Small Home – Big Yard

We made it!  The first leg of the trip, and hopefully the coldest, is behind us.  We left home about 4:30 yesterday and pulled into camp here at Lake Trinidad State Park about 8:30. 

Trinidad - and yes, that's snow!

After making our “shore connections” (an electric cord and a water hose) we poured a celebratory margarita, heated up some chili and had our first dinner in the camper.  We even managed to pull in ONE TV channel and watched the local Colorado Springs news and some of  the Jay Leno show. (thanks K&F for letting us borrow your TV – it works great!)

In my last post I mentioned that we’d had a bit of a challenge getting out-of-town.  As it turns out, we’re not quite experts at loading the camper on the truck.  We’ve only loaded this camper once, and K&F’s one time – so with 2 loadings under our belts, we obviously need more practice.  Starting around noon, after many failed attempts, we finally had the tie-downs secured around 3pm.  THREE hours to load – we both agree that we need to fix this problem. At this rate we’ll never get any boating done – we’ll spend all day in camp trying to load and unload the camper. 

But, the good news is that there are two important lessons learned from our loading adventure. 

1. 2×4’s laying on their side are very unstable!  Our Ford F-150 has taller side walls and cab than some other trucks.  As a result, the recommendation of Northstar was to use 2×4’s on edge to raise the camper to the required height.  From the factory, a “raiser kit”  is permanently installed under the camper. But, in our case – we can’t raise the camper or it won’t clear the garage door.  So, the 2×4’s are laid across the bed of the truck and the camper just drops in on top of them.  However, with the angle of the driveway and a dangling electric connection for the camper – we found that we couldn’t mange to keep the raisers upright.  Just as we’d get the camper ready to drop into the truck bed, one of the 3 raisers would tip over.  Unable to reach in to straighten it, we’d have to pull the camper back up and drive the truck forward to stand it back up.  Lesson Learned: Make a “box” of the 2×4’s so that they can’t tip over.
2. 3 dimensional angles can adversely affect loading.  As you can probably tell from the first pictures, we have a fairly dramatic downward pitch to the driveway.  When we rolled the camper out of the garage, we didn’t pay attention to getting it positioned straight down the hill.  As a result, we’re now dealing with a camper that is setting slightly crooked on the driveway, leaning downward AND tipping a bit to one side.  All of these angles conspired to keep the truck from meeting up with the camper on the desired schedule!  Lesson Learned:  Position the camper carefully when moving it out of the garage.