Saturday, March 21, 2015

2nd Day - testing our wings


Today we tried to figure out how to back the trailer up. We went out to a parking lot with a lot of empty spaces - which is a good thing, because after about 15 min of false starts and going the wrong direction, I finally manage to get it parked - in a space that was 2 over from the one I was aiming at!




I used about 10 spaces to turn into and back up and pull forward in to get straightened. At this point, if there were only 1 space I was aiming at, I'd be doomed to be like this guy:

Trailer Fail Cannon Beach


Jerry, OTOH, aced it (or close enough) on his first try. At least one of us can back up!


On the line is in the zone in my book



Tomorrow will be day of rest - I have a luncheon to go to. Monday I think we'll load it and take it for a little overnighter in the Bay Area.


Friday, March 20, 2015

Our first day

The adventure is beginning!

Today we drove our Flagstaff HardSide popup trailer home from Camping World. I opted to drive since it was my idea to get a trailer in the first place. We got a new 2015 Subaru Outback to pull it. It's the only vehicle that is rated to tow over 2000 lbs without moving up into a pickup or a monster SUV (even the smaller SUVs like the Forester, CRV, RAV4, Escape, etc don't pull as much). And it still gets over 30mpg on the hwy. We wanted red, but they're hard to find in our desired configuration, so we settled for bile green. It's growing on us, tho it reminds Jerry a bit too much of his draftee Army days.





It feels a lot bigger than 12 ft might suggest.  I drove off thinking "WTF was I thinking?"! Frankly, it boggles my mind that people opt to haul 40+ ft trailers around. They're braver than I.

And, clearly, there is much to learn. We're babes in the woods.





It was a bit (ok, a lot!) nerve-wracking at first, but it didn't take long to feel somewhat comfortable with it. We had some very patient techs at CW trying to explain how everything worked, but we've forgotten most of it and need to just do trial and error to learn. (Hopefully not too much error!)

We had to stop to eat en route home, which is no small feat when dragging a trailer. I pulled into the parking lot of Black Bear Diner wondering where I'd stash the caravan, but we lucked out and there was a block of empty spaces in the back of the lot.





Dunno what we'll do when we get to somewhere crowded! But by then maybe we'll learn how to back up. I tried that in the CW lot before we left but kept turning the wrong direction. (Luckily I have no documented evidence of how badly I was doing!) Everything is backwards when backing a trailer. I knew that, but it still isn't intuitive.