Travels in a Tiny Teardrop Trailer – Day 3 – Going Upscale
Sis and I wake up cozy, dry, and rested under my sister-in-law C’s handmade quilt. After breakfast, C shows us around the new house, ending with the back balcony, which stretches the entire length of the house and is hung with blooming baskets of fuschias. Looking out over the back yard, C points out the playhouse for the grandkids, the workshop for Bro, the outdoor patio and BBQ, and the storage space for the trailer. There is a trailer in it. But wait – what about the trailer that is parked in the driveway, the one Bro had to maneuver our teardrop around last night in the rain?
“Oh, the one down there is our old trailer. The one in the driveway is our new trailer. We’ve only had it for a week. This will be our first real camping trip in it.”
C shows us and a couple of admiring neighbors around the new trailer. The new trailer is almost 10 feet longer than the previous one. “We call it our mobile honeymoon suite,” she says, smiling, as she points out the king-size bed, the reclining chairs, the fold-out sofa, the full kitchen and bathroom, the pop-out barbeque kitchen outside, and the 2 widescreen TV sets positioned over the two fireplaces.
Our tiny teardrop looks like a tugboat positioned next to this land-based Titanic. But the neighbors seem equally eager to explore the clever space usage and pop-up kitchen in our mini. It seems that trailer travel is an equal – enthusiasm activity.
We plan to leave for Fort Stevens State Park on the Oregon coast as soon as Bro gets back from work – he has promised to cut out early if he can on a Friday, so we can get a head start. The forecast predicts a 99% chance of rain.
Will Bro get back on time? Will the rain hold off? Will the maiden voyage of the Titanic end in a crash? Will we be able to park the teardrop any more easily the second time? Tune in next week!
Dry shoes for Sis, a couple of chocolate bars, working lighters for the stove, and a hot lunch in our stomachs – what could be finer than driving up I-5 as the sky clears and the sun shines on us. Our operating rule is that the driver minds the road while the person riding shotgun manages the heater/AC and the sound track. I’m driving so we are listening to Sis’s playlist of Scottish reels, blue grass, and Nova Scotian folk music. Not my favorite but she put up with my Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez, and other 60’s relics for the previous day. Won’t hurt me to listen to something different.
The Douglas County Museum is at the far end of the
We get dressed in the confines of the tiny trailer. It’s not easy to pull on trousers without being able to stand up , but we manage it. Our water-resistant jackets are about dry after a night of hanging inside, and our moods improve as we plan on quickly making a hot breakfast on the two-burner stove in the pop-up kitchen in the back of the trailer. Sis fills the water carrier. All we need to do is boil water, and we’ll have coffee and instant oatmeal with fruit and brown sugar mixed in. So much easier than camping with a propane stove – nothing to set up, nothing to connect, just a quick flick of the lighter and….
In the morning, in daylight, we can see that the un-protected section of the tent roof is quite obviously not rain-proof. However, the bottom of the tent is water-proof, and Sis’s shoes are sitting soggily in a considerable puddle that has collected inside the tent.
The weather was perfect: warm, no fog or wind, as we left Hearst Castle.
Further up the road there was an even bigger slide, with an obviously temporary one-lane road perched nervously across the new ground. But it was fascinating to watch the big diggers roaming and scooping atop huge mounds of dirt and stone. And that road remains a marvel of impossible engineering, spectacular vistas, and a maddening plodding pace behind the inevitable road boulder, often a “Rent-Me-RV” whose first-time RV driver is scared to death of his rig and the road. And they won’t pull out to let the long line of vehicles behind them to pass, which is the law, or, if it isn’t, there oughta be.
We had planned to leave at 7AM for 
With a sigh of relief, I spot a privy decorated with a cowboy mural down a little side road. The Visitors’ Center is 17 miles further on. The gravel road is bordered with ocotillo (long slender bare dead-looking sticks with flames of bright red flowers blooming at the tips) and Spanish bayonet (giant pompons of green narrow leaves cupping a torch of white and pinkish downward-facing blooms) and lots of bare earth where the cattle have grazed and platinum blonde grasses where they have not.
After about an hour of jouncing over mostly-pretty-good gravel road, we get to the Visitor’s Center, a plain building with a minimal gift shop and a sign saying “Welcome to the Other Side of Nowhere.” The center also offers an up-to-date set of rest rooms with cool running water, and a friendly ranger who supplies us with trails and suggestions. We decide to eat our lunch at the lone picnic table under the lone bit of shade, and then head out on the Horse-Trap Trail that promises a view out over the central interior of the park, and possible encounters with local wildlife.
OK, I’m cheating a little. We actually spent quite a bit of time on the freeway on our way to the Big Bend area of west Texas – there is no other way to get there.
So off we go out of Austin and past places that we have visited before, into the unknown spaces of the Big Bend country of southwest Texas. We move out of the area where bluebonnets and scarlet paintbrush are blooming and into an area where odd geological formations punctuate the skyline like very broad pencils with sharp tips. Scattered yuccas bloom like pale torches among the scrubby bushes. The occasional farm augments its income with pumpjacks in the valleys and windmills on the ridges, hedging its bets between the old energy and the new.
Allyson Johnson 