Our first travel day after months parked: a to-do list that kept growing, a crossing of the Mackinac Bridge, and a Walmart parking job that turned into a marriage exercise.
Tire pressure, wet bolts, propane, and the maintenance jobs under the rig that are easy to skip until something expensive reminds you. We work through our list and show what we got wrong first.
We came back from six weeks in Brazil to droppings, chewed mats, and at least one uninvited tenant. Four days of traps, baits, ultrasonic repellers, and sealing later, here's what actually worked.
One more Ouro Preto day before we fly back to the rig: hauling suitcases up wet cobblestones, touring a palace with its own gold mine, and learning how colonial Brazil washed, pressed, and policed its gold.
A foggy day in Ouro Preto, the UNESCO hill town in Minas Gerais: feijão tropeiro for lunch, a soapstone market, a guided gold mine tour, and a climb to an overlook that was entirely inside a cloud.
We put the Brinkley into storage mode, flew out of Chicago to Brazil for Fabiola's graduation, and gave you the full tour of our other home, electric shower and all.
A slow day in Marquette: chicken on the Blackstone, a hike at Presque Isle Park that turned into a cliff-jumping show, another round of trailer light detective work, and finally scratching our first states off the travel map.
Two weeks of full tanks, a 36-gallon tote, a macerator pump, one leaky starter hose, and a mess we now call the Poopsie. Here's the tote-and-macerator workflow that finally worked for us.
Last day of boondocking, so naturally we cleaned every AC filter and ceiling fan in the rig, then skipped our Harvest Hosts plan for a casino parking lot. The slots were bad. The sleep was great.
Tiny roads, soft grass, and a 40-foot fifth wheel: our back-in at Richard Bong State Recreation Area took twelve minutes of video to resolve. Then Wisconsin got good.
Fifteen minutes into a three-hour travel day, our trailer lights and brakes started cutting out. What roadside assistance actually did for us, what it couldn't, and how we limped to Wisconsin before dark.
We hauled our warranty list across several states to the Brinkley factory, toured where our Model Z was built, sat out a tornado watch in a house on wheels, and left with most (not all) of the list fixed.
Six months of full-time RV life, every dollar counted: truck, campgrounds, groceries, internet, propane, and the theme park tickets we're not sorry about. Here's where the money actually went.
A Cracker Barrel overnight where a truck nearly boxed us in, our first fuel stop with the RV hitched, a campsite made of mud, and a parking-lot haircut. This is the unfiltered week.
A week at East Bank Campground on Lake Seminole: remote work with a lake view, a door that wasn't actually locked, a surprise leak in the passthrough, and a cave tour to finish it off.
Our first Cracker Barrel overnight, the actual numbers from our CAT scale weigh-in, some math about water weight, and an insect invasion that hitched a ride from the last campground.
