HOMECOMING

The first time I ever hooked up a trailer was the day I bought My Safari. It wasn't hard to do with the guidance of the P.O. I had only seen the load-leveling hitches before, I had never used one. The hard part came when I had to watch my wife drive off with it in tow. We had taken seperate cars to the sellers house and she was the one with the truck. So I watched as she drove around the corner, good so far, and then around another corner, alright, looking good. Then she turned again, the wrong way! We were headed away from the freeway entrance, and it was getting dark. She proceeded a few blocks, not knowing she was headed in the wrong direction, so I called her phone to let her know to turn around when she could. We were able to turn around at a shopping center and we headed back towards the freeway again. By this time I was also frazzled, and instead of turning right, towards the entrance ramp, I turned left and found a whole new part of town I'd never seen before. There were no places to turn around for many blocks, and by the time I found one I was so far from the freeway I had been aiming for that I decided to just proceed to the next main road to take me back towards home. What a fiasco. What should have been three minutes getting to the freeway became thirty minutes, lost, with a trailer we were not used to pulling, in the dark.

Eventually, we found ourselves, and our way home. By the time we arrived in our neighborhood it was quite dark, and not wanting to try going up our one lane road in the dark with our new-to-us trailer, we decided to leave it at the store at the bottom of our hill. I checked with the owner and he said that it wouldn't be a problem to leave it there, so we unhitched it and checked all of the locks and went home to sleep on it.

The next day was a work day, so I wasn't able to get home until about 5pm to finish moving our Safari into the driveway. I had not driven yet with the trailer attached so I took my time getting it hooked up and checked everything three times before pulling out on the road. The road to my house is very narrow and steep, so I took it slowly, up to the house across from ours, and then got out to survey the rest of the move. I would have to turn the whole rig around to get it up to my driveway and have it facing the right way. I pulled up past our neighbor's driveway, and then backed down into it as far as I could go. I couldn't make the front of the truck turn sharply enough to make the turn without unhitching, so I disconnected the truck and turned it around by itself, then hitched up again, and backed the trailer up the last part of the road to our house. It still wasn't in the driveway, but I was so tired I decided to finish the last part of the move the next day. It had taken 1-1/2 hours to move from the store to our house, about 1/2 mile. The following day I hitched the truck up again, and proceeded to back the trailer up into our driveway at last!