The first leg requires much work

    The first leg of our trip was a little under 400 miles to Rock Hall, MD where we would be spending the next week with family. Kat’s parents were there as well as her four siblings and their families. There are 20 of us in all, divided between one house two boats and one little trailer.  We arrived at about midnight, carried the girls in and fell into bed.  I have mentioned before how helpful and useful this group is, and as it turns out, this would be a lucky thing this week.  I thought the trailer had fared well during the trip, but during the second or third tour I realized that the new bigger wheels did, in fact, not have enough clearance between them and the fenders.  The passenger side tire had a pretty good slice in it from contacting the thin metal of the fender.
We already had some projects planned for the week, mostly related to managing pictures and the blog on the move, but now there was one more thing to deal with.  Luckily, we’d have time and help.

There was a lot of collective head scratching over what to do about the tire problem. The general consensus was that cutting the fender back to allow more clearance was the simplest solution. This direct approach was originally vetoed by Ryan for fear of potentially sloppy results due to his lack of dremel experience. This lead to a hunt for stiffer leaf springs. The current springs were of the two leaf variety and the thought was that three leaves would be better. It was determined that the Tractor Supply 45min away had leaf springs that matched the geometry of the trailer. As it turns out, three is not always better than two. Upon lowering the trailer onto the new spring it became evident that the thicker gauge steel in the original leaf springs made for higher capacity and thus were the best we could do.

Now we were back to the original idea to cut back the fender, making everyone’s plan A into Ryan’s plan B. It was also decided that the added protection of bumps stops would provide fallback protection. Bump stops were ordered, via amazon, to be delivered by Thursday and Ryan set about using a dremel to cut through the steel of the fenders. Popov took a turn as well and soon the tires had a much more comfortable space in which to reside.  It is worth noting here that all this wrenching and dremeling was made possible by Dan and Martha's well stocked and tooled boat (Ryan's travel tool kit would not have been enough). Many trips to and from the marina were required, but in the end we had everything we needed.

This shows the bump stop installed on the bottom of the frame, the axle will hit the rubber stop before the tire can contact the fender.

The other unexpected problem became apparent after a series of torrential downpours. The galley hatch was not quite water tight. There was a slight leak in the top left corner by the hinge that was allowing water to seep in and was causing damage where each fastener passed through the galley hatch skin. Silicone proved insufficient to the task so Ryan added some weather stripping and for the moment it seems to be working but bears watching.

Pretty ugly, huh? We'll have to do something about that when we get home.

That took care of the emergencies but there were still quite a few projects lined up to get us ready for our trip. A lot of the projects involved technology which means they involved Sam. There was much finagling with eye-fi cards, a way to wirelessly download pictures form your camera, and an external hard drive. After a few failed attempts we seemed to get things working, and  now we hopefully have a way to streamline our picture taking and blog posting.

Then there were the final touches to the girls bedroom. The girls were spending the week bunked with all the cousins in one room in Julie’s house, seven kids one small room and somehow it worked. That gave us more time to get things done to their quarters. For this purpose, we brought along Ryan’s 17 year old tent that went with him on his last cross-country trip when he was in college. Kat cut it up and used the parts to create a zipper entrance for the back of the truck.

Kat was sewing with her mother's travel machine form IKEA, not the hardiest of sewing machines, made her miss the Bernina at home. 

The idea is to allow the girls to keep the tailgate down and the window hatch up and still remain bug free. The end result was not the prettiest thing but it’s serviceable.

Scraps were also used to create very basic curtains for the side windows. This necessitated creating a device to hang them. The solution we came up with involved putting eye bolts in each corner and running a wire around three sides.

Despite all this work going on we did still manage to have a bit of fun. We’ll fill you in about all that in the next post. Up to this point the blog has been mostly Ryan’s domain. Kat and the girls have contributed here and there but Ry had been our main author. The last two posts have been a combined effort, involving much hemming and hawing and debating semantics while traveling from here to there. Our hope is that from here on out we will take turns with the blogging duties, including the girls. In an effort to keep us all straight we’ll begin our future posts with a by line so you’ll know who’s who.