Rubicon Trail - June 2004 prelog
The days before the Rubicon/Tahoe trip were full of anticipation in the preperation for the great adventure.Wednesday night of June 23rd I installed my old Currie Rockcrawler II bumper that had the tow points mounted. It's really no big deal to swap out the bumpers, just 6 T30 bolts (4 on top and 2 on bottom) as well as the off road lights. Total time to get the customer bumper off and the Currie bumper on was about 15 minutes in near 100 degree heat of Sacramento. I'm not sure why I haven't just mounted some tabs onto the customer bumper that Steve (stevesjeepfab.com) made for me; something I need to do in the future. I needed to do a local test-tow of the Jeep behind our new 2004 Dodge Durango. Let me tell you that installing the hitch on the Dodge and manually tapping into the wiring for the trailer connector was no picnic as I was working in the driveway in the blazing Sacramento-June-Heat. I wrapped up the install and then hooked up the Jeep to the Durango. The A-frame trailer bar was almost perfectly level and so it would not feel like the Jeep was doing a nose dive into the Durango when slowing down. In the picture you don't see the safety chains on, but they were there when I did the test trip around the neighborhood!
On Thursday night I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve with anticipation. I went straight from work to Black Angus to meet my wife (kids were at their Grandma's house). We had a great dinner and then went to see "Dodge Ball" at the movies. We got home around 10pm and luckily all that was needed was to throw together a tool box and fluids, find the Mag lite, and throw some clothes together. Bed time...
On to Friday and getting to the Rubicon!