Our Maiden Voyage!

Hey Everyone!

We’ve done it!  We’ve taken the travel trailer on it’s first trip, spent 3 days and 2 nights putting all systems to work and returned safely home.

We started our trip on Friday, heading south into the vastness of fertile farm country of central Illinois to a State Recreation Area known as Clinton Lake/Mascoutin State Recreation Area.  The campground is located south of the town of Dewitt, Illinois.

Drive too quickly and you might miss the post office…

The campground and day use area is easily found and after a few moments to get our bearings we located our campsite…   

The site was level horizontally and only a slight lowering of the power jack gave us a perfect level front to back. 

The hookups were perfectly located for our trailer, water in front and power and sewer in the back.

 

Many of the campsites had walk-outs to little inlets along the lake…    

A path winds its way down from the campground to a docking pier…

 

Looking out our dining booth window, you can see how far apart we are from the neighbors!

 

The dogs came on the trip and accustomed themselves just nicely to the home on the road…

 

For food, I was a little overwhelmed and needed a plan.  I chose to print out the recipes from Cooking Light’s One Cooler One Weekend meal plan…click the link here…

 

The recipes were perfect for cooking low calorie while on vacation.  It also helped me figure out what to bring and stock inside the very small kitchen!  No guessing, just bring the things I’ll need to make the recipes!

The only thing I didn’t do was make anything ahead of time.  I probably should have but I wanted to test the systems in the trailer, which included the oven, and if I’d made some recipes ahead of time that would not have been used…so here I’m mixing up the cake that is part of the desserts…

The trailer is just 19 feet long so there’s not much room.  The dining table came in handy as a staging area!

And the dogs stayed out of the way by tucking under the table or into the corners…

 

That melon went into these melon kiwi daiquiris…  

And the dinner came together fairly quickly, chicken sliders, broccoli slaw and squash (had to substitute because corn is no longer in season and not in the market).

Saturday breakfast was the Chiabata french toast…oh boy was that good!!!

The cake pan plays double duty to dip the bread in the egg and milk batter…   

The smoothies were made in my personal blender, one at a time..it worked.  It’s a lot like the Bullet blender but it is one that I picked up on sale at Aldi several years ago.  My pans are Revere brand copper and stainless pans that I picked up at an Estate Sale probably 8-10 years ago.  They are small and mostly sat unused in my home kitchen.  Turns out they work just perfectly in the little trailer kitchen.

For coffee, we used that camp percolator you see in a few photos up.  I also purchased a personal drip system that you put on top of your mug and pour hot water over the grounds.  It packs small.  That was the big thing, we have to pack small in this unit but so far it all fits and we had some great food!  (I ended up NOT making all the recipes because it was way too much food!)

Pictures of the freezer and fridge…the melon is sliced up and freezing in the freezer for the daiquiris..

It’s a tight fit but everything we bought for the weekend fit, including the case of beer…

 

Saturday lunch salad…yum!

Later on Saturday we took a hike along one of the trails  (but little did we know it was archery hunting season!).  We couldn’t figure out why we ran into bow hunters on the hiking trails!!!  There were deer for sure but they were silent!  Around one corner Jim stopped me and said quietly “look to your right”…

Not sure if you can see them in that picture so I tried to zoom in the camera lens…

There they are, a momma and her two offspring.  I think the sound of the lens zooming in spooked them a little bit (the dogs were completely oblivious!) and they took off.  We continued on the hike… 

…and then back to the campsite for a nice quite evening.

All in all it was a good trip.  The one thing to remember is to plan on travel taking much much longer towing a trailer and packing two dogs than when you are just driving your car.  What I had thought would only be a 3 hour trip turned into 4 hours both ways.  Coming home was a bit more challenging due to stronger winds near Bloomington.  You can REALLY tell the wind so I guess it’s a good thing we don’t have a super long trailer!

Till the next time…happy travels, happy sewing…happy camping!

~Cathy