The water cooler is officially mounted on the trailer and it looks good.



There are still a few more things on the list for the Long Ranger before we take it on its first long trip.

1. We need to cut and burn new ropes for tie-downs. The ones we used on the Sequatchie trip were about a foot too short and it made it hard to tie all those Trucker's Hitches. And took twice as long as it should.

2. Upon further review, we should probably leave the 10-place extensions at home if we can. It will make a big difference to have them off on a 16 hour round trip. And some of those 'L' underpasses are pretty low in Chicago. Besides, we'll only need extra space when we're on the shuttle itself (just a few city miles) so we can put whatever extra kayaks we have to haul on the lowest racks even though we won't be able to get to the cargo boxes temporarily. That's why it's called an 8-place trailer afterall. So add "remove 10-place extensions" to the list.

3. Install the Truck Balls.

4. Wash the trailer.

5. We got a set of four "same key" padlocks that need to go on the four clasps on the cargo boxes.













We will definitely need these since we'll be parking the trailer on the street in Chicago, but we'll need to figure out where we can keep the keys secure. The safest plan is probably as follows. Key #1: on the key chain of whoever's truck is pulling the trailer. Key #2: in the Chuck Box. Key #3: in a magnetic Hide-a-key under the trailer. Key #4: up Tim's hairy, Mediterranean ass Papillon style.

It appears that most of these tasks can be accomplished at Brown's if anybody wants to schedule a pre-trip next week. We can also run the trailer over to a manual car wash. If you're interested, put it in a Comment below and we'll meet. We can look over some maps of Chicago, too, just out of respect for tradition.