BigBlueBox: Teardrop Camping in the Southwest

The trailer has some nifty heavy-duty, drawers in the galley. One is for the cooler so that it can slide out from underneath the counter. Another is for the stove. The slide nicely, and that's a problem while towing because they slide out into the hatch and ding it up. The dealer's solution was a pin to prevent the drawers from opening. The first problem is that the pins slide out. There is no mechanism for holding them in place. This is the pin that came with the trailer: There isn't anything to loop the ring around to keep the pin from slipping out. For the moment I have a small bungie cord to pull the pin in and keep it from slipping. I'd like to replace the pins with something like this, a locking pin. The other issue with the cooler and stove is that they need to be tied to the drawers, so even if the drawers don't move, the items don't fly off the drawer into the galley door. I use a strap for the cooler and a flat bungie for the stove. The Yet...

We have an 8x8 canopy that's nice to have in the sunny West. It's a collapsable roof without tent walls. The structure is such that it can stand on four legs without guy ropes like a thing my parents had 50 years ago they called a dining fly. The dining fly had two ropes at each corner that attached to steaks in the ground. It took some work, and soft ground, to set up, but it never crossed anyone's mind that it might fly away. It was steaked down! Not so, the canopy. The wind will push it around. We had it up covering the galley in Palisade last week and it was the first time we left it up unattended. It comes with a sturdy bag you fill with water and hang from the middle  to weight it down. It works OK. There was a bit of a stiffer breeze overnight that would gently shake the teardrop. The canopy staid put, but had walked about 4 inches downwind by the end of the night. The next day, we went into town and checked out a small festival in downtown palisade. The night...

Palisade is a great place. Must return for more wine tasting tours and bike rides. Hot though. Wine in Palisade history The trailer sway story took an interesting turn on this trip. As is becoming usual, we noticed the trailer sway, but it was worse after getting better. This time we had two bikes on the back and the sway was pretty bad. It was bad enough that we stopped in Arvada to move the bikes, two this time, into the car from the hitch behind the trailer. The sway improved (reduced) tremendously. By some stroke of luck, Mandy noticed that we didn't have bikes on the last trip, and had two on this trip. Then she thought it seemed better when we moved the hitch into the car on the way home last time. It seems trailer sway is something you can  control. Some web searching revealed that trailer balance is a big deal and sway is the consequence. You want about a 45/55 split of weight between back and front. This translates into  10-15% of your trailer weigh...

We went to the KOA in Santa Fe. This is the same place we stayed at when I road the half-century a few years ago. This was Mandy's first trip with the trailer and she took to customizing it right away. Her focus was the cabin: getting shade for the skylight, privacy for the windows. We used the extractor fan to keep cool. She bought stuff: matts for the doors velcro and a shade for the skylight and windows hanging organizers for bedside clear plastic shoebox organizers for the galley rubber dog-toy head protectors for the galley door latch fire extinguisher So did I: paper towel rack new, shorter handle for the cheap grill so it fits 2 more batteries: 18amp/hour, $35/each The first trip caused some concern because of trailer sway. I kept my speeds down to 60 to keep the stress levels low. The neighbor at Fruita made trailer sway sound like a fact of life and said he drives slowly. The Subaru had snow tires on it on the trip to Fruit and I had made a po...