Category ArchiveEverywhere Once |

Fit To Be Towed

by Brian on October 15, 2010 in How To, Planning and Prep, RVing, Travel

The convoy has rolled to its final stop. We traded in our Audi for a Jeep in New Jersey, and got our tow assembly installed in Washington, D.C. For those who’ve asked us, incredulously, over the past several months why it’s taken us so long to set up, it’s because the whole thing is a bit of an ass ache. You can’t just throw a couple of bungee cords on the bumpers of any two vehicles and head off. The list of stuff needed to make this work reminds me of an earlier “Reality Bites” post. Things are never as easy as they should be, or as they seem.

To get ready to tow we needed to trade in our car. Call this “Ass Ache Number 1.” We liked our car and didn’t plan on parting with it for a long time. So running off to get a new one wasn’t something either of us was excited about. And our choices of new vehicle were severely limited. Most cars can’t be towed with all four wheels on the ground; even fewer with automatic transmissions can be. So we had to give up a car we liked for one that we were lukewarm on, at best. Yay! Our choices were further constrained by weight issues. The trailer hitch and the motor home itself are only rated to tow so much weight.

Height also ended up being a limiting factor, and one that we almost overlooked. Tow bar manufacturers recommend a vertical difference of no greater than four inches between the motor home trailer hitch and the tow vehicle base plate connection. After some research, we discovered that the base plate pegs for the Honda Fit, our original tow vehicle of choice, were 13.5 inches off the ground whereas the tow receiver on our motor home is 22 inches. Math is hard, but even I can figure out that 22 minus 13.5 is quite a bit more than 4. It is more than 4, right?

A robotic breaking system for our Jeep

Keep in mind that there isn’t anyone who will tell you this. You have to figure nearly everything out on your own, and hope you don’t mess it up too badly. Had we bought the Fit as originally planned, we probably wouldn’t have been able to tow it without a dolly. That would have qualified as a bad hair day.

After we side stepped that landmine, all we needed was a tow bar, base plates, safety cables, wiring to connect the tail lights of the motor home to the tow vehicle, a supplemental breaking system, and a mechanic to install it all. Piece of cake.

Setting this all up adds about thirty minutes to the front end and probably fifteen minutes to the backend of our travel time. It adds 20 feet of driving length to our 35 foot motor home and raises a whole host of potential problems, limitations, and hazards while in transit. But somehow this still seems more sensible than driving across country in tandem. Not by much, though.

A Virtual Stroll In Montreal

by Brian on August 16, 2010 in How To, Montreal, Planning and Prep, Travel

As with just about everything recently, we’ve had to adapt our style of travel to the realities of living in an RV. In the past, we would land in a city, pick up a map, and stroll around to get our bearings. We’d always feel helplessly lost at first, but within a couple of hours we usually owned the city. We’d know what could be done reasonably on foot, where we’d want to take the metro to, and what might require a taxi. We’d also have a strong sense of which things on our to-do list should be grouped together.

But now we don’t have a city hotel room to retreat back to after our stroll. If we want to explore the city, we have to get there first, and even that takes some degree of planning. Do we drive in or take public transportation? Where is the best place to park for what we want to do? In what order should we do things? All this, and more, has to be decided before we’ve even set foot in town.

Thankfully, Google has this neat feature where you can plot destinations on an interactive map. This allows us to visualize our itinerary for Montreal, and capture some of the benefits of our stroll virtually. For example, we know we want to catch a free jazz concert on Thursday night, but we don’t know what else on our itinerary made sense to do the same day. After plotting a bunch of ideas on Google Maps, we can easily see what else is in the neighborhood. The “walking directions” feature tells us that a walk from Notre Dame, to the Archaeology Museum, to Marie-Reine-du-Monde Basilica to the Jazz venue takes about 40 minutes; a pretty good day’s itinerary. More importantly, it tells us that the botanical gardens and the Jean-Talon Market are probably too far to walk, and too much of a pain for the metro. So we’re grouping them together and driving.

You can play around with our map here, to see how it works and maybe create something similar for your own next trip. In the future, we’ll be plotting more of our itineraries this way to get a feel of a city’s geography, if not its culture, before we arrive.

Fit or Fun?

by Brian on August 5, 2010 in How To, Planning and Prep, RVing

There is something about this Jeep that has me rethinking our plans. As I mentioned earlier, our existing car isn’t suitable to tow, so we’ll eventually have to replace it with something else. We had pretty much decided on getting a Honda Fit for a whole host of really boring practical reasons. It’s inexpensive, light weight, has plenty of cargo capacity, gets great gas mileage, Zzzzzzzzzz.

But lately we’ve been running into a fair number of unpaved roads, which I didn’t really expect in the North East. I’m wondering what we’ll encounter when we head west. So we’ve been thinking that the dainty little Fit might not get us everywhere we want to go. And how practical is that?

And then today we see this bad boy, tricked out for serious off-roading. It even has the requisite mud splatters to prove it is legit. But there is something else here that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but for some reason I really want a Jeep now.

Inaugural Voyage

by Brian on April 17, 2010 in How To, Planning and Prep, RVing

Point A is the location of the dealer where we bought our RV. Point B is our storage facility in Saugerties, NY, where we’ll be keeping it for the next month. The blue line represents the one-hour, 23 minute, 74.5 mile drive, I needed to complete to get the rig from Point A to Point B. Piece of cake . . . except I’ve never driven an 18,000 pound, 35 foot, Class A motor home before. Conceptually I know how to drive it; it turns wider because of the length; the back end swings out to the opposite side when turning because of the shorter wheel base; it’s wider than a car so I need to mind the right hand side; it stops much slower; etc. etc. etc. But as any college professor understands, knowing and doing are two completely different things. Nonetheless, today’s the day I needed to saddle up and take this puppy for a spin.

A couple of things surprised me about the trip. One, I didn’t wreck it. That was pretty cool, and an important first step in our plans. The second is the great visibility I had of the road. Not only in front, but also along the sides, and to a certain extent, in the back. Because of the large double mirrors and the high vantage point I actually had a better sense of where I was on the road than when I’m driving my car. But that high vantage point has a drawback . . . bridge overhangs look looooooow. Passing under bridges, even when the elevation is marked, feels like a leap of faith. I keep picturing the top of the rig getting sheared off by a low bridge. But not on this trip. Ship and crew arrived safely at their appointed destination with nary a scratch. So far, so good.

It’s Here!

by Brian on February 28, 2010 in How To, Planning and Prep, RVing

Our rig has arrived a littler earlier than we’re ready for it, but because the dealer’s pants are on fire to get final payment we drove the three hours to Amsterdam to take “possession.” Possession, in this case, means that we settled all the financial stuff and drove away with the RV still parked in the dealer’s lot. Why’d we leave it behind? Mostly because we have no place to park it in Hoboken, NJ. If you’ve ever been to Hoboken, you’d know the idea of parking a 35-foot bus there is a little comical. We also don’t want to take it while it’s still winter and have to worry about weatherizing and de-weatherizing it. So the dealer has agreed to store it for the next couple of months until we’re ready for it.

We did the walk-through and every thing checked out aces. My only concern is that this beast is huge! I’m still apprehensive about driving the thing, but I guess I should have thought of that before I actually owned it.