Wheels And Electrons

There's reason you don't  find many septuagenarians playing on the same ruggby team as tricenarians. It's  not that they can't play the game, it's just that they have slowed down a bit and can't compete on the same physical level as 30 year olds.

It's not that I can't ride a standard bike, it's just that the inevitable passage of time means the kind of riding I like to do is difficult on a cheap standard bike anymore, to the point of sucking all the joy out of the experiance.

I'm not much of a road biker, nor does slamming around on mountain-bike trails hold much appeal, I'd rather hike those and soak in the experiance at a slower pace, I'm not a loop around and around the city-park affectionato, so that pretty much leaves the many rails-to-trails - well, trails.

Only thing is, those tend to have longer distances between access points and being on my own, all my rides are out-&-backs, so no chance to pick the downhill direction for a ride.

The last time I rode the Quad-B (my $120 Walmart Big Box Beater Bike) on the Tunnel Trail from Viena, over the crest at Tunnel, and down to Burnside (there's a really pretty stream and some beaver dams between Tunnel and Burnside) and back again, I thought I'd never make it back uphill to Tunnel before starting the long glide, or what should have been a long glide, back down to Viena. 

Finally back at Tunnel, while I was flat on my back on the bench of a picnic table trying to recover enough from that last uphill slog to finish the ride, I had to work hard to convince a concerned young woman (more like a child in her form, and what a form, fitting lycra) that she didn't need to call the paramedics for me, even though I wasn't entirely sure she was wrong.

That was the last time I road the Quad-B, which, admittedly, was nearing the end of its useful life with worn wheel, pedal, and head-tube bearings and badly brake-worn rims. (Even going downhill from Tunnel to Viena that bike wouldn't coast anymore and I had to work for every mile!)

But I still like the idea of riding the many rails-to-trails opportunities available today, as well as being able to occasionally scout questionable forest-roads by bike before committing a vehicle.

I could bridge the gap between desire and ability a bit by buying a decent mid-level standard bike to replace my ragged out Quad-B. But for that kind of money, enter the ebike (with conciderable help from Mom's estate). An investment that's more  likely to keep on providing as my physical condition ages out.

Now I know there are those out there that quote - would die before buying an ebike - unquote, but we're all different, and for me the electrons seem to be working.

Most evenings now I end up riding the ebike in (rugged) loops around the property for 30 to 60 minutes before calling it a night, something I haven't done on the Quad-B in years. Something that's good for me both physicly and mentally as I de-stress from the day. Not that you'd think I have all that much stress in my day as it is, but a feature of the end of the spectrum where I apparently dwell is having dificulty shutting the mind down.

There's  a ton of decent e-bike offerings out there and after much research over several months I picked a Lectric XP Stepthrough 3.0.

Stepthrough because there's no reason to make life more difficult than it needs to be. Lectric because they are US based, well known, have good quality and customer service reviews, and at the time were offering a package deal that included the fancy seat, saddle-bags, and two extended range batteries for about the same price ($1500 or so) as some decent standard bikes. XP, not because I was particularly looking for a folding bike, but because that was the only way to get a bike with 20" wheels, shortening the overall length enough

that, without taking anything apart, it would fit between the walls across the rear door of the cargo-trailer (by a half inch!)

while still leaving room to fold the bed down.

I added some low-profile D-rings to the floor and the door/ramp so the bike can be securely strapped down.

I also added a 1up bike rack to my arsenal.

Bike racks are pricey and I've had a Thule swing-away rack for - well, since forever - but it's a frame-hanger which won't work at all for this new bike.

Besides, electric bikes, with thier steel frames with integraded welded-on steel rear rack, 3" tires, fancy shock-post seat, saddle bags, and extended-range battery are heavy! 70 pounds ready-to-ride in my case.

Constantly arm-curling one of those up to hang it on a frame-hanger rack - well that's just not in my vocabulary anymore!

Hence the wheel-suport rack with ramp (30 pounds all together), so I can just roll the bike on and off.

The wheel-support trays of the 1up also fold 90 degrees to end up parrallel with the hitch-tube which streamlines the stored rack so I can slide it into the bed of the Ranger when towing the cargo trailer to a destination, then once there, mount the rack on the back of the Ranger for day-trips.

As you may have already seen in a previous post, I added a reciever-tube to the front of the teardrop so I can mount the rack there too,

then travel with the bike mounted on the trailer, then once there, wherever 'there' is, shift the rack to the Ranger for day-trips.

First impresions are good, but I've only got a couple hundred miles on the bike so far and frankly I'm still learning how to use it, so maybe sometime in the future I'll go into more detail on riding it and how it's doing. (Don't you want to just reach through the screen and grab by the neck those people that leave reviews saying 'arrived on time, packaging in good shape, haven't used it yet, 5 stars!'?)

Project Detour - A Small Centerpiece

This morning The Wife brought me a small blue jar she likes

along with a tub full of doodads and said "do something!".

So, even though she also said, "no rush, whenever you have time.", like any man that has been successfully married for over 40 years, I dropped everything

and did something - - -

Especially since she had to go to town this morning for more supplies

to keep her tore-up arm bandaged (feral cat that panicked), and she's always grouchy when she gets back from having to be around people.

Final step, assuming she signs off on it,

is to put a 50/50 mix of water & glue, with a few drops of soap to make it flow better, over the copper-coated bb's I half-filled the jar with, to lock everything down.

Uh-oh, I hear her coming down the driveway - wish me luck!

A Bike Rack Where?!

Who ever heard of adding a 2" hitch reciever on the FRONT of a trailer?! Especially when there's already one on the rear, where they belong.

Well, that's exactly what I did to the teardrop, because attaching things to the back of a lightweight trailer with a rear hatch is inconvenient (when you need to get the hatch open), problematic in terms of weight-distribution (there's only just over a 100 pounds of tongue-weight on this thing. Add any more behind the axel and the tongue will be floating! Disasterous for trailer control!), and hanging things out back there makes them just a little vulnerable in traffic.

So, to the front!

My brother, the metal-guy in the family, told me I had to span two frame-members with the receiver-tube to avoid work-hardening of the welds which could result in eventual cracking and failure.

That meant two things.

First I had to drop the spare tire to make room for the actual welding process

and second, I had to cut a 24" long 1/4 inch walled steel reciever tube

Don't know what I would ever need that short cut-off for, but ya never know so, now that the cut end is painted up so it won't rust on me, I'll find a spot on a shelf for it

so that I could still get the spare mounted back up afterwards because apparently nobody stocks the 14" reciever tube I needed and there was a month-long backlog on 18" tubes.

Now if you thought I was going to weld this thing on myself, you were wildly mistaken!

I'll weld up things like this racoon-proof fountain, shown above in the dry-fit stage, for the little pond out the back-door, but generally speaking - OK, always speaking - my welding SUCKS, so I took the freshly cut tube and the teardrop down to a proper weld-shop to make sure the damn thing doesn't fall off one day and wipe out the poor smuck following me.

You might remember that I mentioned building two different campers on an Isuzu NPR chassis. Well the second version required removing the flatbed from the truck and this is the same shop (new owner) that did that work for me 20+ years ago. At the time I told the guy the flatbed was his to sell on or scrap.

While waiting on the welding job I wandered around and discovered that the flatbed is still sitting out there in the weeds!

All welded up (properly!), I headed back home,

painted up the bare metal bits,

wrestled the spare tire back up into its mounting spot (good thing the Ranger uses the same wheel as the teardrop because its spare is a lot easier to get at!),

and now I'm able to mount my single-bike-with-ramp 1up bike rack on the front of the teardrop  when towing or the back of the Ranger when not.

When it's on the trailer it's not an issue, but for when the rack on on the Ranger the contents are partially blocking the tail-lights so I added some auxiliary lights to the ramp

that plug into the Ranger’s 4-way.

Just what I need a bike rack for is a long-ish story for another time.

Don’t Hit Me!

 I knew, even before it was in my hands, that I would be making modifications to the teardrop, that’s just the way I’m wired.

After a 6 month wait for it to get through the build schedule, in early June the trailer was finally ready - - and sitting in Grand Junction CO.

I was not.

So first thing on the list was a road trip to go fetch the damn thing back to where it belonged. I’m not used to making road trips without my living quarters on my back, so the first day was a long drive because I didn’t want to screw around homeless any longer than I had to. I didn’t leave the house until the day before my appointment at Timberleaf Trailers and made it across three states and one mountain pass to Salida CO where (shudder) I found a motel room for the night.

Next day I was in Grand Junction about three hours early for my appointment  after crossing the 11,000+ foot Monarch Pass and what Colorado calls two “crests” (most would call them serious passes with chain-up areas, runaway ramps and permanently mounted closure-gates) on US50.

That night I was camped on BLM land with my new trailer and already knew what my second upgrade project would be.

I was parked at a noticeable angle, not something I normally worry about (compressor fridges like I use to avoid the need for a mounted propane system work just fine up to a 30° angle), but this night the slope had me rolling across my air-mattress into the wall, and it was a bitch to get myself sorted out and upright uphill when it was time to get out of bed, well, at least up on my knees since there's no "upright" in here, because there was no place to grab onto. I was like a turtle turned upside down and waving my flippers around desperately! So, grab-handles! Four of them. on order from Amazon before I even got home.

But my first project was definitely going to be correcting the Department of Transportation’s criminally inadequate minimum lighting requirements.

For trailers less than 80” wide and less than 10,000 gross, the USDOT requires ONE tail light (Most states add to that and require the usual two) a pair of brake lights and a pair of turn signals. And they don’t require them to be separate lights, they can be combined into a pair of single 2 or 3-function fixtures, each with a minimum of 3.5 square inches of luminous surface area. Yep, that’s right 3.5, which is equivalent to a round light just barely more than 2” across!

I guess these people have never come up behind a slow-moving trailer in a heavy rain!

 Even when the minimums are exceeded by a factor of three, as they were on the trailer as it came from the factory (which is a 6 person combination workspace and showroom with a half-dozen trailers in various stages of production at a time), that’s not good enough in my books.

One slight problem.

The roof, including the rear-hatch, are built up glue-ups with the various bits being cut on a CNC machine which also routes out pathways for wiring which is added before the final glue-up, and the tail lights are very firmly glued in so access to the wiring on the back of them was non-existent. So unless I wanted to really hack-up the rear hatch, its real estate was not available for any additional lighting.

So I sourced these narrow lights, just shy of 17 sq. in. of luminous area each, that would fit on the frame of the trailer between the two heavy rubber blocks that act at bumpers. I made sure they met another criteria in that they also act as reflectors. Good thing too! But I'll get to that in a moment.

And while I was at it I picked through my leftovers pile and found a set of these 3/4" press-in LED lamps to add as front and rear fender clearance lights. Not stipulated by DOT standards but required by common sense!

To simplify wiring things up I bought a trailer wiring kit for a 4-way connector so I'd have plenty of length of the proper wire-colors, then climbed under the trailer, not all that difficult since it is only a few inches short of 2 feet off the ground, where the existing wiring harness, though neatly installed and anchored down, is accessible,

 and with my tools, rubber tape, plastic cable-way, and clamps, I spliced into the existing wiring harness,

drilled through the rear frame member and wired up the new tail-lights. I even added the vehicle-end of the 4-way connector that came with the wiring harness so that if, for some reason I throw a basket or something on the rear receiver that comes as part of the trailer, I'll have an easy way of lighting it up.

Adding the press-in lamps to the fenders was just a matter of running more wire in more cable-way fastened down with more clamps and drilling some holes.

There, much better - - except,

DOT also requires reflectors, even on small trailers. Now maybe the original tail and side lights were marketed as reflective, but this night shot clearly shows that until I added my own tail lights there was nothing reflective about the rear, or sides of this trailer.

Well my leftover parts box has that covered too, in the form of some 2" wide red reflective tape. So I added some of that on the rear and sides of the trailer to become compliant, and more importantly, visible!

I've used this stuff a lot on various projects and never had it peel off or lose its luminescence.

As you can see, it doesn't take much light, not even enough to make the frame visible here, to make this tape really glow.

But this was just the first of a number of modifications I've already made to the teardrop.

 

Me and The French

 

I seem to be leaning into a trend of revealing more of myself since I returned from my cancer hiatus. Still not convinced that’s good, but recently I made a comment on another blogger’s post and the response from the blog owner was along the lines of WHEN was I in England, WHAT enticed me to go to France, and HOW could I possibly not like the French food in France?!! (That’s right. Blame the other guy for what follows! BTW I had some photos picked out of our datacenter infrastructure and the computers in those datacenters, but after thinking about it, decided not to use them because, even though most were of outdated crap, they really aren’t mine to be publishing.)

OK, let’s start with the first two. When and what, England and France.

But first, between the military and my civilian job I actually spent a lot of time in a variety of places. Something that I take for granted because I’ve lived it, but apparently somewhat surprising to others. 

Some of those places were good – in the 90’s, Caracas, and northern Venezuela in general was hectic, confusing, contradictory, a little dangerous, but vibrant and driven on hope, and the food! Talk about exquisite flavors without pomp and pretense! – some downright bad – Lagos Nigeria in the 80’s was dirty, hopeless, perilous, and something to be endured (once! only once!). Shell Oil bought an island, built a small day-resort, locked it down, and would ferry expats and family out there for a few hours of “normal” away from Lagos. – some were idiosyncratic to my American sensibilities – in Singapore you can buy packages of bananas sorted by days (eat this one today, the next one tomorrow, and so on. Someone sits there, breaks down bunches of bananas, sorts them by ripeness then packages them in trays labeled with the days of the week, the ripest on the left, the next ripest in slot 2, and so on.), but  the only way you could buy a razor in Singapore, even the disposables, was to get a clerk to open up the locked cabinet. And in England the shops close at 1700, malls, convenience stores, you name it, shut up tight. No wonder the characters in Midsummer Murders are always buying gas-station flowers on their way home! Only place open. – some were deceptive – Villahermosa Mexico is anything but a beautiful view! (My grandmother used to live in San Miguel de Allendein the late 60's/early 70's, so I know what a beautiful Mexican View is, and it's not Villahermosa!) – some were contradictory – 90’s Columbia was beautiful, but if you fiddle with the hotel restaurant’s window-coverings during breakfast you will firmly be told to leave the blast-curtains alone.

There were a few places I REALLY didn’t want to be, but for the most part visiting other places was interesting, though honestly, as a military person my schedule was pretty well dictated and full, and as a civilian I was usually focused on my work and not playing tourist. Though there were some exceptions.

One morning I made an emergency flight to Caracas (I always kept an overnight bag under my desk because this wasn’t unusual.) because one of the two main-frame computers there went down late the day before and the guy on the ground couldn’t get it going again. I touched down in the afternoon with a dozen or so boxes of parts, which I had to get through customs right behind a guy with a weapons catalog in his bag, to find that the center manager had not only banned the on-site tech from the computer room first thing that morning, but also from even meeting me at the airport, his assistant was there instead. Somewhere around 0200 the assistant and I had the computer up and running again with a part that had already been on site, but by the time I woke up the next morning on the floor in his office, the former on-site tech was already back in the US and I stayed there in Caracas for 6 weeks, exploring the streets, jungles, and beaches, while they found someone to replace him. (That year I was away on assignment, training, or conference for 11 out of 16 weeks running, and this was over the Thanksgiving/Christmas period). And we had an operation in Anchorage that was treated like a foreign assignment, so for a number of years I would go up and live in their house while the company flew the computer tech and his wife back to the lower 48 for their 6 week annual leave. It was a small center and took about 2 hours a day of my time to keep running, so I did a LOT of hiking in south-central Alaska during those years, and as an added bonus, during one of those years watched Mount Spur erupt from their front porch.

But back to England. We had two data-centers there in southern England about a half-hour train-ride apart, so I was there doing my thing several times. (Here’s a tip, use public transport during the week, but when you rent a car for a weekend excursion, insist on a manual shift. That way you are always using the “wrong” hand which constantly reminds you to stay on the “wrong” side of the road.)

I guess that leaves France and my less-than-up-to-expectations experience with French food.  I will admit, I was biased against the French, at least the French business culture, long before I was exposed to the food, but I’m getting to that. And remember, what follows is my experience and my opinions resulting from that experience. (And my exposure was to French business people. I don’t claim to know what regular French people are like.)

Some additional background here. After military service and a couple of subsequent, short lived jobs (3 years or so each) I worked for the same company for 31 years. But it changed names and leadership several times during that period. The first major change was a “merger” (I put that in quotes because in my experience, rather than actually playing nice together, that’s just a term used to sugar-coat the fact that one company is going to try to ride roughshod over the other) between a US based company (The one I was with) and a Canadian company. Years later, when the Canadian born CEO of the resulting company decided to retire, rather than promote from within (there was a candidate that had been specifically groomed for years for the position but he, an American, was ultimately passed over), he chose to bring in a complete ringer instead (I hope he spent his retirement kicking his ass for that, as the company he spent his life building up and banked his retirement on tanked! Well at least dropped from industry leader to just another of the mediocre pack.) His ill-considered pick was a Frenchman. And that Frenchman, after unsuccessfully trying to tear the heart out of the company culture, barely let the ink dry on his contract before selling the company off to one of his cronies running a similar French company in yet another one of those “mergers”.

An important detail of my civilian career. I was on the data collection and processing side of the oil and gas business. A field that prospers by being on the cutting edge of technology. Something that dovetails very nicely with the American culture which is largely made up of 900 or more years of people making the leap into the unknown and collectively prospering by riding that cutting, sometimes bleeding, edge. Oddly enough given our similar historical trajectories, Canadian culture is not quite so “wild west”, it’s a little more reserved, but as a company we managed to hash that cultural difference out and stay out there on the cutting edge and continued to build one of the premier outfits in our field.

Now you may already know this about French business men, I didn’t until I started working with them, but they are scared to death of making a mistake. They make Asians look like amateurs when it comes to “saving face”. I don’t know if that’s an ingrained thing across the population or if it’s beaten into them by their precious business schools (I’ll come back to the schools in a moment). Because of this fear of “failure” they tend to sit back and let somebody else take the risk first, if it works, maybe, but only maybe, they’ll give it a try. Not a good fit for the field I was in.

The way to stay on the cutting edge in the technology field, which moves at lightning speed, is to occasionally step across the line and get bloodied. That’s the only way to know where the cutting edge is! I used to tell my team-members that if they weren’t making mistakes once in a while they weren’t doing their jobs. And that didn’t sit well with my Gallic bosses. And when you piss off one French boss you piss off all the French bosses right up the chain.

The French businessman is also obsessed with the school he/she went to and will only gather minions and cronies around themselves that are from the same school. When a high-ranking Frenchman moves into a position you can be sure the whole structure is going to be decimated because they insist on bringing their familiar, school-vetted entourage with them, filling all the nearby positions with known entities and getting rid of those pesky unknowns.

I was used to quick, informal meetings where multiple disciplines came together as equals, usually in a mix of in-person and video feeds since we were scattered all over the world, and hashed out ideas, worked towards solutions, and came to a group consensus on how to proceed. That’s not the way French business meetings work. In a French meeting, which are highly structured and go on interminably, they go around the table, which has been carefully stacked by rank and importance, and each person presents their data and recommendations. There’s no discussion, no back-and-forth, no exchange of ideas. Then the head person gathers up their notes and walks out of the room. No decision, no plan of action. Sometime later, after they have digested the often misinterpreted information they collected and made an autocratic decision, they will let the peons, who have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs while the rest of the industry is charging forward, know what to do.

With all the traveling, advising, and consulting I did for the many company locations scattered around the world, I never went to France, the global company headquarters during those last years, not in my professional capacity anyway. Because, although they were happy to milk my skills and expertise in other locations, they could handle their own business in France with their own people thank you very much (Boy did they make a hash out of designing what was supposed to be a “showpiece datacenter”!). So I stayed away from France until the powers-that-be finally got fed up with the lack of progress in resolving the ongoing cultural clashes within the company.

Their solution was to hire a mediator and a corporate trainer then “invite” key personnel (No upper management because, of course, they weren’t the problem) to an intensive 5 day “workshop” to be held at a hotel on the south side of Paris (They couldn’t let something like this get too close to the corporate headquarters located in Paris proper lest there be some cross-contamination!).

By intensive, I mean full days of formal, scripted sessions starting with breakfast and ending with dinner, then we were broken into teams and sent off with “homework” for the evening. And to make sure we stayed on track, our sleeping quarters and meals were part of the program. That wasn’t an issue. I went through the same intensive, immersed thing when completing my MBA at a local (local to my usual office in Houston) university during their summer break when we had run of the campus, including the nearly empty dorms, and pick of the professors looking to make a little extra spending money between semesters.

No, other than the cultural issues, the main point of contention during this workshop, if you discount the two hours the company head (Frenchman of course) sat down in front of us with his henchmen on either side (why is there always an entourage standing around behind the police or fire chief or mayor during crisis press conferences?  Shouldn’t they all be off doing what they’re paid for instead of standing around and uselessly nodding at what their boss is saying?), went on a rant and berated us for the very thing we were there to resolve, was the food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, didn’t make any difference, it was dictated, scheduled, no substitutions, and universally atrocious!

Now to be fair, I already had a bad attitude of all things French by this point, but I wasn’t alone in thinking the food was just plain bad. It was unpalatable enough that after a day and a half of chocking down slop a senior attendee told the hotel catering staff that we were done and would be ordering our meals off the general menu from here on out. The head of catering agreed, but not until after tomorrow night because the chicken cordon bleu had already be removed from the freezer and was thawing - - -

So that’s why my take on French food in France is to not – take it that is.

The session ended mid-day Friday and I, nor anyone else that I know of, didn’t hang around to test our new “camaraderie”.  I grabbed my computer-bag, which doubled as my luggage for most of my trips, snagged a taxi out front, fortunately the driver spoke Spanish because I had, still have, no French, had him take me to the nearest station, grabbed a train up to the Paris Gare du Nord station where I grabbed a Eurostar to London, a taxi to Crowley, and was sleeping in a room of my choice that night after eating food I selected myself, before spending another week or so bouncing between the two UK datacenters trying to put that disastrous French interlude behind me and do the job I was being paid for.

For the first 26 years I worked for that company it was a blast. I was traveling around, elbow deep in technology, dreaming up new ways to utilize and push that technology, actually getting to try out many of those hair-brained ideas, building datacenters based on my designs with multi-million dollar budgets based on my say so (the first time a company VP said “whatever it costs, it’s your project” I was scared to death, even though I knew I was right, and got pretty obsessive about triple and quadruple checking everything!).

The next three years I saw things slipping away, literally, as the company went from being a premier choice of clients, mostly oil companies, big and small, to just another one of the pack.

The last two years pretty much sucked. The only reason I didn’t bail out in the middle of that French session while being yelled at by a pissed off, completely out in the weeds, French upstart was because I had already selected a retirement date and was going to leave after the previous year’s bonuses were paid out in March.

There were some rough patches, but overall my working life from 1972 to 2012 (longer if you count summer jobs) was a good run. I can even see the good side of working with the French now. Because of that experience I have cherished every day that I don’t have to go in to work and put up with their corporate and cultural crap.

But that doesn’t mean I have any interest in going back to soak up their contrived culture. I’m not impressed by the food I was exposed to during my one trip there, and since I’m not a foodie, not really driven to try again despite the gastronomical hype. The most famous painting in the most famous French museum was painted by an Italian. Yes, France has some notable, home-grown artist, but when you think about it, the best artists have always been societal outliers and, despite the best efforts of the appropriationists , don’t exactly represent the cultures they came from. It’s like someone that hasn’t really done anything of note themselves trying to appropriate the glory of their movie-star grandparent. (OK, that’s perhaps a little harsh, but writing this has got me all riled up all over again, so screw-em!)

 

Well that turned into a bit of a rant! But hopefully answers some questions for at least one reader.

The Teardrop In My Driveway

 I know, I know! I just finished talking about transforming my cargo trailer into a travel trailer and it's part of a succession of rigs I've had that I’d be comfortable living in. 

This was the first of two versions I built on this Isuzu NPR chassis. 

On the left is the second version I built on the Isuzu. For this one I removed the flatbed and built right on the chassis, this time with a hard-sided vertical-lift top similar to the Alaskan Campers (Of which I owned one sometime in the 90's). On the right is a Sportsmobile popup built on a Ford E350 platform. 

For context (on that "living in" comment), counting The Van, from 2002 to 2012 I lived in one of four different rigs on three different chassis parked in the parking-lot at work during most week-days because it was too far to commute daily, and I was perfectly content doing so.

So why am I talking about parking yet another trailer in our driveway?

Well, though it might not look like it because I removed the IHBD FX4 stickers (I Have A Big Dick) from the sides before I drove it off the dealer’s lot (I’m not a fan of advertising, and especially not of false advertising! And along those lines, why is it so difficult to buy a decent ball-cap to wear when driving because it makes a far more effective and versatile sun-visor than the vehicle’s sun-visors, that doesn’t have some garish logo plastered all across the front. And shouldn’t they be paying us for the advertising instead of gouging into our pockets for the privilege?) - OK, climbing back down off my soap-box, for a little while anyway - but despite the lack of signage, I did spring for the not-inexpensive FX4 package on the Ranger for a reason.

 

As useful and comfortable a rig as it was, one of the downsides of The Van was that it was rather large, bulky, and two-wheel drive. I found myself turning away from too many challenging roads because if I got that heavy sucker stuck, it was stuck! True, in addition to many “highway-ed” passes, I did take it over Montezuma, Apache, and the even sketchier Middlemarch (at least on the sandy east side, the west side is pretty tame) passes on less than great tracks, but, due to practicality (or maybe chicken-ness), over the years I also bypassed a number of other challenging forest and BLM roads that may or may not have been interesting.

So, to correct that issue, when I bought the Ranger I got myself a real 4-wheel drive. 2H, 4H, 4L, electronic locker rear-end, skid-plates all round, extra clearance, various driving modes (sand, mud, snow, ruts, rock.), an inclination meter (so I know how far I was leaning just before rolling over, not if I was more inclined towards a hamburger or salad today.), on-dash graphics depicting how the power is being dispersed among the tires, 360° cameras so I can see up-close all around without having to get out – all with heated leather seats, tinted windows, dual climate zones, automatic lights that know when to turn on and off – even when to go bright and dim – and bend around the corner when making a turn, windshield wipers that know when and how fast to flop, adaptive cruise and lane-keeping, the ability to read and display speed-limits on the dash and even automatically adjust the cruise setting as you pass through and back out of towns. (Years ago when I went from the manual in the Isuzu to the automatic transmission in the Sportsmobile I wondered if I was still actually driving or just riding. I’m wondering that all over again now.)

So that’s all well and good, but the only thing is, when you pair the Ranger up with the cargo trailer, as nice as that trailer is, it’s still a cargo-trailer which means it’s pretty close to the ground, a bit boxy and bulky for narrow two-track roads, (Though I did have it on Apache Pass this past February, which, depending on what the weather has been doing, actually only has one short section of real challenge.) and weighs in at somewhere between 2700 and 3000 pounds, so the combo doesn’t exactly scream “back-road-adventuring”.

So I started doing some research into back-road capable options to compliment my setup when the cargo trailer wasn’t entirely appropriate.

The obvious solution was a tent

 

a fancy, quick up and down, plenty of room, tent paired with a cot, folding chair, and folding table to make for a quite comfortable space. – But it would still be a tent. Not exactly Walmart parking-lot capable. (When I am traveling from here to there [something I do a lot with both family and decent public lands so far away], I really dislike the hassle, cost, lost-time, and social interaction of finding a real campsite just for a few hours rest overnight.)

 

How ‘bout a rooftop tent!

Turns out those suckers are heavy and I would need to build a crane system in the barn to get it on and off the Ranger. And clearly there's not enough space in there to make it into a cabin with cot, chair, and table, or even stand up in, and there's also the very real possibility of falling and breaking something when trying to crawl out of it in the middle of the night for - well, you know.

And in the end it would still be a tent.

 

OK. One of those overland style popup shells for the truck-bed?

But again, I would need a crane system to get it off for daily driving.

And Holy Crap! Have you seen how much those cost?!

Enter the teardrop.

Not one of these Tag or Tab highway-ready trailers that are tall enough to stand up in. Nothing really wrong with them except; I already have a highway-ready trailer that's pretty close to the ground; I don’t need or want all the “amenities” they try to cram into a too-small space; and Holy Crap! Have you seen how much those cost?!

 

Nope. I’m looking for a mean, lean, off-road capable, overlander type trailer.

But Holy Crap! Have you seen how much those cost?!

 

Enter the Timberleaf Pika.

Smaller and lighter than the Timberleaf Classic but larger than the really small Timberleaf Kestrel.

Proper teardrop shape for slipping through the air on the highway, counter-space/kitchen area in the back, good sleeping space inside, especially since I travel by myself, no taller than the Ranger’s cab (Interestingly enough, the bug-line on the cargo trailer isn’t down around the height of the tailgate but up around the height of the cab so the primary airflow must stay up there and go right over anything lower than cab-height.), just the right compromise of size verses function, weighs in at less than 1500 pounds fully loaded and ready to go, and when equipped with the off-road package, capable of going wherever the Ranger can go.

But Holy Crap! Have you seen how much those cost?!

Then again, Mom had some money left over when she died, and, even though she was the fiscally responsible one in the family (Dad could not be trusted with money! He was prone to coming home with yet another new toy instead of milk and in 1954 he sent a telegram from England to his very young, very broke, and very pregnant wife asking her to wire bus-fare so he could get back to his Army base in Germany before his weekend pass expired!), I figured she wouldn’t want me to be too practical with my share. At least that’s what I told myself - - -.

In keeping with the whole Forest/BLM-road theme, I went with the off-road suspension. Not because I expect to be doing any actual off-road stuff, just back-road stuff, but for a few (OK, a lot of) extra dolars I got not only the flat topped, step-on fenders,

 buy also the clearance of the Timbren axle-less suspension, electric brakes,

and the three-axis Max Coupler articulating hitch in place of the standard ball-hitch.

The rock-sliders that come with that package are a nice perk as you'll see when I get into the bike-rack, probably in another post.

8" drop hitch carrier on the left, needed so that the cargo trailer tows level. 2" drop carrier for level towing of the teardrop on the right.

This package, which includes big fat 33" tires, means the Teardrop frame is about the same height as the Ranger’s receiver so anything the Ranger can clear the teardrop can clear too. In other words, there's no dragging when negotiating a steep gas-station entry.

There's an 80ah LiFePO battery on-board with a dc-dc charger that trickle-charges when plugged into the running truck (i,e,going down the road), a shore-power charger for those rare occasions when that's available, and a 140 watt Lightleaf solar panel with a Victron charge-controller as well as a Victron battery monitor.

The Lighleaf can be removed from its mount and comes with an extension cord so I can set it out in the sun when the teardrop is in the shade.

I had them install the same Maxxair 7000k powered roof vent that I have been using on rigs for years, a first for the Timberleaf people who usually install the MaxAir rain-sensor powered vent. The 7000k means I can leave the vent open regardless of the weather but that extra overhang of the hood also means I can't have the roof-rack installed. But I have a whole covered pickup bed for carrying stuff in so don't need, or want, the rack anyway.

I also had Timberleaf delete the standard wall-to-wall mattress-for-two and instead I put down a layer of those puzzle-yoga mats to ease the hard floor (and they do a great job at that) and my own single-wide mattress, which opens up the inside space nicely. There's even room in there for my portable toilet and self-contained sink.

So there you have it, or rather I have it. Options in my driveway.

I can go glamping, or at least my version of glamping, in the cargo trailer as long as I stick to decent roads, or I can go camping in the back-country in the teardrop.

I've already spent a variety of nights, BLM land, Cracker Barrel parking-lot, and Texas State Parks, in the teardrop and next time I'll  get into some of the customization I've done - because, well, you know, I can't leave well enough alone.