an adventure.
But WE’RE STILL HERE!









