Literal Cart Before The Horse …
The idiom, “Putting the cart before the horse” seems to be the most appropriate wat to describe how we got the truck and the Adventurer setup. I always liked horse idioms … “Long in the tooth”, “Don’t look (or lick, depending on who you ask) a gift horse in the mouth”, and my personal favorite that made some of my old coworkers gag, “Rode hard and put away wet.” Take care of your horses people!
But back to the original idiom, putting a cart before the horse. Who would be dumb enough to buy a cart, without having a horse to pull it first? Well, we did and here’s how it happened.
So, we know that this Pan American Highway involves a bit more “off road” and smaller travel, so while I would rather be pulling a trailer, or have an RV pulling a car, these options were going to be too big for our plans. Tight spaces, low hanging branches, the ‘Highway of Death’, just to name a few would prefer the traveler to be in a smaller, more compact ride.
For a while, Jamie was content with just buying something like a Trail Blazer, or a 4-Runner and living out of a tent and sleeping in the cargo bay of the car. While that sounds practical for maybe the two of us, having William on the trek made a sardine can sound more appealing. We talked it through and settled upon what is known as a truck camper or commonly a slide in truck camper. This is a camper, that sits in the bed of your pickup truck and you tow it around like a turtle with his shell. Something that can be taken off the truck and put on the truck, to allow for transport and living conditions. We looked at so many slide-in campers (online) that our heads were spinning. Scout, Travel Lite, Lance, Palomino and we settled upon Adventurer. Seemed serendipitous since we were soon to be adventurers of our own. But we hadn’t officially seen one in person.
We hit up a couple RV shows in the Phoenix area, and even went to what we thought was an RV show, but was actually a Rolling Stones concert at State Farm Stadium… I swear, the website said RV show THAT weekend! We were definitely not dressed for a concert. We were looking for shelter and the Stones were ready to ‘Gimme Shelter’, but ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, and we left. Actually, we went over to Bass Pro Shop and checked out some camping supplies. We’ll probably be back (to the pro shop, not the Stones). Either way, the RV shows that were not concerts, did not have truck campers at their shows. So we needed to find a dealership. There’s one in Surprise (30 minutes away) or maybe a few others down in Mesa (an hour away). We chose Mesa, and we even brought my FIL along for the trip. Manly bonding time … with the wife and child.
So we loaded up into the car and headed to the dealership, where they had three models of Adventurer campers on their lot. “We’re just here to look” we said to the dealers. Model 1, was the 89RBS (The RB stands for rear bath and the S stands for a slide). Pretty roomy and a decent setup, but we’re not overly fond of the bathroom being in the rear of the camper, but easy to look past. Model 2 was an 86FB (FB for forward bath), which was more along the line we wanted and had the right amount of room for a family of three. Checking all the boxes. Only box it wasn’t really checking was the counter space for prep and cooking. So on to model 3, the 901SB (honestly don’t know what the SB stands for since there’s no slide and the bath is in the middle, so we’ll say it stands for Super Big). Now this one, checked every box! The FIL wasn’t impressed. He was already hooked on model 1 saying, “you’re gonna want that extra space with the pop out.” Jamie liked the 901SB though … so who won!? Lol, like you need to ask if I went with my FIL or my wife! And, conveniently, the 901SB was ON SALE! But, we just came to look, right? “It’s a 2024 model, been here a long time as we go into 2025 ... It’s marked down to go and make room for bigger RVs. No one wants truck campers anymore.” Says the dealer. So, it was somewhere in the range of 30% off sticker price and just begging us to sign the dotted line, and we did.
Congratulations Weirbacks, you know are the proud owner of a truck camper! Yay … wait … Here’s where the whole cart before the horse thing comes into play. We bought the cart, but we don’t have a horse to put it on. Obviously can’t strap this 3500lb camper onto the back of my 2014 Sonata. Proud owners of a camper but no way to get it home. Guess we better start horse shopping and fast.
Not sure how many used car apps there are in the dataverse but I think I had at least three on my phone looking for a truck. Good news is we know what we’re putting on the truck, but the actual Adventurer website says that the 901SB is capable of fitting on a ¾ ton to a 1 ton truck both short and long beds. Narrowed down the search a little but there are a ton of trucks out there for sale. The 901SB has a base weight of 3,000 pounds and with the upgrades that are on our recently purchased camper is 3400 pounds. The average cargo capacity of a ¾ ton pickup is between 3-4 thousand pounds so we immediately took anything less than a 1-ton truck off the list. It’d be like me trying to throw 11 year old William on my back. I may be able to walk a straight line and have a little back pain … but I’m not climbing any hills or mountains. So, we ruled out the ¾ tons and we found a beautiful, red, one ton, standard bed GMC 3500HD SLT, single rear wheel truck down in Casa Grande and now, we had a truck! I will make note of this, Jamie, did not believe that this particular truck was enough truck for what we needed. It has a max gross vehicle weight of 11,400lbs. That means, that with the truck, full of gas, people, and cargo (aka a camper full of living stuff), should not exceed a total weight of 11,400lbs or else the vehicle becomes unsafe and can have mechanical issues, like a broken back going up a hill. We asked the dealer and the camper dealer if this was enough truck for the camper and they both said absolutely, so dumb ol me (as you’ll find out), thinking dealers knew math more “gooder” than me and my wife, I said cool and we bought the truck, drove it straight over to get the camper put on and start chapter one of this trip.
A few days later and another $1,000 into the purchase (because we needed to buy something to get installed in the bed of the truck to attach the camper to, we had our rig. License plate was RYA 1FZ, so we named our rig, Raya. Raya was ready for some trips, but first we decided that we should see how much Raya weighed. Now, normally, you wouldn’t ask someone what they weight, but when it comes to Max Gross Vehicle Weight, we kinda had to know. So, we took Raya, Jamie and William with a fully fueled truck, and an empty camper to the scales. And we weighed in at exactly 11,400lbs. One Big Mac away from a broken back! But in reality, if you fill the camper with water, clothes, food, tools and equipment, we were going to be overweight not by a little, but by a lot. So, the beautiful, red, one ton, single rear wheel GMC 3500HD SLT, truly was not enough truck and the love of my life was right once again and knows more than your average RV and truck dealers.
So back to hunting for another truck and by April, we had our current truck and enough truck to do the job we needed it to do. It’s a 2024 GMC 3500HD dually with a MGVW of 16,500lbs. More than enough now to climb those hills. Really wanted to keep the RYA license plate, because we had become attached to the Raya name, which I’ll let you know more about in another post, but the dealer messed something up and now we have a new plate and the camper, which we still call Raya, has a new horse to pull her. Horse’s name is TBD for now.
