Remember January 9th, 2015? Sure you do, that was Day 520, when we were camped out with our RV and PPG at the fabulous Trona Pinnacles:
I didn’t get to fly that weekend because of rain, but thankfully Dodge has put together a dramatization of what it would have been like:
An old friend recently e-mailed “the way you’ve turned your lives into art — in the best sense– is truly remarkable.” I’m not sure that this is what he had in mind.
I drove out to Long Island to go flying with some local plots:
Flight #116:
Flying from Jones Beach Island to Fire Island:
Flying back across:
Coming in for a landing:
Touchdown:
I would have flown for much longer but there was a good bit of turbulence, probably due to wind shear. Local pilots tell me it dies down towards sunset. If I ever decide to drive all the way out there again, I’ll come later in the day.
This afternoon I went for my first flight in 7 months. I was a little rusty, so it took me several attempts but I finally launched flight #115 at Randall Airport:
There may be some trips for which a massive 5th wheel like our 2014 Avalanche 360RB is too large. I found a truck camper on Craigslist and bought it for $500. It’s a 1990 Sunline C951. The floorplan can be found on page 11 of the manual:
The truck camper needs a good bit of work, hopefully I can get everything working.
In order to bring the truck camper home, the truck needed tie-downs to attach the truck camper to the truck. I could have purchased a set for $450, but it rankled to pay almost as much for the tie-downs as the truck camper, so I decided to build tie-downs instead. I welded up a pair of rear tie-downs using a bar attached to the tow receiver:
For the front tie-downs, I based my design on commercially available tie-downs:
During construction, I installed the tie-downs to make sure the fit was correct. To tie-down the truck camper, extension bars are installed to bring a mount point out beyond the undercarriage of the truck: