Home Again

Eighty-eight days and nearly 6000 miles on the trailer. It was a good trip although we had much more rain and cool weather than has been our past experience. We managed to miss some 110+ degree weather while we were gone, but there's certainly more where that came from.

Just for fun, I crunched some numbers. We moochdocked with friends and family for over 30 nights. We enjoyed classic boondocking only 3 times, and wallydocked at business locations 4 times. We were only able to make one Harvest Host location fit our schedule but love the concept. We stayed in public parks 26 nights including city, county, and national parks and forests, averaging $12.29 per night. Twelve of those nights included sites with water & electric or full hook-ups while the other 14 were dry camping. We stayed in commercial RV Parks 20 times, leveraging Passport America or Escapees discounts. Even with the discount, our commerical parks averaged over $28 per night.

We got very good value out of our Escapees membership but don't plan to renew our Passport America membership. The typical weekend limitation reduced its effectiveness. The jury is still out on Harvest Hosts for us. I love the concept, but struggled to incorporate what were typically rural, one night stays. We'll keep trying this one.

There were some equipment issues that will need to be resolved before our next trip. We were in Cody, Wyoming when I noticed that our left hand shock bracket was broken. Removed the shock and carried on. Could have had it welded, but we were headed towards the barn.

Turns out, some of the shock brackets made it through QA with the reinforcing flange out of position. New brackets are expected any day now and the change will be a quick process.

The other one surprises me. Hard to say how long the coupler has been that way, but our wet travels on this trip

allowed rust to highlight the crack. This is a failure mod that I've never heard mentioned before.

I'm going to do a mod to this one, slipping a doubler between a slightly shortened vertical brace and the top surface of the coupler that will span across to the sides of the coupler.

Trailer travel isn't all it's cracked up to be, but we'll be better than every once I get to work on it. But first, some time in Alaska...