New Shoes and the Maiden Voyage

A tired tire.

    Small tires like the ones on our Apache go through a lot of rotations to get from A to B. To avoid a blowout or complete catastrophic failure at highway speeds, you have to make sure your spindle, axle, bearings, races, wheels and tires are all good to go. And trust me, that sentence would have made a lot less sense to me before I got this thing, but it's amazing what you can learn when you have to. So while polishing wood cabinets and daydreaming under the canopy was fun, it was time to get into the nuts and bolts of making our camper road-worthy. And them meant spending a lot of time on the ground, covered in rust flakes and grease, and getting busy with spray cans of black primer and paint.

    Check out those grimy 'before' shots. That's what 50 years of neglect looks like, in case you're wondering. As gross as they are, they make the next pics all the more satisfying:

    That's what I'm talking about. I opted for brand new tires on new rims, both to make life easy and so I could use one of the old rims to mount a spare tire on. Not shown is the guts of the wheel assembly, the bearings, which need to be replaced and carefully packed with grease. I imagine my hands were too filthy to take any photos of that process.

In the midst of all this, work was paused so we could deploy the big canopy and host an outdoor covid-era birthday playdate.

Happy days.

Made in the shade.

    With new shoes and a once-over from a knowledgeable neighbor, I felt like our Buffalo was ready to roam. After taking it out to an abandoned parking lot to practice backing up (yup, still need practice), we headed up to the White Mountains in our home state of New Hampshire for a weekend of camping. It was a tense ride, towing something for the first time, and making sure to never exceed 65 mph. Oh, did I forget to mention that tires this size have a max speed of 65? Well, at least we won't get any speeding tickets.

    The trip was a success, and we learned a lot about how camping for an extended period of time might work. I came home with a list of things to fix, number one on the list being the taillights that worked much too infrequently for our liking. We also realized the need for better stabilization, a more practical sleeping layout, and a road cover that didn't leak like a sieve. And that floor. Purely aesthetic, but I didn't want to spend weeks looking at that old gross vinyl tile. But all in all, it was a great test run. We swept it out and put it into our neighbor's barn for the winter, covered in mothballs and full of promise.