Small Home – Big Yard

Whew – it was windy yesterday in Northern New Mexico. It was a bit breezy when we left Trinidad, blowing harder when we topped Raton Pass, and very, very gusty as we came further south. And, of course it was a headwind – how can it always be a headwind regardless of the direction we’re traveling on I-25?

We worked a few hours from Trinidad, had some breakfast, packed up and were on the road before noon. Trinidad was expecting snow overnight, so I’m glad we’re headed south. Here’s a picture I just found from Cuchara, Colorado, west of Trinidad near La Veta pass.

Other than a petrol stop, we drove direct to Santa Fe arriving around 3:00. We’re at Santa Fe Skies RV Park, a Good Sam park on the south side of Santa Fe. The park is very busy – we have one of the last two sites. There’s a RV rally in Albuquerque this weekend – I’m not sure if this is the stop before arriving at the rally, or just overflow from the rally. With the wind continuing to gust (up to 50mph the news said) we hibernated inside the camper, worked a few more hours and had dinner. We’re getting free, very good quality Wi-Fi here at the park and were able to watch TV via Hulu. Only about 40 miles north of Albuquerque, we also get plenty of “over-the-air” TV channels.

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.

With the temperatures climbing and all of the snow melted from the driveway, we’re going to attempt to stay on schedule for our first leg of the trip this afternoon. 

The first step to getting on the road is loading the camper.  Well, there’s actually one more step, and that’s rolling it out of the garage.  A few months ago I found a forum post from a real inventive guy that had built  a rolling table so that he could move his truck camper around in the garage.  Doing a bit of investigating I found casters that could easily handle the job.  The only question was if the camper (actually the fan cover) would slide in under the garage door.  With a very short table and the four corner jacks barely off the ground, it fits and we can now eaily the roll the camper from where we unload it on the driveway into the garage.  Here are the before and after shots:

We’re just a few days away from starting our great Texas Roadtrip 2010 – and there’s a doozy of a spring snow storm that has descended on Colorado.  In the foothills where we are, they are forecasting 12-24 inches of this white, wet, heavy stuff.  But – fingers crossed – these spring storms usually move pretty quickly, and the temperatures usually returned to seasonal within a day or two.  So, maybe with the assistance of the snow blower and a bit of mother nature’s sunshine, we can still stay on schedule for the trip.  Stay tuned…

From 9news – our local TV/News station:
DENVER – Winter is making a comeback during this first week of spring. Denver and the Front Range foothills are being pounded with another round of wet, heavy snow that will last into Wednesday evening and make driving very difficult.