This Roadtrip Has Not Been Beta-Tested

Good morning vicarious travellers!

I must apologize for the long interlude between posts, but we've had an eventful almost-a-week between the Delaware Water Gap and where we are today, Assateague Island National Seashore.  

I think we last left you off with the notion that we were going to stay an extra night at the Water Gap and then move on to the Pine Barrens.  The morning we left the DWG I noticed a bit of a reduction in our already camping-unfriendly ground clearance due to the metric ton of gear hanging off our trailer hitch.  While the mounting gear for the spare tires was holding strong, and the reinforcments welded on the cargo rack were proving to be sufficient, the receiver mounted to the car frame seemed to be bending.  The only available hitch assembly for this wagon is a Class II which means that the tongue load (the amount of weight that can hang off it, not the amount of weight you can tow) is only rated for 300lbs.  While the tires and cooler and bike combined with the bike rack and cargo tray should only weight around 220lbs, the weight had no other support beside the hitch mount itself.  This meant that the rack would "bounce" up and down everytime we hit a bump, an effect which was exaggerated by being pretty far behind the rear axle.  So even though it was not technically overloaded, the end result was that the receiver tube (the part mounted to the car that the cargo rack slides into) was starting to bend slowly downward, decreasing our ground clearance from about 4" to maybe 2", not nearly enough to clear the bumps and mounds of a campsite road, or many of the ill-paved backroads we are sure to encounter further along the trip.  

But enough of the physics of trailer hitches and load bearing statistics, the whole point of this lengthy explanation is that Miriam and I made a joint decision to head home and re-evaluate our cargo arrangements.  I figured that if we could lose about 200 lbs of total weight to make the car happy for the rest of the trip.  After a lengthy return ride home which took us wayyy north over the Bear Mountain Bridge  and then just south of Hartford, we arrived back in RI on June 6th at about 9pm.  I immediately went to work on rearranging our spare tires and Miriam got busy trying  to reduce some of our food stocks to save weight.  

After a full day at home we managed to reduce our travel weight by about 250lbs (we're estimating).  I removed both spare tires from the cargo rack and replaced the tool kit in the spare tire well with an single spare tire which saved about 60lbs and moved quite a bit of weight further forward.  Next I removed the spare parts box and replaced it with a much abridged and smaller tool box with only a few repair items such as radiator hoses and extra filters.   Losing the spare alternator and starter motor saved an additional 40 or so lbs.  We removed most of "doubles" of food and repacked all the gear and Miriam's clothes into smaller and much more easily packable plastic crates that we got from WalMart (of all places for us to shop!)

Now our new load arrangement is much easier to pack and unpack compared to the myriad of different size and shape boxes from our initial pack.  Most of the boxes (with the exception of the two food packs) are much lighter and are no longer a chore to load and unload from the car.  The car sits and handles much much better now with the reduced and shifted (forward) weight, and  our ground clearance is much more amiable to campground roads roads.  

Oh and for those of you that didnt quite get the title of this post (mom, I'm looking at you here!), beta-testing is what you do (usually in reference to software development) to makes sure you get all the bugs out of things.  Since we were leaving significantly later than we had  planned we didnt have time to do a trial run locally and work out any kinks in our camping arrangements, but luckily we were close enough to home that we are able to return and repack with only about a 36hr delay in our trip.  

It takes soo long to write on here off the cell phone that an actual trip update with details like where we are and how the camping is going will have to wait till later when I have some more time.  And we promise that a picture update IS coming soon, Miriam has one almost ready to go on her laptop, we just need to get to some wifi and plug!

Till later today (hopefully)!

RhodeKill Rob