Today, too much smoke to ride. Well, we’ve finally figured out where we’re going after this, but we’re going to wait a few days – get The Beast fully checked out before we move on. So far everything seems to work, at least the important stuff – THE TOILET (VERY important! No more midnight treks to the bathroom – WOOHOO!), the refrigerator, the stove, the oven, the microwave. Tomorrow we’ll probably test the city water system. We’re not too concerned with the on-board water system, but we’ll end up checking that out too, I figure.

Saw something interesting out in front of the RV place we stopped by today:

A 1950 carbon arc water cooled projector. Did NOT expect to see that there!

Maybe we’ll ride the paved trail around town – I miss being on the bike!

Ok, no riding today either, as it’s RV-pickup-day. 9:00 AM appointment! NOT! We get there promptly at 9:00, and are told “No, your appointment is at 3:00 PM”. Not happy. Have to put off appointment for the new tires. Argh! Oh well, it gives us time to get more stuff we know we’re going to need. And stuff we DON’T need, but have room for … like a TV! Yeah, we’re going to succumb to that. Noise in the background.

We get a bunch of stuff, then head back to pick it up a little early – luckily, they can get a guy to show us around before three. Well, I was not idle yesterday, but spent quite a bit of time looking for information on the web, and did indeed find a bunch. The guy they sent us was pretty new, and he learned a whole lot more about The Beast than he could ever have shown us. Not happy about that either, but that’s how it goes sometimes, especially when you buy something as rare as this. Oh well.

Ok, finally, we’re done with that, ready to hitch it up, trying to decide if I need the weight-equalizing hitch that comes with it or not – realize that hitch has an issue (a minor one, but still a pain), and try to figure out if I really need it. I rest the tongue on my existing hitch, and Junior squats less than an inch. I think I’m good! If we ever decide to carry the motorcycles, we’ll need the weight-equalizing hitch, but on this trip, we’re golden! Let’s go get tires!

We head out, and this thing pulls perfectly. I can feel the difference away from a stop, but only until the turbo kicks in – when that baby starts cramming air in, Junior still leaps like a gazelle. Life is good … but I have no trailer brakes. I have a brake controller, and it’s lit up, but no brakes. Then I remember (it’s been a few years since I’ve used a trailer with electric brakes, probably more than ten!) that there’s a sensitivity adjustment. I crank it all the way the other way and gently tap the brake pedal … WHOA!! Ok, we have brakes! Let’s turn that baby down a whole bunch, just not all the way. The Bear is still trying to extricate herself from the dash. I get it dialed in and life is good.

We get to the tire place a bit early, but that’s no problem. Rotate Junior’s tires, and replace all five on The Beast. The old tires have VERY few miles on them (the spare has actually never been on the ground, the flashing is still all there), and the guys look at me funny that we’re replacing them. Yeah, take a good look, guys, there are THOUSANDS of little cracks on all five tires, from the dry rot. No way I’d ever risk my life on that set, y’all can have them, I’ll be happy and safe with my new ones.

So, we take The Beast back home, wondering just how much bigger it will look next to PUP. Well, here it is:

Well, the boxes don’t look that different. Let’s go eat, then come back and set it up!

Dinner was at a pizza place recommended by our neighbor – Fatty’z:

REALLY good pizza, probably the best we’ve had so far! Gotta come back before we leave.

Ok, so back at camp, get The Beast set up, and here’s the shot:

And here’s a shot with The Bear standing out front of The Beast:

Yeah, it’s BIG! The floor is three feet off the ground! And I actually measured the inside of the box – it’s sixteen feet, bed to bed! The old one was a bit less than ten! So, 60% more floorspace, BEFORE you slide out the dinette! A lot more comfortable.

Oh, yeah … some smartass made a comment a couple of days ago … how many turns to crank it up? ZERO! I knew the next one would be motorized, and this one is:

One finger raises it or lowers it! Love it! Sure makes life a lot easier …

Yeah. The curse is back – it rained last night and today, so no riding. That sucks. Well, we took advantage and went around getting stuff for The Beast, because any time you get a new RV, there’s always new stuff to get.

Thin day today!

Ok, rest day today – a forced one. First, a lot of smoke, and second, we need to do something about PUP.

Headed into Boise, to the Camping World we visited the other day, to see if they’ll take our offer on a camper we liked. They still think we want a hard-sided trailer, but we saw a really unique popup we like, that will fit our needs and lifestyle. We go, we look – it’s in worse shape than we thought, but nothing major we can tell, other than it needs new tires. It still has the originals (from early 2006!) and they are cracked all over – no way I’m taking these on the freeway! So, that’s a grand we’ll have to spend right off the bat, if we buy it, so they need to really drop the price. Our sales rep is out to lunch when we come back in, deciding what to offer, so we have to deal with another guy. He tells us asking price is $15.995. We counter $10,000. He goes to talk to his boss – they drop to $11,655. We counter with $10,000. They say, “Oh, come on! We came down – you come up!” We counter with $10,001, and state we don’t NEED to buy, would like to, but it’s a chunk of change, with lots of problems, so meet our price. Besides, try selling a popup trailer in Idaho in the winter – you’ll still have it next April! Sales guy takes me in to see financial guy – They’ll have to take a loss of almost $50 if they sell for $10,000. I said “OK, make it $10,050”. Yeah, but sales guy makes no money. I reply – “I don’t know him, $10,050”. I was kidding, but they didn’t realize it, so Barri steps in and says “Ok, $10,300”. We have a deal! SOLD!

Then, I shock the crap out of all of them – I offer to GIVE them the old PUP, for FREE. They are truly stunned, as NOBODY has ever given them an RV before. Canoes, tents, other small items, but not this. Remember, we paid almost 3K for it three months ago. It served us well, and the two sales guys do deserve something, and I’m not really that much of an asshole, so they should be able to make a couple grand off of PUP. We have a new trailer (well, we pick it up Thursday), and they take the old one off our hands. Life is good.

So, what did we buy? I call it “The Beast”. I’m quite certain it’s the biggest popup ever made in the free world. Seriously. It’s a Starcraft Discovery 36RT. On PUP, the living part of the trailer is 11 feet long. On the Beast, it’s about 15! So we have about 50% more floor area! Plus, the dinette slides out about a foot and a half, for even more room! PUP was 24 feet in all his splendor, tent end to tent end. The Beast is a shade over 32! There are two King beds (well, RV King, anyway – 67×78), a shower, a toilet, a microwave, a three-burner stove, and a real oven! Quite a bit of storage inside, BUT – on the outside, they hung a box  off the back, like the ones you put behind the cab on a pickup truck, the ones at the front of the bed. Lots of room there. BUT – the REAL piece de resistance is the front cargo area – six and a half feet wide, by eight feet long! Room enough to haul TWO Harleys up to Sturgis one of these years! Its carrying capacity is almost equal to its own weight! It weighs under 4,000 pounds, and can carry over 3,000! Here is a photo from the original brochure (because I cannot yet take a photo of it not surrounded by other RVs):

That photo doesn’t really give you a sense of scale. Closed up, it’s taller than I am! Here’s a shot of the outside with The Bear standing beside it:

Yeah, the MIDDLE of it is as high as her head! And she’s not short! Here’s another shot showing the slide and the cargo area:

Hmmm. Maybe that slide actually goes out two feet. The interior (where in PUP I’m used to brushing my head up against the ceiling) is seven foot three inches! I have over a foot of clearance – woohoo! Here is a shot of the front part of the interior:

And here is a shot of the rear half:

Showing the sink, stove, oven, microwave, and YES, refrigerator – kinda small, but it should hold a case of Guinness! I can’t wait to go pick it up, of course, first thing on the agenda after is the new tires, which are already on order, and also rotate the tires on Junior. Can’t wait, but first things first – tomorrow, we ride again!

Well, this AM it was off to Les Scwabb Tire to see about getting PUP looked at. Hmmm. No can do – gotta bring it in. DAMN! Pack it up, collapse it, drive it down so they can look at it, then drive it back, and put it back up. Nah, there has to be another way …

Ok, got off my ass and decided to troubleshoot it myself – jack it up, and check it for play, probably just loose or worn bearings – cheap fix! Well, no such luck. Bearings have minimal play, and spin very freely (though not TOO freely, so they have lube). That means the axle is bent, which it looks like if you crawl under the trailer – great. That was the $800 fix we got quoted, with a month-long wait for the axle. Great. Is it worth putting $800 into a $2,700 trailer? No, not really. Of course, we can just keep putting tires on it, it really should not get any worse, but we don’t like that option. We’ll have to mull this over. We go back into Boise to go to another RV dealer and see what they have that might work for us. Oh, yeah – and the smoke is back, with a vengeance! This time we’re told it’s smoke from fires in California. Great. You can hardly see the mountains that are only about eight miles away. We’re not riding around breathing that air! So tomorrow will be another lost day. Well, we’ll use it to try and figure out what to do about PUP. This is definitely NOT the fun part.

Today, we ride! Both bike shops pointed us to trails just North of town. It’s actually kind of funny – you go North on 8th Street, until it becomes a dirt road … and this dirt road is appropriately named … 8th Street Road. No, really! I thought it was kind of cool, but then, I’m easily amused.

So we decide to ride what is labeled as a 12 mile loop, first riding the Kestral Trail (yes, with an “a” – don’t ask me!), following that with the Crest Line Trail, which leads you to Sidewinder Trail, and finally you take Hulls Gulch Trail back to the start. It climbed gently at first, then got progressively more aggressive, but it never went totally out of control like old Bangtail did! This is a photo of Boise from somewhere up top:

Yeah, there are trails along there somewhere, I know, I rode them!

One part that connects Sidewinder to Hulls Gulch is a motorcycle trail. STEEP downhill (boy, was I glad I had that collapsible seat post!), which kind of burned up my rear brake. It started squealing like a stuck pig, and when I looked at it after we got back, it’s now discolored – I’d say it got REAL hot!

The interesting part is that when we got done, we’d only gone six miles, so maybe he did it as an out-and-back … you know, the loop … as an out-and-back … ok, never mind.

But it was fun, and that’s what counts!

Tomorrow morning, go to Les Schwabb Tire to see about getting PUP fixed. Evidently they do house calls.

Ok, problems got set aside today. First order of the day – Farmers’ Market! Two of them! The first one had some pretty good stuff, we got bread and some fruit. The second? What a disappointment! Mostly folks selling crap that has nothing to do with a farm or a farmer. It’s a shame, but this seems to be what ends up happening to most Farmers’ Markets. The doodad sellers drive out the farmers. Bummer.

Well, after that, we head for some bike shops. Had lunch at Whole Foods first, as we wanted a good lunch, and while there we saw this, which was really, really cool:

What is it? It’s a bicycle repair stand, complete with tools and an air pump. Very nice!

Anyway, while checking out at WF, the girl checking us out overheard our conversation about mountain biking, and mentioned there was a bike shop just around the corner – George’s, so of course, we headed straight there, where we talked to a very helpful guy named Lars, who was happy to sell us a map and a pump. Yes, we already have two tire pumps, but the ones we have are for road bikes, and it takes fifty (yes, 50!) strokes to get my tires from flat to 30psi, so a high-volume pump was in order. We got it, and I can’t wait to try it!

The second shop was World Cycle, where we were helped by Brett, who actually DID give a damn! Ha, ha! I love my obscure references! Anyway, maybe we should curse him instead, because, besides telling us where good rides were here in town, he told us that if we REALLY like to mountain bike, we’ll go to Bend, Oregon, and then also Oakridge, Oregon. That last place has over 400 miles of trails, all of them through old-growth forests! Bastard! Now we have to really wonder what we’re going to do next! Go North or go South? Problems, problems …

Anyway – a decision for another day. We also stopped by an RV dealer to try to figure out what’s wrong with PUP. Yeah, I’ve also named the pop-up. Everything should have a name. They were no help on that score, but were kind enough to show us some old and new rigs, should we need to replace PUP.

Long day, go get some rest.