Speed run

Picking up the narrative on our departure from Red Bay, we continued our speed run (relative to driving a 12 ton, non-commercial vehicle) across the country and to Baltimore to meet the ship.  Adventures along the way included:

• discovering* that a visit to Huntsville, AL likely would have been worth the 1.5+hr trip from Red Bay (*Discovery from a sense of new for us -- we're not claiming to have been the first humans and certainly not white people to have discovered Huntsville, AL)
• hearing a train whistle in the early morning in Chattanooga and walking across the Georgia / Tennessee border 4 times (convenient when the RV park straddles the state line, and one has a dog to walk)
• having Martha radio "I'm good for another 30-60 minutes of driving" and we end up on a 2.5 hour hunt for camping in the Shenandoah Valley (pickup camping Friday evening w/in driving distance of DC during the height of summer -- bad idea)
• discovering an awesome Italian restaurant within walking distance of that desperately found camping spot in the Shenandoah Valley
• finding out that "emptying the propane tanks" which on the internet was portrayed as a trivial activity "for your local propane dealer" actually means burning off every last ounce of propane first -- countless hours of running the outdoor barbeque, running the furnace at 99, turning the burners on full and finally 1+ hour at an apparently major propane distributor "getting medieval" on the tank before doing the 5 minute empty & certification
• camping at a historic battlefield only to be seduced into the nearby waterpark and watching Dr. Strangelove

But all in all, we made it.  The rig was delivered complete with accompanying Prius nearly 45 minutes before they no longer would accept us for that week.  And the 4 copies of certification about the propane?  Never came up.

But I slept really, really well that night.