Last
night we got everything that travels in the overhead shelves snugged down so nothing
would be tempted to jump over the edge onto the bikes. The ‘boom-bar’
(blue-tooth speaker) fell overboard last year…it didn’t hit the bikes, but it
sustained some minor damage and that incident put me on notice that things can
fall through the netting. So, I made sure everything up there was snug. We
packed bags with essentials for stopping at hotels and finished up by packing chairs,
bird feeders, the little vacuum and unneeded sheets and blankets under the bed.
All items going in the back of the truck were also set aside in a pile. Having
all that preliminary packing done made for a quicker clean-up inside the camper
this morning.
Inside was my domain and outside was Kim’s. Draining
the tanks, disconnecting the hoses, lifting the stabilizers, etc., are pretty
much the final stages of making the camper travel ready. And that had to wait until
I was done with the water. However, Kim kept busy loading and arranging the
truck bed…the backseat was being kept open for our hotel gear and Mom. On the
way out we used the back seat for storage…whatever had been back there had to
find a new home for the ride back to Michigan. We were busy from the moment we
crawled out of the sleeping bags…no sitting around talking this morning.
Of course, the very last things to be loaded
were the bikes. And before that could happen, the camper had to be hitched to
the truck. Moment of truth here. As happy as we were with the new truck, it
hadn’t been put to the camper pulling test. Up to this point, we were only assuming
it would be up to the task…but would it? Kim was able to back right up to the hitch
using the 5” x 7” back-up camera which eliminated the frustration that
inevitably showed when I was tasked with helping. I held my breath as he pulled
away from the campsite to drive in a big circle to get in a better position to
load the bikes. From my vantage point, the
truck pulled the camper like a champ!
Time to load the bikes and wouldn’t you know
it, the temperature chose this morning to get into the high 70’s before 11 o’clock.
Sweat was drippin’ down my face the entire time we were tying down the bikes. Mission
accomplished and we were in the air-conditioned truck, ready to hit the road at
11:10 a.m. Made a quick stop at the office to talk to Ryan and Ozias…on our way
at 11:30.
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It took Kim some time to adjust to the
differences in truck/camper combo but eventually said it was pulling great. The truck had one last test to pass…going up
the mountain on 70 East just outside of Las Cruces. Strange things happened to the green truck
when it came to making that climb. It’s like it was having an asthma attack and
just had to wait to catch its breath before it would continue. That was an “Oh,
Shit!” moment of monumental proportionsa. Kim was already talking about buying
another truck due to the amount of anti-freeze the green used on the way out; I
was on the fence about it. However, the truck’s
asthma attack pushed me right off the fence onto the new truck side. Anyway, Kim was quite convinced the new truck
“isn’t even going to burp making this climb” and it didn’t. We were up and over
with no problems. New Truck = great
idea!
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By the time we got to Alamagordo, it was
dark; Kim suggested we find a hotel and get an early start tomorrow. He’d already driven over 400 miles, Santa
Rosa was about 175 miles farther and the likelihood of lodging between here and
there was sketchy. If it were just Kim
and I, we would park the camper and just crawl in for the night; but the logistics
are different with a third person onboard. Since the camper bed isn’t big
enough for three people and that would just be weird anyway, the bikes would
have to be taken out, the couches pulled down and the whole process would have
to be reversed in the morning. We chose to do it that way in 2020 when we
headed home from Arizona because the country was being shaken by this thing
called Covid-19. It seemed the safe thing to do although it was very inconvenient
and the bike thing took extra time
because Zeus’ battery kept dying when he
was outside in the cold. Anyway, this year, we’ll be staying in hotels and the
bikes can stay strapped down in the camper all night long. If their batteries
die, we’ll deal with that when we get home.
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40 Days of Lent opportunity: Listen to the sermon “Letting Go: Greed”. I haven’t
done this yet today but I’ll have a whole lot of hours of sitting in the truck
tomorrow to do it.
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