Wharton State Forest off ro...

So we headed out and drove onto the road to Paradise campground. After feeling out how the truck behaves with the trailer I wound up throwing all caution to the wind and pulling off the main dirt road onto a ... lesser road... At the time I didn't realize that it's really an ATV trail - it was just a bit too narrow. We overnighted in the woods right of this trail, with occasional ATV's passing by, and a relative quiet at night.



Morning came and brought two surprises: The truck battery was dead, and the jump-starter is not even remotely strong enough to start the monster V10. Fortunately I was able to carry the coach battery from the trailer over and that had no trouble getting us up and running. We left the trailer, exited the woods and (swallowing our pride) ran over to the nearest Walmart, buying the biggest battery I could find. Having greater confidence in having a running vehicle, I set out to explore the 4x4 trails, which was interesting (the truck has no trouble with just about any road intended for traversal), though pointless (all I got to show for it was a bunch of brush swirls on the paint).

For our second night I wanted to move into an even more remote location, so we drove up Paradise Dr (a road I have some familiarity with from my previous van trips), which is about 8 miles long if you go all the way. It was in pretty busted up shape, with road-sized puddles deeper than a foot in places, complete with muddy slopes. Again - truck had no issues as long as you had 4x4 enabled. The engine is monstrous - it dragged the trailer out of the oceans of muddy water with practically no gas pedal application at near idle speed.

I took one wrong turn which looked like a road but turned out to be yet another ATV trail. The way I determined that this is an ATV trail was that we quickly came to a foot bridge that was about 4 feet too narrow for our ensemble (and the fact that the brush was scraping both sides of the trailer also gave it away). Fortunately I only had to back up about 150 feet. Unfortunately, there was pretty little room for error - I had zero clearance on both sides. To add to this interesting experience, 5 ATV'ers showed up in front of me and they of course were now unable to get by. This is where I learned to back up a blind trailer with exact precision and without the use of mirrors (they folded immediately thanks to the bushes). I also learned that having a rear-view camera on the trailer is very helpful - however, if it is pointed straight down to observe small children, it doesn't help you navigate a narrow road. Should I add a second camera?

We found a neat (and level) place to park near the road and discovered that the trailer's rear bumper now looks a little different (yes that's 4" of mud):


After some local exploration where we got assaulted by armies of strange looking tiny creatures which we are hoping were not ticks, we returned "home" and attempted to make coffee. This process was made difficult by the following combination of factors: There is no coffee maker. We have a percolator that can sit on top of a cup, but it slides off with great ease. The handles on our portable camping cookset wobble side-to-side, which causes the whole pot of hot milk to jerk a whole inch as you tilt it, causing my wife to slam the unstable percolator twice in a row, destroying the setup. In the end it was managed:



Morning came again, and brought with it only one surprise. This time it was in the shape of a state police vehicle parked behind us. The vehicle was occupied by two officers who explained that we are each getting a "camping in an unauthorized area" ticket. Apparently the absence of prohibitive insignia is not equivalent to a lack of prohibition. At $75 each this is not a cost effective use of public land, but we have little choice at this point. The nicer officer explained to me that they are actually on the lookout for entrepreneurial individuals who set up meth labs in trailers in the park. But since we were not attempting any chemical experiments (making coffee did not qualify in his book), we only earned camping tickets.

As a parting experience we figured we'd dump tanks in the local campground (Paradise Campground). They charge $17.50 at this time and you have to come in and pay at the bar prior to visiting the elaborate "dump station" which consists of an inconveniently high hole in the ground and a non-functional water faucet. It being our first experience with tank dumping and all, I had a lot of fun with the hoses, but noted that the black tank did not seem to produce the expected sounds (and other expected experiences). I relegated this discrepancy to an overestimation of our toilet use and thought nothing of it at the time.

When we got home I spent an hour washing mud and sand off the trailer and truck, and then under the trailer and truck. This is when I discovered why we had nothing to dump... there was now a huge multiple web crack in the black tank, evidently from being dragged through rocky/muddy puddles (as the back of the trailer is 8" too low). Live and learn.

Good news is - I was able to repair the crack using Marine-Tex Flex-Set epoxy. It really is magical stuff.

Also I ordered a 6" drop ball mount and now I have a level trailer for our next trip, yay. In fact, I decided that this truck doesn't care about weight-distributing at all, so I just got a regular $20 drop mount. No sway or weight issues so far (the truck can handle up to 3000lbs of load... 400lbs on the tongue isn't too noticeable).