Hi Atlee,
My wife and I use our Hi-Lo for both destination camping and touring road trips.
Our road trips tend to be long...six weeks and 5-6,000 miles. Ironic that you want to come west from Virginia, since in May we are traveling to Virginia from the west! Long trips are easy with a Hi-Lo. They don't fight you when being towed...very smooth and easy because of the low profile and low center of gravity. Its easy to have fun on the road when your not exhausted and beat-up from the drive... Well, now that I think about it, transiting through certain urban areas (like Chicago and St. Louis) can be VERY stressful and tiring. Most of the West is wide open and relatively traffic free.
With a Hi-Lo, its more than just hitching and unhitching... you must also clear the decks and lower away, so to speak. When touring, my better half and I both have it down to a system and can be on the road in 25 minutes or less. That's if we've unhitched. If we haven't unhitched we've been out of a campsite in as little as 15 minutes. We don't put a clock on ourselves, and we don't rush. We've just done this sooo many times that we've gotten very efficient.
We do a lot of the preliminary stuff the night before, chairs and other equipment stowed, awning retracted, tow vehicle lined up, most of our interior stuff put away, etc. In the morning all we generally have to do is disconnect and stow our hook-up hoses/cables, retract the stabilizers, lower the top, complete the hitch-up, pull the chocks and go. Sometimes I even hitch-up the night before. We have a simple typed pre-lowering and pre-moving checklist that we go through EVERY time, to make sure nothing was forgotten. Naturally, if we want a more substantial breakfast than fruit/coffee it does take longer to get going, but we tend to eat less when traveling.
In the wide expanses of the west, when we're just trying to get from one sight to the next, we'll just pull into a KOA (or clone) for the night. At such times we won't unhitch, and only unpack what we'll need just for that night.. no chairs, no awning, just the minimum. Likewise, for a quick overnighter we won't even hook up the sewer line. I do carry a grey water drain hose and will run that to the sewer port, especially if its a second in a row in-route stop.
As with most things in life, Hi-Lo set-up, take-down, parking and getting-on-the-road processes get easier and faster with experience.
Jim
