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Trip towing report

WilliamAWilliamA Member Posts: 1,311
in Tips & Tricks

I thought I might do an “after-action” report on my recent trip and share a few of my thoughts on things that went well and things that didn’t.

Planning
My motivation for the trip was to attend T@BAZONA 2018 at Usery Regional Park outside of Mesa, Arizona. I whipped out my map and spent a ton of time exploring options about where I could go after the rally. I have wanted to have a look at the Salton Sea for many years and made that my #2 destination. A careful look at the map brought me to the idea of going through Imperial Sand Dunes/Glamis, Ca. as an easy side trip. In fact, it wasn’t even really a side trip as I was going pretty much right by it. As an old gearhead and VW officianado, I wanted to see the mecca of sand-rail and desert running that I had been hearing about for years. Following that, I decided that since the Joshua Tree National Park was a stones’ throw from the Salton Sea, I’d have to go there as well. Since I had to, at some point, make my way back, I started to look at a few things to see along the return. I made a side-trip to Why, Az. and spent one night there, dipping my metaphoric toe into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Another one off the list. The following day, I headed into Phoenix to beg for an oil change and rotation, which Larry Miller Jeep was able to do for me right away in the morning. They also took pity on me and did a free wash, which my Jeep was desperately in need of. I didn’t push my luck and ask them to wash the trailer too. From north Phoenix, it was northeast up into the high desert and on to the Very Large Array (VLA) out in the high desert of New Mexico. I’ve wanted to go there for a long time (since Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” came out) and finally had the time and tenacity to do that. Moving on from there to Socorro, then a bit of a jog south and east to the Trinity Site. I couldn’t get too close as it’s only open one day per year, but I got as close as I could and that was enough for now. Leaving there I drove through Roswell and on to the northeast, getting into Oklahoma and Kansas where the wind really does blow freely across the plains. I bucked a 40 mph headwind in OK. and followed that up with a stiff blizzard for a couple of hours in Ks. More nail-biting driving for a bit there. I’d have pulled off to wait it out except the temperature plummeted into the near 0 range and had I stopped, I’d have had to “hotel” it. More time spent closely watching the “common-sense-ometer” got me through in good shape with only my fuel mileage and nerves to suffer for it.
The planning takeaway is that I was able to logically cover a lot of ground and see a steady string of “must-see’s” with a minimum of backtracking. By leaving myself with only the bones of a schedule and not a tour-itinerary, I was able to move things around a bit. I ended up spending an extra day so I could take my RV neighbors advice and go down to Borrego, Ca. and the state park there. I also, as a consequence of that side-trip, was able to spend a day off-roading in the washes and slot canyons of a huge off-road area south of the Salton Sea.

Maintenance
I did a pretty comprehensive post on preparing or my trip so I’ll gloss over many of the fine details here. Suffice to say, preparation makes the difference between a good trip and a bad one. We can’t change the weather but we can plan for it and I’m pleased to say that, having gone through a wild variation of different weather climates things went well. Lessons learned here are going to be put to use in the future but overall, I was happy with how well it went. For more on that, go to the “Towing” section.
I did some “in-trip” maintenance in addition to my pre-trip prep. I reset the preload for one of my trailer hubs as it was getting a wee-bit sloppy. This is one of those things best learned before it’s needed. My experience tells me that some wheel hubs can go for a long time without changing and others, for some reason, seem to need more attention. For my “in-trip” wheel bearing check, I simply put a knee against the top of the tire and see if the hub clunks or seems sloppy when I push it from side to side. One of mine had a bit of a noise so I jacked the wheel up and put a 1/4 turn on the spindle nut. I like to have the wheel off the ground so I can spin it while tightening things. That way I know there’s not too much preload going on. In my mind, too much is worse than not enough. I also checked the grease on both sides by simply pulling the caps and looking in. As far as in-trip maintenance, that’s all I had to do other than checking the air pressure from time to time, checking for tightness of the roof rack and trying to keep the road spray off the taillights. Everyone has their own favorite selection of tools and I’m not afraid to say I carry too many. That’s an area I need to work on as well. I struggle with the needing and not having vs the having and not needing. The right answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Towing
My new TV
I recently purchased a new Jeep 4 door Wrangler and did a bit of a whirlwind getting it wired and outfitted for the trip. The most exciting part of the towing ended up being that it wasn’t all that exciting. It did a stellar job of the trip and I had nary a tense minute. The modifications I made worked according to Hoyle and made things much easier as I was able to concentrate on my driving and navigation without worrying about what my Jeep was up to. I returned as high as 19 mpg and as low as 12 mpg with a trip average of just over 17.5 mpg overall. To collect my mileage figures, I just jotted down the per-tank mileage and then averaged them all out. I had the trailer on most of the time and was pretty happy with the mileage. Did I say pretty happy? I meant really happy. The 12 mpg was going north across Ok. into a full-boat 50 mph headwind. The gusts were threatening to pull the convertible top and hood off the jeep so I didn’t feel cheated by the low mpg figures. She worked for it.
As I said earlier, I got a full-boat weather-related workout on my trip. I started out in 17” of fresh snow and drove in snow, Ice and salt conditions for the first half-day. I set the brake controller as light as it would go so the trailer wheels didn’t lock up and just took it easy. I had nary a fishtail and the trailer behaved itself better than I could have hoped for. I kept a close eye on the “common-sense-ometer” and just paid attention to safety, not letting myself get drawn up in the “miles per day” challenge.

Packing
Many books could be (have been?) written on the subject of packing. I’ll only say that, while I ended up with pretty much everything I needed, I also could use some quality time spent learning to better use the space available to good end. I’d like to say I was pretty good at it and in truth, I knew where everything was all the time, really need to gut my process and start anew. A couple of things I have decided to do include getting rid of the microwave in favor of added storage space and learning to better utilize the cabinets inside the trailer. I had things in neat bags that could have been better off in the cabinets. The result was my TV was sort of a sea of various storage devices while the trailer was devoid of things I should have put there. I’ll work on that before the next sortee. My under-bed storage access system works fantastically and has allowed me to put all of the junk that used to go in the front tongue box under the bed, freeing up space in the tongue box for tools and chairs, which I used to haul in my TV. Some careful thought is in order to get smarter on the where’s and how-much’s of trip storage. Another thing I want to explore is to be able to mount my generator on the tongue so I don’t have to haul it in and out of the TV every time I need to charge the battery. That will require a complete re-think of tongue weight and distribution of stuff. On the up-side, my bike rack on top of my tongue box worked great, offering quick access to my bike and proving to be a good solid mount for backroad travel with no worries of it falling off. I also like the fact that it’s out of the wind more than if it were on top of the TV or trailer. Whatever else gets moved about, the bike will stay there.

Resupply and food handling
I generally pack dry-goods for about a 2 week period and supplement with spoilables (dairy, fruit, vegetables, meat) every 3 or 4 days. This is the first major opportunity I’ve had to use my refrigerator and must say it worked great. I turned it on and just let it run for the whole trip. As I was moving every couple of days, I had no trouble with battery use from the fridge. Daytime temps were in the high 70’s to low 80’s most days and cool at night. I did run my generator a few times to top the battery off, but most of the battery charging happened while going down the road. My battery never got below about 11.3 volts even with the fridge and lights. Either the gennie or my TV proved capable of quickly bringing it back up to a good state of charge.

RV Park vs Off-Grid camping
I’m not afraid to say that I like the comfort and facilities of an RV park. I also hate the $30-$50 dollar daily fees. I tend to go off-grid until I just have to have a shower and then find facilities for that. I have also showered at truck stops on occasion, but generally do that in a campground with facilities. I didn’t make any reservations and just did the “poke and hope” for campsites. Having been in the southwest before, I was aware that there is a veritable sea of off-road parking available and did a bit of pull-off camping. I saw dozens of others doing the same thing from primitive tent camps to class-A carnivals. Again, common sense is the tool for that job when picking a spot to flop.

Postscript:

Letting the dust settle from all of the fun and adventure, it’s safe to say that I will be spending a lot of time refining my technique. There are many things that I have learned about my method that deserve closer examination and sharing. I’ll get to them in time.
As to the trip taken in its total, any one of the destinations would have made for a successful adventure. That I was able to pack so many in a short period of time is a bit of a double-edged sword. I am a bit addicted to the frenetic travel schedule I often put myself through and that usually comes at the expense of the introspection afforded by a slow-plodding schedule. I have to weigh the value of high adventure against its equal weight of quiet commune with fewer destinations. That’s the nature of it and hopefully, each time I go out I can use the things I’ve previously learned to make the next trip as filled with adventure and devoid of problems as the last one was, albeit with better balance between the polar opposites. the frantic and the quiet. The pragmatic traveller within me says that it must always necessarily be so. But a good, memorable trip leaves within its wake a terrible thirst for more, and each one brings more information on how to be better. As the Poet and Playwright, Samuel Beckett once said: “Failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The writer Peter Egan once penned an essay in which he said that we all get 6 days in our lives when everything is perfect; The weather, the road, the companionship, the destination, the timing. Most of our travels are subsequently spent searching for those 6 days. I can say that I’ve had, already, more than my fair share of those 6 days. Searching through my notes, receipts and photos to pen this up gives me pause to think that I have been lucky in that. There were some good days in this trip that more than balanced the dodgy travel on the trip ledger. Sitting alongside the road between the great dishes of the VLA, then soon after sitting in front of the sign that designated the Trinity Atomic Bomb test site strikes me as the great and terrible of what we are capable. They signify all of what we can do using all of the good things; intellect, imagination, scientific knowledge and hard work, but minus the petty divisiveness we often exhibit. For those glimpses into the mind of us, there is no substitute for travel. It’s hard to recognize all of that while sitting on the couch.

WilliamA

"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."

2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.

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