Day 1 - Let's Really Go Today

We spent the night in the driveway and then worked to actually get everything into the trailer that we had put aside for the trip. For the most part this went OK, when we got the trailer packed only the bikes were left.

First another word about the setup here: Not only had I enhanced the welds on the bumper for this purpose but I had also gotten a different bike rack. The RV place gave us a Swagman bike rack which I didn't like because when it tips down, it comes down straight and all the bikes get jumbled up. Softride has far superior racks that maintain the bikes' orientation when they pivot down. I found one on Craigslist and drove the boys down to Gig Harbor one day to pick it up which turned out to be farther than I realized. But we did get to drive over the Tacoma Narrows bridges; that was cool. See this link to see why this passage is famous. It turned out to be an older model than I thought but I went with it anyway and it still works just fine. I have pinched my finger badly in this once so far, I pray that was the last time. It is still sore after 2 weeks.

Back to the bike packing. We have my bike, Cady's bike, the boys each have one and we got an REI Afterburner to let one of the boys ride along with us. We haven't really done much with this yet other than to test it but wanted to have it with, 'just in case'. I had fit everything on the rack once to test and knew right away this would require special magical alignment to make everything fit. Thursday morning that alignment was hard to come by. It probably took me 30 minutes of cursing and coaxing, pushing and rearranging to get everything on there. Finally, we were ready to go.

When entering the world of RVs one learns that weight is of critical importance. Now being officially ON THE ROAD, I knew that I needed to find a scale to see how we were doing on weight. We finally found a scale down near Tacoma near the port. Going into the truck stop and getting a taste for all that was fun. The lady who helped us was super helpful and friendly and if I do eventually get a CB, this was the moment that idea was first born (I want my handle to be 'Mad Hatter' btw). Our trailer is not supposed to exceed 3500 pounds and when we measured in Tacoma it weighed.... wait for it... 3940. Ouch. Catastrophic axle failure can't be far behind. In a way this solved a problem I had been having the first part of the trip, 1 more thing about our bike rack setup was that the RV place also included an extender to increase the height of the bike rack vertically and horizontally from the bumper. This is the part the guy made such a big deal about b/c he's "seen so many bikes come in all mangled cuz they were too low", etc. Well, this combined with the weight only increased the torsional force on that bumper. I swear part of me wanted that bumper to break off so I could sue those morons. Anyway... This whole apparatus had a lot of bounce and movement to it and here you will see it in its full glory

See how far out everything is? As we were driving down the highway I had a subtle nagging feeling wondering which part of this would fail first and cause a massive accident on the interstate. Finding out that we needed to shed weight solved that quickly. Look again at the picture above and you'll see that we're outside of a UPS store; this was in Olympia about 100 miles from our start. Yep, we wound up shipping the grown up bikes and the Afterburner plus just basically throwing away the extender piece. The couple who own the Olympia UPS store are wonderful and really went above and beyond to help me get all that stuff in some big ornery boxes. Here is V 2.0.

The combined weight that was shipped (and thrown away ) was about 200 lbs, yet the next morning I reweighed and we were down to 3600 lbs; a difference of 340 lbs. I think the horizontal extension of the weight created enough moment to increase the weight over the wheel. Curious about the physics of this...

We continued on after this delay and made it to Salem, Oregon. Stayed at the Premier RV Resort there and boy, that is one nice place. Super friendly, super clean, level poured slab sites, just really nice. Valen and I walked around in the dark with Autumn while he rode his bike and I hope I remember that walk for the rest of my life. The moonlight was coming down through the trees and part of the park is by the river with loud frogs chirping: magical. The next morning Val taught Kirin how to get himself started on his bike, Kirin has just begun riding without training wheels and up to then needed someone to help him. He's mostly fully autonomous now. Awesome!