Whirwind...

Well, I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Austin and back. 375 miles each way!

I left the house at 4:45 this morning and made it back at 6:00 this evening pulling our new to us travel trailer!If you don't know me, you might be wondering why in the world I drove to Austin to buy a used travel trailer. If you do know me, you already know why I drove to Austin. For a Deal! ;-)

It is a 2007 model, a Cherokee Lite made by Forest River. It is an 18' travel trailer and only weighs 3,700lbs empty so it is supposed to be fairly easy to tow with a 1/2 ton pickup or even an SUV. I was able to tow it back relatively easily, but the truck did have to work at it a bit.

It would have been smarter and easier to just rent one in Wyoming, but I'm not always very smart and I tend to make things harder than they need to be!

Here's the other side.
And here's a picture of the storm that I drove through just before I got home. I don't have a weight distributing hitch or sway control bars yet, and I was thinking I might not need them until I got into the gusty winds coming through the storm. It wasn't too scary but I got down to 50 mph at one point in some heavy rain. It seemed like the wind was behind me, but the trailer really pulled hard going through the rain. I think it was more of a cross wind when it was all said and done.

I think that trip gave me a decent test for the trip that we will be making in just over a month to Wyoming and the reason why we bought the trailer in the first place. People don't think that Texas has much in the way of hills and that is true for much of Texas, but they don't call the area around Austin the "Hill Country" for nothing. That, and the fact that Austin is around 500' elevation and Lubbock is at 3,250' elevation means that I climbed more in that 370 miles than I will climb from Lubbock to Denver! From Denver to where I'm headed in Wyoming isn't much of an elevation gain overall, but there will be several ups and downs before it is all said and done.

I pretty much stuck to 65mph and the truck handled it pretty well. I kept it in 3rd gear pretty much the entire time and the truck runs right at 2,500 rpms at 65 mph in 3rd gear. It dropped down into 2nd on a couple hills and runs at 3,500 rpms at 55 mph in 2nd gear. If the hills had been much longer I might have had to slow down some on the biggest hills as it peaked at 99 degrees outside on the drive home and the truck started to get a little warm toward the top of one of the longest hills.

I was hoping to get 10 mpg and I did on the first part of the drive, but as I started climbing I got a little worse mileage. Overall I ended up getting 9.3 mpg for the trip home. I got 17.1 mpg going down there so pulling the trailer makes a little bit of a difference!

It is too tall to fit in our barn, so we're not sure exactly where we are going to park it permanently. Here's it's temporary resting spot out beside the barnWe looked at several different floor plans before pretty much deciding on this basic layout. Pretty much all the RV makers have a floor plan like this. There is a couch that folds out into a bed up front, a dinette and the kitchen stuff in the middle, and a double bed with a single bunk above it and the restroom in the back.

It hasn't been licensed in a couple years as the previous owners hadn't used it much at all. The interior looks pretty much brand new.

Here's the jackknife couch at the front.
And the beds in the back.
The dinette and the stereo. Not sure why all the RV's have to have a fancy stereo but they do.

I took a picture of the bathroom, but then decided against posting it. It pretty much has a commode and a tub/shower. Nothing special, but it should be functional.

That's pretty much my Saturday. 750 miles with 1/2 of that pulling a travel trailer.

I'm about ready to go to bed.

Nathan