Judy is so smart!
When we were young, we would tease her for being mechanically "level".
Well, no more of that. She keeps figuring things out and fixing things now.
This time she did it to the bicycle rack. The new bicycle rack. The old
bicycle rack was a problem. It plugged into the hitch receiver on the back
of the Jeep. Once the bicycle rack is on, you can't open the lift gate to
get at anything in the back of the Jeep. And now that the weather is warm
and we're carrying the kayaks, you can't load or unload the boats from the
top of the car without removing the bicycles and the bicycle rack first.
Well we changed that. We bought a different bicycle rack. We bought a rack
that attaches by means of a sleeve that fits over the tow mechanism for the
car. It stands up between the motorhome and car while we're towing so the
back of the car stays clear. That works, but that also creates a problem.
The car tow mechanism has to lift and rotate when we hook and unhook, but
the bicycle rack sits low over the tow mechanism and blocks that motion.
The bicycle rack works, but the tow mechanism is disabled.
Solution to that problem: buy an extension for the tow mechanism. That
makes the tow mechanism protrude out from under the bicycle rack. That
worked, but with the extension in place, the bicycle rack mount got moved a
little forward. The rack no longer cleared the bumper of the motorhome.
Next solution: mount the bicycle rack farther out on the tow mechanism and
reverse the gooseneck that comes up from the sleeve to move the bicycle rack
back towards the motorhome. That worked.
But we still weren't there. The bicycle rack is mounted. The tow mechanism
works. But when we put the bicycles on the rack, they didn't fit. The
rails were too close together. The handlebars clashed. We moved one
bicycle forward as far as it would go, and one back as far as it would go,
but they still clashed. I turned one around, but then the handlebars of one
clashed with the seat of the other. It still didn't work. Now we were
considering how to reengineer the bicycle rack itself. Do we cut the rails
off and move them farther apart? Do we cut the rails off and stagger them
so the handlebars will clear? Judy to the rescue.
Judy said: "Why not turn the front wheel around on the outside bicycle?
Wouldn't the handlebars clear then?" The handlebars move with the front
wheel, so that would put the handlebars in a different place. Well. Yeah.
That was certainly the simplest solution. Now everything works just fine.
That was the last solution we needed.
We're only on the road for a week this trip: unless another job gets
scheduled in the meantime. We have several good prospects for new jobs.
We've been talking to Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, and Trinidad.
After all the places we've had to go, all over Colorado, we spend this week
in a place called Buena Vista. It doesn't take much Spanish to figure out
what that is about. Buena Vista sits in a broad mountain valley at 8,000
feet. The view is of the Collegiate Peaks range: a whole line of
fourteeners.
