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Bill Barnes

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To: Posted Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

After breakfast, I went to the campground office to send in yesterday's "Diary" entry. Everyone there was talking about the weather--cold. Last night it was 18 degrees. I spend way too much time worrying about getting snowed in on this leg of our trip, and this kind of talk doesn't help.
Today and tomorrow are traveling days. Sara printed out new checklists, which in my humble opinion are absolute requirements for traveling in something as complicated as an RV. Without them we'd surely have forgotten something big and important (unplug the water hose). Or small but meaningful (stow the houseplant). While Sara fussed with the computer (today the IR port works for the camera but not the printer; go figure), I stowed our loose belongings. Next we secured the moving parts (windows, fans, cabinets, and drawers) and shut down the systems (furnace, water heater, fridge).
While I took out the garbage and stowed exterior items, interior Sara slid in the slideout. The slideout is what makes the trailer livable instead of utterly cramped. It's a little five-sided box (4 feet deep by 12 feet wide by 5 feet tall) containing our couch (complete with hide-a-bed) and dining room table. When we're parked the slideout extends out the port side of the trailer. When we're ready to depart, we press a button and it magically moves inside the trailer until its outer wall is flush with the trailer's. The net result is a gain of 240 cubic feet of living space. And it's pretty cool to watch.
After we unplugged the electricity and water it was time to couple the truck to the trailer. Ours is a "fifth wheel" trailer, after which attaches to a hitch on the pickup bed itself, just above the rear axle. This makes for a more stable arrangement than a traditional trailer (it's basically a small tractor-trailer), and it saves space too: Our bedroom juts out over the pickup bed. At the dump station I did the dirty work of emptying our holding tanks of the sewage, shower water, and dishwater from the last three days. After two months of this I've got pretty blasé about human waste products. I definitely feel much more ready to have children--after this how bad can diapers be?
The whole process of packing and coupling up takes about 90 minutes. More if we've stayed several nights, as our possessions tend to sprawl.
En route to Conway, N.H., we had a lovely drive through White Mountain National Forest. We stopped at the Pinkham Notch rest stop, the official information center for the Appalachian Trail. Sara and I just finished Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, which is hilarious. It raised our awareness of the AT from "never heard of it" to "fascinated and thinking of hiking the whole thing." Sara pointed out that unlike most overblown gear shops, this one contained mostly things you would actually need if you had just hiked a long distance and were about to hike another one: blister remedies, sock liners, pack covers, etc.
boulder At Conway we uncoupled (everything above but in reverse--about 30 minutes), then drove the truck to Boulder Loop Trail. We hiked two hours through the huge eponymous boulders up to another incredibly scenic summit. The main activities of the evening were grocery shopping and laundry. It turns out the clothes dryers didn't work particularly well, so there's laundry hanging everywhere in the trailer.

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From:
To: Posted Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

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Last August, Slate's first Program Manager Bill Barnes left Microsoft after 8 1/2 years. This August he, his wife, and their chocolate Labrador left Seattle on a seven month cross-country RV tour. They are currently in New England.

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