Sigh. Remember the towing article I wrote? It is pretty helpful I think and in it, I sort of lament at how we didn’t think through how changing our tow vehicle could necessitate a change in what we had for our whole towing set up. Well guess what? It happened again. I swear we are almost willfully ignorant when it comes to asking the question ‘How could changing ‘X’ have a knock on effect to ‘Y’?’ but here we are again… To be fair, it wasn’t a catastrophic mistake or anything and we were able to tow the HCT with what I will now call our ‘legacy’ set up for our first run, but man, you would think we would be better at this by now.
Picking up the HCT
Charlie definitely thinks ours is the prettiest
If you watched the video we posted, we expected the HCT to be delivered and not for us to pick it up. There wasn’t an issue or anything, it’s just that campers that are being shipped cross-country have a stop over in Ohio where they will be loaded on to the next truck heading to the east coast. As she was sitting in Lima, Ohio waiting for her ride east, Covid-related data was spiking and there was a lot of talk of implementing new restrictions. We had this vision of the HCT sitting in limbo on the lot in Ohio so we decided to just go get her ourselves while that was still an option for us.
It was a pretty uneventful drive out to Ohio from our home in Providence, RI and as always Rose and Charlie joined us for the trip. When we arrived, the camper was in a safe location and the owner Josh was really helpful in getting us on the road - but when we hooked up the HCT to our legacy set up, well, we had sag. It wasn’t so much that we wouldn’t be able to pull her home, but as Josh said ‘be careful going over railroad tracks’. I think the extra weight of the HCT, the extension that we need to use on the Macan plus the connector to raise the hitch just created too much play in the set up. And because we were there and I had an expert on hand, I asked Josh for a reco on what we should buy for the ideal set up. It was really great that he was there to help me with this because my first search result was not an aluminum hitch and would have been really heavy - so if you are wondering what to get, here it is.
I’d like to think that this is going to be our last towing related change, at least for a while. We have no plans for a new tow vehicle and we definitely won’t be changing our camper, hopefully for a very long time to come! Stay tuned for a video where we will tell you about our first impressions of the HCT and some of our ‘aha’ moments for things we didn’t expect.