Man, it's cold out there

Man, its cold out there. Our weather all of a sudden dropped well below the norm for this time of year, namely the beginning of November. While so many of our friends and acquaintances are already on the road to a destination south and warmer temperatures and others already set up at their winter domiciles, we are still sitting here at home. As retirees we are free to chose when and where to travel but there was no real rush for us to head out in October while we still enjoyed beautiful weather. However, parts of Ontario have already had their first snowfall and soon we will be blessed with this cold and wet stuff that we all dread. So I guess we better get organized and start packing.

We added a new "friendship" spare tire cover

This annual chore is somewhat a routine but not the same every year. On our first trip down to the southwest we packed a lot of unnecessary stuff that we never used. But also we learned a few expensive lessons by not having certain things. So for that reason we have on order a Surge Guard for our shore power connection, when we are hooked up to a power post in an RV Park. Hopefully it will get here in time (it better be!) Reading too many suggestions of should haves and must haves and not having had any experience ourselves in the first year of RVing we just packed everything.  Over time in the following years we realized that what is needed really depends on weather you stay in a RV Park or choose to boondock most of the time because you keep moving around. Now we have become a little smarter, I hope, but nevertheless we probably still end up with a few unused things that just travel with us to and from. 

Who else washes their travel trailer in the rain?

So in anticipation of a soon to be departing date Benno decided to turn our travel trailer around for easy hook-up, because should we get snow before then, this exercise would be a bit messy. For this task we have a power dolly, which we store in our crawlspace underneath the house.  There is not too much of a space for our truck to maneuver from the garage to the stored trailer and the power dolly really is ideal to tackle this job of moving the trailer out to the road. We wrote a post about the dolly on Nov. 7^th2016 blog  "He did it!“  

Hooking up the power dolly

Benno attached the cable from the dolly to the battery of the trailer that sits behind the propane tanks and started moving.  It’s an easy thing as you walk slowly steering the trailer down the driveway. He made it down and turned the trailer onto the road. He then reversed the dolly, pulled the trailer a few feet and then toggled the dolly switch to the forward position, but to his surprise nothing happened. After a few hectic pushes on the switch with nothing happening to the dolly, panic set in. The trailer sat on the road blocking all traffic so nobody could pass. It now dawned on Benno that the dolly was on the fritz and he came chasing up the driveway in his crocs to get the truck out of the garage in a hurry. Well, the truck with Benno behind the wheel got the trailer where it was supposed to go. The dolly he pushed up into his shop where he pronounced a short while later that one of the two relays was defective and needed to be replaced. (Ordered two relays of higher contact rating, got shipped, Benno replaced both relays, now all-working again!) 

A couple of days ago he torqued all the trailer’s wheel nuts and what is left to do in this department, the checking of the tires’ air pressure will be done on the departure day in a couple of weeks or earlier. We carry a little 120 Volt tire inflator or air compressor with us. Jayco provided on the White Hawk trailers two outside 120 Volt receptacles conveniently close to the wheels position, which comes in handy for the tire inflator. In case we are on the road and not plugged into shore power we could use our portable Honda Generator fired up to give us the 120 Volt power to run the tire inflator. We use the gen set anyway while traveling after a night stop for breakfast preparation and afterwards Benno can quickly run a tire check before hitting the road again.

The 120V receptacle, one of each side of the trailer

So what is left to do is packing what we think we’ll need for a few months away from home. Not a big deal but a chore nevertheless. In the meantime I am roasting some back ribs for supper, suitable for this miserable cold weather.

I hope you are all staying warm and cozy and I thank you for dropping in again. Next posting should tell you that we are underway!