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.