Literally. Finally. We got my mom’s camper hitched to her truck. It took us an hour in the blazing sun as we examined all the pictures in the instruction manual and then went in search of the pieces we needed. Sweaty and triumphant, we stood back and admired our work. Then we turned around and admired my aunt’s Class ‘C’ RV even more. All it required was getting behind the wheel.

I’ve long dreamed of selling the house and hitting the open road in an RV; free to explore at our leisure. My husband indulged my fantasy and suggested we go camping for Father’s Day weekend. My mom offered her new camper, and I began making plans. First, we needed a tutorial on everything we needed to know to successfully RV. My aunt offered her advice, but couldn’t help us with the hitch. We had to figure that out for ourselves. And we did! So then, we took the next logical step and went for a test drive to see how it handled.

After several miles of racing down back country roads, we were satisfied that this was, indeed, the life. We drove back to the farm and my husband expertly backed it up. We debated leaving the whole thing attached, but decided it would be easier to gas up the truck and finish getting our supplies if we unhitched. So we started to dismantle the hook-up and took everything apart, but couldn’t get the ball cover off of the hitch.
My husband decided that we’d have to pull the truck forward onto lower ground since we just couldn’t raise the tongue anymore. It was as high as it would go. So we re-assembled the hitch and were congratulating ourselves on our new skills; we could now do the whole thing (okay — by “we” I mean mostly my husband) in about a minute. We were like an Indy 500 pit crew! So he pulled the truck forward about 6 inches and we started dismantling it all again. But we still couldn’t get the hitch out from under the ball cover.
As luck would have it, a farmer who helps out at the farm stopped by. He walked over to say hello and flipped a safety release on the ball hitch, innocently thinking that we’d just forgotten to. Nope. We never even knew it was there. Then he asked us if we wanted him to put the cotter pin back in? Cotter pin? What was he talking about? You know – the pin that locks the hitch and cover into place so that it can’t come undone while you’re driving. The pin that keeps the trailer attached to the truck. The pin we knew nothing about!
We confessed that we’d been driving all over those back country roads without one. Then we all shook our heads. Boy, had we gotten lucky! All I could picture was a cartoon where the trailer starts racing down the hill next to the truck it’s supposed to be behind. Those cartoons never end well. So now we’re on our way to Natural Bridge, Kentucky. Hopefully the cartoon antics are over. I don’t want to look up at the bridge only to discover that an anvil is about to fall on my head.