Trod Bogs Sadly – Oddstray's Blog

It had been way too long since we had been camping, and ‘her indoors’ was threatening rebellion by making black-outs for the windows of the Xterra, with the notion of sleeping on an air mattress in the back of it.

Horrified by the thought of that, I hurriedly called a trailer rental company about a pop-up camper. No go until after the 4^th of July. At the last minute, (Thursday) I called http://www.littleguytrailers.net of San Diego, and they were willing to rent us the trailer you see in the photo (a ‘5-wide’) for three nights.

So, Friday morning, we trundled over to AAA to get an insurance waiver, yawn wait, yawn wait. Thence to U-Haul for a 2 inch ball for the hitch receiver, yawn wait, yawn wait. Then thence to Little Guy Trailers to pick up the little teardrop trailer, yawn wait, yawn wait. At least we got a demo of how to do things, which was helpful, since we had never done them before.

Cutting to the chase, we loaded up the Nissan with all the boxes randomly filled from the VW camper and headed out to Dos Picos campground, about 20 miles away, near Ramona, for a shake-out trip. Which was largely uneventful, except for two things:

1. We encountered Lilli (SP?) and Chrissy, on their way from Ushaia (Chile) to Alaska on a pair of Honda Transalp motorcycles. As soon as I saw those bikes, I knew that there was a story there, as you can’t buy them in the USA. I’m jealous.  Check out www.reise-ecke.at. It helps if you know some German. Lovely people.

2. Fecking computers. We decided to check out B.’s Nexus 10 for movie watching, and it turned out that we hadn’t brought the OTG cable or SD card adapter/USB hub and disk. Remembering that this was a ‘shake-out’ trip, I drove home and picked up the missing pieces. Later, we loaded Nexus File Importer to see whether we could watch a movie. Doh, no way, it wanted to check the ‘License status’ online, and we did not have a connection for that device. End of session. That really sucks, Google, if you are watching. The whole point of Nexus File Importer is to overcome the lack of SD card support on Nexus devices. If we were online, we wouldn’t need it, as we could use Skifta to connect to our media library. Stop doing this sh*t, Google, it’s inane. As a follow up, when we eventually returned home, both Nexus 7 and 10 worked just fine after once ‘checking in’.