Six months in the tall man's trailer

This circus story is pretty much guaranteed to provoke some laughter.

Imagine living in a house built for someone who is 7'7" tall and his wife who is 5' tall. I did, for 6 months. OK, it wasn't a whole house, just a 40' long travel trailer. It had been custom built for Ringling so they could provide appropriate housing for their contracted "tall man" during the 128th edition of The Greatest Show on Earth. When he didn't return to perform on the 130th edition, there was this extra trailer sitting around. Since it was a usable trailer, it was assigned to a staff member on the show, rather than buying a new trailer for that person. That person was me - how fun :)

Anyway, here are the fun points that people usually laugh at:
1. I couldn't reach the shower head. If I wanted it to point a different way, I had to use a shampoo bottle to knock it around.
2. My bed was about 9 feet long. I had a box on the bottom of the bed that I never unpacked after I moved into the trailer. It never bothered me.
3. Speaking of my bed, they don't make tall-man sheets. I had to use two flat sheets tucked into the mattress instead of a fitted sheet.
4. There was A LOT of unused space in my trailer. I couldn't reach the highest shelves, so it just didn't make sense to put anything up there. At least in the bedroom I could stand on the bed to get to stuff. :)

I sure learned a lot by living in a travel trailer. I learned how to drive the biggest truck you can drive without having a commercial driver's license. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but after a small Geo Prism, a Ford F350 dual-axle super cab sure seems like the biggest vehicle on earth.
Then, I had to learn how to hook the thing up to the trailer. Not an easy feat. You have to be able to back the truck up to a fifth-wheel hitch on the trailer and make them connect. Then you have to drop the trailer off its legs and onto the truck. Boy, every time I did that I just watched amazed as the back of the truck just kept dropping and the trailer legs were still touching the ground. I was sure I was going to pop the back tires. But, I guess that's why it was a dually.
Pulling it around the country was definitely a feat. I gained confidence with it by first driving smaller trailers on short trips while someone else drove my truck and trailer. Once I felt comfortable driving my own trailer, I took a few trips with someone else along with me, in case something happened. On my first trip by myself (Wilkes-Barre, PA to Lexington, KY), I "ran into" a Burger King and have never lived it down. I didn't really run into it - I pulled into its parking lot so I could get lunch. After eating, I didn't feel like I could turn it around in the parking lot, so I continued around the building. The space got fairly narrow next to the drive through (NO I didn't try to go through the drive through) and then as I turned out, the pavement sloped toward the building. Apparently, I scraped the top of the side of the trailer all the way across the corner of the drive through. I think I pulled a few shingles off of it. I didn't actually realize it at the time. I was getting gas a few miles down the road and a police officer asked me if I had stopped at a Burger King a few exits back. He showed me where my trailer had hit the Burger King and I was flabbergasted. Oops.

Backing the trailer up was the hardest part. I didn't really ever learn. It's just not intuitive. Usually if I had to back up my trailer at an arena, like when I was parking it for the week, I'd have someone else do it for me or I'd have Hans walk along in front of the truck and tell me which way to turn the wheel. Finally, just before I moved out of the trailer, someone told me the trick - put your hand at the bottom of the steering wheel and then move your hand in the direction you want the trailer to move. I still never got good at it.

Yeah, travelling the country in a travel trailer was really kind of fun. Maybe I'll do it again when I retire. And then I'll make my husband back it up.