Lolo in Cathedral Cove on Lake MeadWhen we moved to the West Coast last November, we postponed the decision as to what to do with our 20-foot Grady White. There was just too much else to think about with the move. Fortunately, Herb’s brother Ron has an empty lot at the Jersey shore and was kind enough to allow us to store the boat there, along with the 1995 Suburban we use to tow it.

After 10 months living on separate coasts from our boat, we decided it might be overstaying its welcome and that we should probably go back to New Jersey to retrieve it. So, we booked one-way flights to Newark with the plan of driving it back across the country. Since we still didn’t know how we wanted to use it on the West Coast, we decided that we would bring it to Lake Mead in Nevada and store it there for awhile. We arranged ahead of time for a storage spot in Boulder City, Nevada, about 10 minutes from the lake.

We knew that this was going to be a very stressful trip. The Suburban was over 20 years old and despite its low mileage (80,000), it had an awful lot of rust underneath from the many years of East Coast winters and summers driving it on the beach. Plus, sitting parked 200 yards from the Atlantic Ocean absorbing all that salt air for the last 10 months certainly hadn’t helped it.

Final cruise in the AtlanticHerb made sure that I understood that several days in the beginning of our trip were going to have to be spent doing truck and trailer maintenance/repairs before we set out on a cross country drive. Thankfully, his brother was a mechanic.

The plan to bring it back was to take I40 through the West, as that route was the lesser of evils in terms of mountain passes and steep grades. Hopefully, we could have some fun along the way, although we knew that a Suburban towing a boat (45 feet of tonnage) was going to be pretty prohibitive in terms of sightseeing.

The main things we were looking forward to doing on the long journey west were:

• Visiting my brother and his family in New Albany, Ohio
• Climbing at indoor climbing gyms along the way (if we could find a place to park the beast)
• Exploring Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona
• Spending a few days on the boat in Lake Mead before storing it
• Not breaking down on the side of the road