n order to make my move from Southern California to Northern California, I needed a vehicle large enough to haul that tanker, err, large enough to carry all my stuff, and tow my car behind it. I initially intended to drive the car and pull a trailer behind it, but you'll see what happened to that idea when you read on down this page.

As of not, this page is just a one blog entry from the time I rented the U-Haul to move up to live with Malaya. I don't intend to add to it again, and in fact I sincerely hope I don't, but if I do, the newer entry will go on top of this page.

July 27, 2003

A few random and potentially amusing rental truck anecdotes.

I moved last week, driving about 500 miles from San Diego up to the Bay Area.  I needed to transport my car, as well as a bunch of household items in boxes.  No large pieces of furniture, just things in boxes, a couple of office chairs, and some heavier stuff like a TV, monitor, computer parts, printer, etc.  Far more stuff than I could begin to fit into my car, but not enough that I needed to rent even a small moving truck.

My initial plan was to rent a trailer.  I've seen U-Haul and other brands of trailers towed behind cars, and though my car isn't that powerful, I figured it would be fine since I wouldn't have that heavy a load back there.  Unfortunately you have to get a trailer hitch, and that was the hitch in my plans.  Literally.

Renting a trailer for the drive from SD to SF was going to run me $111 for a 5x6 or $130 for a 6x8.  That seemed high, I mean it's a box on wheels, why would it cost more than $50 for a day?  It's not like there's a motor or anything.  So sorta steep, but whatever.  The problem was that my car needed a hitch to pull them, and since I have a small sports car and have never ever considered pulling anything behind it, I didn't have one already.  It turns out that they are quite expensive. U-Haul does not rent hitches, they only sell them, and to install one on my car would have cost me $279, and they didn't even have one that would fit my car at the main San Diego location; they said it would take 7-10 days to arrive, unless I wanted to pay $60 to have it sent overnight. Since I was planning on moving like 4 days after I called them, that was totally out of the question.

I was wondering what I'd do, since I figured a truck with a trailer for my car on it would cost a fortune.  However when I asked about that, they told me it would cost $169 for the truck (3 days, up to 640 miles), and $30 for the car trailer behind it. I blinked and cleared my ears, and asked again, and yep, that was the correct price.  So why does it cost $130 for a smallish trailer, which is a box on two wheels, and $30 for a car trailer, which is a large metal framework with ramps, straps, a full towing hook up with working brake lights, and so on?  The trailer looks like a lot more expensive contraption, with more complicated working parts, and one that will surely take a lot more wear and tear than a box on wheels.

Anyway, I hadn't considered renting a truck since I didn't need anywhere near that much space, but once I saw that was going to cost me less than half the trailer + hitch, it wasn't a hard choice to make.

Of course the issue with a truck and the car trailer is that I'd have to drive it.  The truck is easy, it's just a big van; I got the 14" model, their smallest kind, and after loading everything I wanted to take into it, along with two desks and a bookshelf and a table to drop off at my mom's and dad's, I barely had the floor of the truck covered.  The inside was about six feet high, with another big shelf up above the cab, and I had it to about knee deep, and not even wall to wall.  In other words, I could have taken at least 5x as much stuff and fit it in easily.

The car trailer was interesting in of itself.  It was a two-wheeled thing, meaning I drove my car up on it with my front wheels, strapped them in, and the rear wheels were left on the ground to roll along.  This was fine for moving forwards, once I did a few practice turns around a big empty parking lot to see just how tightly the trailer followed the truck (tip of the day: make very wide turns or you'll sideswipe stuff) but it was effectively impossible to drive backwards.  I don't mean it was hard due to my inexperience, I mean that it was impossible.  Literally impossible.

The problem was that the car wasn't fixed exactly to the trailer; it rolled along in the same general direction, and followed fine, but if you tried to back up the trailer's direction was based on the truck's, while the car went straight backwards, regardless of which direction that the trailer went.  So you could back up about a dozen feet if you went perfectly straight, but if you tried to turn even a pinch, the car would jack knife off to the side and you'd quickly hear the groaning of straps and metal as something prepared to break loose as the trailer went to one side or the other.

They gave me a brief warning at U-Haul not to ever try and back up without removing the car in the first place, but I didn't appreciate just how hard it was to do that until I had some driving time to realize why. Just backing up with the trailer was very hard, since I'm not used to the way it goes the opposite direction from the truck, but mostly since the trailer's wheels are wider than a car (obviously) and are pretty far back from the truck.  This makes for a very wide turning radius, and a very slow reaction to your cutting the steering wheel in one direction or the other.  Tight maneuvering in a small area was pretty much impossible, and just getting it turned around in my apartment parking lot was a 30 minute ordeal that ended in me and mom giving up on trying to turn it around, and settling for backing it out the way I had gaily driven it in, an hour before. The trailer weighed at least 500 pounds, far more than I could budge bare-handed, so short of enlisting several other people to pick it up, there was no way to move it other than by driving the truck. 

The really sad part was that when coming in, I had clipped one of the metal posts that were set above the stairs down towards my apartment.  I was only moving at about 5 MPH, but I got it perfectly on the edge of the trailer wheel, and at just the right angle to bend back the metal fender into the rear tire.  Thus making it impossible for the wheel to turn.  I tried to fix it with my car jack, but that was impossible; I needed a longer crow bar for more leverage.

So I drove forwards enough to get out of the middle of the parking lot, with the tire leaving rubber scrapes the whole way, and went inside and called mom.  She'd been planning on coming over to help me pack anyway, but I asked her to bring a crowbar.  Of course she didn't have one, but dad did, and he doesn't live too far from her.  So I called him to see if he was home and could get the crowbar ready, and then called back to mom to pick it up.  All the while worrying about the truck blocking the whole driveway, and wondering how many hundreds of dollars they'd charge me for the repair (a repair you know they'd have some guy do with a crowbar for about $5 labor) if it came to that.

Fortunately mom brought over the crowbar, and since the fenders on the truck were just metal pipes with a plastic frame, I could stick the end of the crowbar into the fender, and yank, yank, yank on it, leaning back with my full body weight each time and half-expecting something in my back to tear with a molten-metal like flash of agony.  My efforts were partially successful, since I was able to move the fender out enough that the tire could turn, but it was going to rub with any load on it.  Which would obviously be the case once the car was on it.

My clever idea then was to basically undo what I'd done, in the same way.  The fender was literally a hollow pipe, bent around to point out sideways, and while it was impossible to hit it on the post by itself, I could stick the crowbar out of the side of the fender, and back the trailer into the post, thus bending back the fender.

It took about 15 minutes to back up the balky trailer that precisely, partially with me driving and mom giving directions, and partially with her driving and me giving directions, but we did eventually get it lined up pretty well, and my envisioned repair plan actually worked.  It was after that that it took 30 more minutes to get the damn trailer backed down the driveway, and I'd only driven it in there in the first place due to a misguided impression that I could actually turn into a spot and then turn around to get back out the way I'd come in, for easier loading.  In retrospect that was a total pipe dream, unless I'd tried to do it at a time when there was not a single car in the 8 spots of the small parking area, and I don't recall any time in the five years I lived there that would have made that possible.

The only lasting harm from the experience, other than a delay and some damage to my pride, was the fiercely-red sunburn my back collected while I spent about two hours shirtless in the very hot weather, banging on the damn fender with various heavy tools.

As for driving it, I didn't think it was that bad.  The trailer was wide enough that I could see its wheels, in my side view mirrors, around any curve in the road.  However the car was not, so I had the disturbing impression for most of 500 miles that I had just a trailer behind me, and that my car had fallen off somewhere, several hours before, unnoticed. Of course that was technically impossible, since the truck got such bad mileage that I was never able to actually drive for several hours without stopping for gas.  Twice.

It wasn't actually that bad, but I had to put in 3/4 of a tank about four times on the way up here, at about $40 for 22 gallons each time.  Since the whole drive took about 10 hours, I had to get gas about every 2.5 hours.  And the longest I went without getting gas was the first 4 hours, solely due to me spending 2 of that stuck in LA rush hour traffic, moving anywhere from 1-25MPH... most of it a lot closer to 1 than 25. The rest of the time I was on relatively open freeway, generally going about 65, and mostly on flat.  So yeah, the fuel efficiency was somewhat disturbing.  Not to mention expensive.  I spent more on gas over 550 miles than I did on the actual rental itself.  And while driving I kept thinking to myself, "If I wanted an uncomfortable vehicle that I had to stop for gas every 100 miles, I'd have rented a Hummer."

I did gain a far greater appreciation for the travails and difficulties of your average long-haul truck driver.  Boredom is probably the worst of those. But the driving itself sucks as well, even in a small U-Haul with working AC and radio.  I was slow to accelerate or head uphill, it was hard to maneuver, hard to see around, hard to back up, and so on.  Of course commercial truck drivers do it for a living, so they get pretty good at it, but I'm still giving them more love than I used to.  I certainly look at gas stations in a different light now, after spending a long day being sure I picked ones with a long and straight entrance, high roof clearance, and a straight exit out with nothing too close to the pumps.

If you ever find yourself wondering why most gas stations, especially ones out in the country, are on such large plots of land with so much empty space around the pumps, consider trying to access them in a vehicle more than twice as long and far less maneuverable than your car, and you'll get an idea.

An odd thing that was perhaps the single most annoying feature of the truck began to manifest itself about 4 hours out, once I was past LA and maybe 170 miles north.  Past LA, on I5, you hit a lot of rather steep hills, what would be called mountains in most of the US, and climb up a couple of thousand feet.  The freeway there is huge, four lanes, and the right two are basically for semi-trucks only.  Really slow ones are on the right, heavily-loaded, crawling up the mountains at about 20MPH.  More powerful or less-heavily loaded ones are passing them at 30 or 40 or 50.  Then the left two lanes are mostly cars.  Fast cars, ones not pulling any load and driven by people who like to get where they are going, are doing 80+ and zooming along, both up and down the hills.  The #2 lane, second from the left, is where the slower cars are, and sometimes a very fast truck passing a faster truck.  I was mostly in that lane, not loaded down enough to be dragging along at 30 like the big trucks, but far from fast enough to keep up with the lighter cars.

Up until those hills I hadn't exceeded 60 MPH in the truck with the car trailer on the back.

For one thing, there had been heavy traffic in LA, and intermittent traffic most of the way up there from San Diego.  Also, there were stickers on each fender of the trailer, written backwards so I could read them in my side view mirrors, saying 45 MPH max for the trailer. I justified that by thinking "okay, 50 will be no problem" and then I mentally upped that to "well, 55 or maybe 60, and see how it goes".  By the time I was 180 miles out and had taken all afternoon and part of the evening to get that far, and had 300 miles yet to drive, my speed rationalization was further down the slippery slope.

"I've got over 300 miles yet to go, and it's taken me five hours already.  At 60 I've still got over five hours to drive.  But at 70 I can drive that in just over four hours..."

So I began to step up the pace once I was descending the hills and was far enough north of LA to be clear of the awful traffic.  It was easy to get up to 70; I could almost roll and do that.  At first I was very cautious, turning the radio off and paying great attention to the noises and feel of the vehicle.  It was hard to tell much, at that speed, in such an un-aerodynamic vehicle, with a strong cross wind in the mountains, but as far as I could tell, the trailer, and the car on it, were fine.

At least that was what I told myself.

My confidence thus boosted by the lack of disaster, I began to average 70MPH going down the hills, occasionally getting up towards 75 before an uphill section, which I knew would bleed my speed severely.

It was on about the fourth such downhill stretch when my left side view mirror suddenly swept in and nearly crashed into the side of the car.  This was rather a surprise to me, since as the mirror folded back towards the window my view through it changed radically, and out of the corner of my eye I thought a car had somehow come driving diagonally across the road and was about to crash into me.  I jumped a foot.

I ignored the now crooked mirror for a while, contenting myself with a steady stream of vile curses, but once I began to need to change lanes, the lack of sight out my right side began to become a problem.  The back storage area of a U-Haul is very wide, a couple of feet wider than the cab, so you can literally see nothing out the side to the rear, without the mirror to look in.  I mean literally, you can stick your head out the window without improving the view, unless you've got a neck as long as your arm.  I do not.

There are two mirrors on an aluminum tube frame on a U-Haul.  A large rectangular one, and a smaller rounded fish-eye type below that.  They give a pretty good view to the sides, at least when they stay out where they are supposed to.  The mirrors are mounted on a long metal pole, connected above and below, with notched round things with bolts through them on a spring. Basically you can hold the bottom of the bolt and turn the top to tighten it, and vice versa.  However they are really hard to hold, and you pretty much have to have a socket wrench for at least one of them.  I did not, so despite my scratching at it in a gas station or two, I couldn't make them any tighter/less likely to fold back once I got going over 65.  Especially not with the heavy cross winds in the mountains.

The right side one I adjusted so I could crane my neck down and sort of see out it with it folded back.  Only through the round convex one though; the big rectangular one showed the side of my truck.  I had no way to reach over and change it while driving (the passenger seat and floor of my truck were entirely covered by a case of wine, two coolers, an aquarium of rodents, and more) so that was the only option.  Well, my other option was to drive 50 miles an hour so it wouldn't blow back, but since if I'd done that I would never have needed to change lanes, and wouldn't have arrived until yesterday, I ruled that one out.  The driver's side mirror I thought I could just push back out once it came in, or adjust it as I drove.

I could, but you have to realize that the force required to push it back was about 65MPH of wind, with heavy resistance.  Try pushing a large metal rectangle into near-hurricane force wind lately?  With your left hand?  While steering a big, unsteady truck with your right?  At 70 MPH?  In the dark?  With huge 18-wheeler trucks immediately to your right?

You get used to it.

I mostly just left it back, since I mostly wasn't passing, but for the last 2 hours or so, going through the entire Central Valley, at 72 MPH, around 9-11pm, I had to roll down the window (it was like 94 outside, even that long after dark, and the AC was my savior) and reach out into the humid, furnace-hot night air and grab the metal frame, and then brace myself with me feet against the floor and my right arm on the wheel so that I could stiff arm the mirror back to straight, and hold it there just long enough to be sure the headlights I was seeing on the ground to my right were from a car that was far enough behind me that I could pull out around the double tractor trailer full of strawberries ahead of me.  The leverage was essential, or else I'd have just pushed myself sideways across the seat, rather than forcing the mirror back out.

Repeat this little game about 60 times over two hours while the only radio available is a static-y classical station, a bad alternative rock station, eleven Spanish-language farm reports, and half a dozen country music stations, all while yawning and feeling eager to reach your sweetie's before it's too late, and you'll have something of a recreation of my night. Bring a snack.

When we returned the U-Haul truck the next day I told them about the side view mirror problem and that they really needed to tighten them more, or convert them to some sort of wing nut so people could do it with one wrench or pliers, and the guy was like, "Yeah, they always blow back like that."  And then he went on chewing tobacco and whistling through his missing front tooth, completely consumed with concern over events transpiring in the Middle East.

Or perhaps not.

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