We decided we wanted to take it on a mountain trip to see how it handled on difficult roads. We went to a cabin on the north side of Mt. Baker for the weekend, with Vicky's daughter and family. They have two young babies, so we graciously volunteered to sleep in the camper instead of in the cabin, so they wouldn't have to worry about keeping us awake when they started crying in the night...............aren't we nice people?
On one of the days we decided to take the rig to a trail for a hike. That's where we learned another lesson (or two......or three) about our "new" camper. One thing we learned is that when you drive to a trail head you are driving almost straight up--which means the poor engine of our F-250 labored mightily with the load. It almost meant that we could practically watch the gas gauge falling. And it is a nasty, harsh ride.
We also learned to not do something like this without locking the rear door. And we also learned it's especially important to lock the rear door when Vicky's former backpack is right inside it and will fall out when the door flies open unbeknownst to people riding in the pickup.
On the way up to the trail head, one of the safety chains holding the camper onto the bed of the pickup snapped--or more probably a safety screw jostled out. There was a lot of strain on these chains because of the very rocky road and the fact that we were doing a lot of jostling. But that was the only weakness we noted. Although we did violate our first rule which was to always lock the camper door, and although Vicky's backpack did fall out on the 12-mile road to the trail head, the camper and pickup did OK. Certainly they both did well enough to give us confidence for long rides on normal roads. We've learned to lock the door, and I will attach additional safety chains, but those are small matters. I wish somebody would have turned the backpack in to the Ranger Station, but all that is left now to hope for is that whoever found it and thought they had scored an unexpected backpack and didn't leave it at the Ranger Station will get eaten by a bear the first hike they use it on. I'm good at letting things go and achieving serenity when things go wrong.
The trail we drove to was for the best hike I've taken in the PNW--Skyline Divide. The day was beautiful, and when we reached the top we could see 360 degrees, with Mt. Baker so close it appeared you could touch it. Although it was late in the season there were still a lot of wildflowers. I'll stick in a few photos, but they can't do justice to the beauty and majesty of this place. We've committed ourselves to going every year.
Here's Vicky doing her Sound of Music imitation:
Isn't this incredible?
With the camper attached, and on normal roads, we got 11 miles to the gallon. The pickup itself isn't small (a 3/4 ton) and the camper is heavy, so this probably isn't too bad. Good thing we have a 37 gallon tank.......and a paid-off VISA card.
So, it's on to the next part of the road trip project. As we've been getting more into this, we have begun to realize the difficulty of picking up and leaving for two months. It's not the same as leaving for a week or so 8 or 9 times in a row. There are a whole new set of problems to plan around. More on those later. We thought that getting the camper 7 months before we planned to leave would give us plenty of time, but now that we've used 4 of those, we see that we were (accidentally) smart to leave this much time to get ready.
But it's fun.
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