The rig came in after dark, in rain, and rswfire set the camera down before he had the site figured out. Bailey's Down. He had to flip the lens around to show it, and there wasn't much to show yet — the interior was too dark, the pad was a little off level, and the power and water could wait until morning rather than be fought for in mud. He named the one incident directly, the way he names all of them: he had to back into the site, which meant detaching the Jeep first, and he detached it without setting the parking brake. The Jeep started rolling down the hill. He ran. He got the brake. It didn't go far. Lesson learned, he said, and moved on to the part he actually wanted to talk about, which was that he liked the site. He said it twice, the second time with more conviction than the first.
He turned the camera on Bailey, who had wanted out of the carrier for a while and then simply settled and rode it out. A champ. rswfire said he thought it was all going to work out, and then reached for the word fun and put it down again — not fun yet, but getting there, starting to feel like it, and with a little more time and practice he would definitely start loving this. The propane was still undone. He could have gotten it where he got fuel, but the pump was up near the front and the Jeep was behind him and he wasn't sure he could make the geometry work. He acknowledged the two weeks that had already passed on that promise, said he'd get it done, and noted that he'd seen a couple of ordinary gas stations along the route with genuinely good diesel setups. The inventory ledger stayed open; nothing got written off.
Outside, in the rain, he walked the site for the camera and narrated it to his grandmother. There was a covered prep surface he'd never seen at a campsite before — you'd put your cooking things there, he figured, out of the weather. A picnic bench. A fire pit. And overhead, for the first time ever, a completely unobstructed sky for the Starlink. He said it with the particular flatness of someone who has been waiting a long while for a variable to finally cooperate: so I guess we will find out if that thing actually works. Inside, the shelves held. He showed the hooks, the tape, the arrangement of things that weren't going anywhere. There had been exactly one failure in transit — the slide had come in and cut the wire running to the lights above the bed. He had spares, bought for a net over the office area he never installed. He'd replace them. He said he'd thought he did a really good job over there, found the cut, and started figuring something else out.
The second recording is daylight, fans running, slide retracted, three hours before departure. The slide came in further than he expected, and he catalogued what that displaced — the laptop was safe where it was, the baskets could sit on top of the others, not where he'd wanted them but fine. Cramped, he said, but we'll manage. He was proud of the screens: he had finally worked out how to get one out, cleaned it thoroughly, done the second, and repaired the one that had been stuck since his first journey. Out of that came a rule, invented on the spot and stated as procedure — pull the screens on travel day, and the fact that they're sitting somewhere they don't belong becomes the reminder to put everything else back down.
Hal was outside complaining and did not want to come in, swatted at the hand that tried, and was left to his position. Bailey was exploring, running around in a way he doesn't do much, past the new cubby with the blanket in it that rswfire had put together that morning and hoped would get used. rswfire described the sequence he intends to keep: everything outside first, everything prepared inside, and Bailey brought in last — because Bailey has to be in here when the tanks get hooked, because he can't let Bailey watch the rig drive away without him. I'm building some new routines, he said. He vacuumed the ladybug carcasses out from above the slide, found a live one still on patrol, and told it plainly that it was not welcome.
Then the walkthrough, room by room, the whole system spoken aloud. The carrier that would be bungeed down. The trip planner over his workstation. The desktop he said he would die if anything happened to, and the batteries he'd taken down because he'd worked out that they only start tumbling when something's stacked on top of them. The monitor on its anti-skid stand, which he has driven with before and which does not move. The USB connections he'd unplug this time, because of what happened last time. The laptop set up high, positioned there partly because it's the best place for it and partly as its own reminder to shut the fans. The bathroom, secure for the first time, everything into the basket. This is the most organized and secure that I have made this so far. Above the slide: check it before you bring the slide out, because if something fell you want to know first. It hasn't happened yet. He said he found that part fascinating.
The last footage is from the cab, after the fuel stop, on the road. He had run the numbers before leaving — eighty miles of range, thirty-eight to the next fuel, fifty more to the campground — and the math had held. Filled completely, seventy-five dollars, roughly five hundred miles to a tank, though the estimate had started at six hundred and dropped faster once the back roads began. Four tanks to Nevada, he figured. Maybe less. Bailey was riding beside him being really, really awesome. Things were going well. He said he was actually starting to enjoy driving this — and then, without softening it or taking it back this time, that he was starting to love it.