IWTDI tour blog, Volume 3 (Day 13), 5 April FAULTY TRAILER BLUES

Where to begin? The show in San Diego was great! We had a good crowd, saw some friends, and had a place to sleep that was comfy. We played with dogs, ate some burritos, and got up way early to make the trip all the way up to San Francisco. And then…

We went out to the van to hit the road, and we noticed that our trailer was starting to look funny. The front of the trailer was bending the tongue of the trailers hitch and while we had noticed a few days earlier, the damage seemed to have increased slightly. We hit the road anyway.

About an hour up I-5, we stopped for some in and out burger and a quick pee break. Upon going back out to the van, the trailer seemed worse than it had been. I was already looking kind of bad but we couldn’t tell if it had gotten worse. So we busted out a piece of paper and marked it so that we could check again down the road. We hit the road again.

About two hours later, we stopped for gas. The trailer looked terrible. We were about 30 minutes south of Bakersfield at this point. We got the piece of paper out again, and the front end of the trailer was a good inch and a half lower, the bottom of the trailer about 4 inches off the ground. When it was new, it was more like a foot. We decided that we couldn’t make it to San Francisco and started looking for U-Haul places. We found a place in Bakersfield, so we hit the highway with our stupid, poorly built trailer one last time, 40mph and hazards flashing.
By the time we got to the U-Haul place, the trailer was done. We scraped the bejabbers out of it pulling into the parking lot and Totally Destroyed the wiring harness. We managed to get it off the van, went to a nearby auto parts store, bought a new wiring harness and rewired the van. We paid for the trailer, a giant, 4x8 with a 6 foot tongue, loaded it up and hit the road again, now roughly the length of a city bus, about to drive into one of the most hilly and turny cities in the country. And then, we started looking up trailers to buy.

We’ll upload a few pictures of our wounded soldier (traitor?) as soon as we can get them up! But for now that’s episode one of the trailer saga.