The snow is pouring down in Sandy, Utah, and we’re approaching the yellow…no, make that red…light. We’ve had our F-250 (Carl—we’ll explain later) for about a month, and this is the first time he’s been out in the snow with OEM tires. I gently press on the brakes and…we do the (soooo not electric) slide right through the intersection. There were thankfully scant other vehicles around our renegade truck.
We’re on our way to supposedly pick up Ellie (again, we’ll explain later), the Airstream Flying Cloud 30FB Office, and bring her home to Colorado with us.
That is increasingly looking like a pipe dream.
The dealership had already held Ellie since we bought her in December and we took the opportunity to have her outfitted with 400W of solar on the roof, 400W of Lithium ion batteries, and all the associated gear to help keep us out and disconnected for longer (we’ll find out later just how short of a period this really is).
But now it was time to take her home. And we couldn’t even control the truck, let alone have faith it could handle driving back through the Rocky Mountains to Denver. Nonetheless, we soldiered on, getting the turnover guidance from our (awesome!) salesperson Craig and learning how to hook her up to the new ProPride anti-sway hitch.
So now we break for lunch, and the snow’s taken a break as well. We hit a favorite local joint and wonder aloud if Craig will insist we take Ellie with us, or if we can return with either snow tires (unlikely, given it’s nearly the end of winter) or another day with a fairer forecast.
Given our past experiences with another dealer around timing of delivery, we weren’t holding our breaths. But when we approached Craig with what we thought by now was a quite delicate question, he responded with a shrug and a, “Oh, sure.”
Huge relief.
A few weeks later we returned with sunny skies, got Ellie and Carl situated together, and headed east!
Carl & Ellie are characters in the Pixar movie Up. While the first 11 minutes of the film really deserve your attention, you can refresh your memory with this shorter clip. Since they dreamed of adventure and travel, they seemed the perfect inspiration for our new…oh wow…home.