tinydawghouse

Well, we (me and Ryan McNeil, who served as both co-pilot and driving therapist) made it. After a week of sleepless nights worrying the Tiny Dawg House would roll over into a ditch on the ride down the road, the day finally arrived. With minimal fanfare and a lot a sighs, we got into the truck and drove off into the sunrise. We started slow (about 35 mph) to get the feel of the trailer, truck and road, then slowly pushed it up to 45-50 mph. We even got up to 55-60 mph on some open stretches of road, but it felt better to stay around 45-50. It took about 4.5 hours altogether to go about 170 miles. We stopped a few times- once to scrap the magnetic trailer lights  off the road and re-attach back onto the trailer, once for pee break and coffee, and once to replace the magnetic trailer lights that had fallen off again, and this time completely destroyed. We could have made it sooner had we taken a different route, or driven faster, but this was about all my blood pressure and sore neck could handle. As it was, I drove  in high-stress posture of rigid arms and scrunched shoulders for the entire trip. My shoulders did not drop until we pulled off the road into Walker Farm.

Finally, after Darby (new Tiny Dawg House owner) pulled us from the sand trap with a tractor and much pruning of side branches along what seemed like a tunnel of brush, we arrived at the final resting place for our Tiny Dawg House. It was too sandy for us to pull the house to the prepared spot, so we waited for a wrench to attached the ball hitch to the track and let the tractor do the final positioning. A few minutes later, the water hose was hooked up and 30 amp electric cord plugged in…lights on, water on…ready to go (er…stay)

Handing over the keys to the house was both a happy and sad moment. Happy that the house (and me) had survived the trip and the project was actually completed in an amazing 16 weeks, and sad to see the product of hours of thinking, reading and coaxing was over. Kim, George, myself and 13 very hard working students actually built a very nice tiny home over the course of one semester and now it’s resting at it’s new home in a very serene and beautiful isolated spot on the edge of an alligator swamp.

Now a new chapter begins……Darby, its all your now.