OK, I’ll get to the trailer talk in just a minute…….I drive a regular car — a LaSabre — not a big truck or SUV, just a simple LaSabre. If I were to want (or need) to vacate our location and go camping, with our 10′ emergency tent, our camp loo and all it’s toilet paper, our cooking supplies & water, etc, not to mention our 5 cat carriers which fit nicely in my back seat, once the cats are in place, I’m out of room so everything else I’d take would have to go in my husband’s Jeep Cherokee and if he weren’t available, I’d be screwed!
So I was thinking I would get my husband a trailer hitch for some present — maybe Christmas, or get a trailer hitch to go on my car (wouldn’t THAT look funny). But as I said, once the cats are in place with their BOB which includes food & heavy kitty litter & a big litterbox, everything else would need to go in DH’s jeep. Now for the 2 of us that’s OK, but it would push the limit of space, especially with rigid water containers along with my collapsable ones, whether empty or not. But if my brother & SIL were to need to go with us, they’d be able to take their one car with their stuff, but we’d need to take more food so more space would be helpful. This is the way my thoughts are running……
I need a trailer — one of those lawn equipment trailers or something like that so we could load stuff on it, hitch it up & haul it behind us. That would also keep my fuel duffles from being packed inside a car that could get very hot….not a good idea, as far as I’m concerned.
OR a much more likely event would be if we had a situation where garbage pickup were to fail us and we needed to haul our garbage off to some disposal location, I certainly wouldn’t want to put that in our LaSabre or Jeep!
I’ve looked some online & in my Northern Tool catalog (I just love that catalog) and they have blueprints to make a trailer, but I’m thinking more along the lines of finding a used one somewhere, since honestly, it’s something that I hope I don’t ever have to use and it just rubs me the wrong way to spend hundreds on something I may never use. Somehow it’s not so bad on the millions of smaller preps I buy that I may never use, but a expensive trailer……..well, that would hurt. I don’t want to look like the Beverly Hillbillies riding down the road, and a trailer would help keep stuff off the top of our car (although I DO have a car top canvas carrier, but neither of us have those braces on top of the car to mount stuff to-we used it once & had to brace it through the windows which made for a noisy ride from Alabama to Arkansas!)
I’ve seen new trailers around town, but heck, they’re $300+. I’ve looked on ebay off and on for months, but have never really found anything cheap enough and close enough to make it worthwhile. I need something bigger than those garden shop wagons, but not much larger than one that would hold a riding lawn mower.
Should I just get the blueprints & make one, since I’d still have to be buying the metal framing kit (and I think it was close to $1000), or is there a brand I could look for online or in town for an economical one? Is there an industry that uses small trailers that’s not occured to me to check out that I could stalk until I find a company that’s willing to sell one of theirs cheap? Lawn maintenance companies seem to be the most prevalant use at the moment. Would a motorcycle trailer do me any good — I just thought of that while I was typing & don’t even know what one looks like……..
Any ideas??
well…having your preps trailing behind your car would most likely put you in a dangerous position. It would be SO easy to rob you at a stop light or while you are on a bathroom break on your way to where ever.
Unless you plan on bugging out way before the general population knows what is happening, I truly fear for your safety and well being under that scenerio. You may want to re-think this.
Spirit
I’m-workin’-on-it – at 17:50 --- Take a look at JC Whitney’s site SoftSide luggage rack.
You can get a Class I under-bumper hitch installed that is made for your car…check out U-Haul. I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee and installed a Class III hitch about 6 years ago…I’ve pulled boats and large trailers with it without too much trouble.
Making your own trailer can be quite a bit of work…then you have to get it licensed by your state’s Dept. of Motor Vehicles. You might be better off buying a pre-made trailer frame w/ tires and fitting your own plywood flooring and sides to it.
I’m-workin’-on-it – at 17:50 --- Something else to consider would be to mount matching trailer hitches on both vehicles…that way, either vehicle could pull the same trailer…Get a hitches that are rated for the lower-towing-capacity vehicle…
Yeah, I know and like I said, this is last resort planning. But it could be that for some reason our neighborhood had to be evacuated for a gas leak or some other reason that would force us to leave without a pandemic. My plan, should some wind damage ever happen to the condo, was to have the tent & set it up on the little strip of land behind our condo & ‘camp out’ there while repairs to the house were being done — that way we’d be close at hand to keep an eye on things, but I would be able to keep the cats confined safely rather than having them climb up the tree that fell through our roof & get out unattended. But if we had to leave then I’d want as much of my preps with me as possible, disquised in garbage bags or whatever, and with our gun(s), which I need money to buy another one so that’s another reason why I don’t want to pay a lot for a trailer — gotta buy the hitch too and that’s costly!
Bronco Bill – at 18:04 yep, that’s exactly the type of luggage carrier we have that we’ve used once. I hope to eventually have a hitch on both cars, and need to try to get one that’s as ‘universal’ as possible because we’re bad about hanging onto our cars (mine’s a 1996 or so I think) and my DH’s jeep will just be paid off in Nov and he’ll have it awhile, but you never can tell about my car & should we trade, I’d want something that could be mounted on some different type of larger than mid-size car. Do they even make something that’s sorta generic like that or would we end up buying a different trailer hitch when we got a different car?
You’d probably end up buying a new hitch, unless you got the same style car…and even then, the frame configuration could change. IF you went from your current Buick, to let’s say, a Chevy or Ford, you’d definitely have to get a new hitch installed. It used to be that you could buy a hitch that just hung on the back bumper, but that was before the auto makers replaced the solid steel, “un-breakable” bumpers with the “safer, softer, consolidated” plastic bumpers
Realy dont know your country, but do you need all that water? Get a filter and only have some water for a few days drinking only. And the camp loo? Dig a hole in the ground, a spade takes much less place. that was my two cent ;) but i only got one cat ;)
I’d suggest keeping an eye on the “used” market like your local paper’s classified section. I found a utility trailer really cheap about five years ago and bought it on a lark. I had no plans to use it. It has been heavily used ever since: moving my new wife from one end of the state to the other, hauling away hurricane debris, taking riding mowers and other vehicles to the repair shop (mine is a 16′ with ramps). Family borrows my trailer regularly. It’s handier than a pocket on a shirt.
To address security concerns, I’d suggest a good heavy duty tarp to cover your goodies. Folks might not be as tempted by your stuff if they don’t have a clue what it is. But, don’t be tempted by the cheap discount store tarps. A few miles on the highway can turn them into tattered shreds. I found a one that has served me well at Tractor Supply.
A storage spot for the trailer can also be a concern, especially for city dwellers. Remember that a trailer kills one good parking space.
I’ve been ebay browsing Airstream trailers in need of work lately. For the price that I would pay for a new enclosed hauling trailer here in S. Florida I could probably pickup a good size AS that pulls straight and hopefully doesn’t leak.
Obviously you are looking for something small but consider that you are talking about caravanning 2 to 3 cars incase of a bugout when you could possibly hook up a travel trailer to the Jeep and be down the road.
My ideal bugout (if I decided to do that), would be a travel trailer setup and loaded with my preps. Hauled by a cargo van holding all my passengers, additional preps, and extra fuel. At the moment, I’m planning to stand my ground here, we’ll see if that changes as time goes by.
nopower – at 21:58
They’re not Airstreams, but the Government Services Administration is selling used travel trailers online. These are largely units that have been returned after disasters and have over $1500 in damages. Some are really trashed. Some are pretty nice.
Look under the “Trailers and Tractors” link. You search the sales by state and new sales show up very regularly.
For space saving, you may also want to consider ditching the kitty litter and putting a little real dirt in the cat box. It is likely that they would use it since indoor cats like to pretend they are in the wild, the new smell may give them some needed releif form the stress of moving and confinement, etc. and you will eventually run out of litter and likely resort to this at some point anyway. Just make sure that you get it from a “clean” area, as in no visible bird/dog/cat/other animal poop mixed in it and see if your vet will provide you with some “hurricane or other disaster” de-worming products (and maybe some flea products, too) Good Luck with your cats. Nice to see responsible pet ownership!
Do take SOME kitty litter, however. Best to make sure it is from the box(es) that the cats have been using as the smell will be familiar while you make the switch-over. Also, if you have one particularly finicky cat, it may take them awhile to adjust. Just don’t take a car-load. There are more important things—like baby food if you have a cat that refuses to eat for a time due to stress. Don’t forget the catnip!
Be VERY careful who installs your hitch. We had a large, reputable company install a hitch, with electric plugs, on our car. Three years later, our car caught fire and turns out it was a bad installation job. (yes, they paid for it, but it was very inconvenient to try and replace a great, paid for volvo wagon and be one car short until we found a replacement, which btw was a used jeep!) Even though my large suv is killing me in the gas department(double the cost from when I bought it, though thankfully it has gone down this week!) I’m still holding on to it because I keep thinking that it’s a great “camper” with a security system,lots of room for 100# dog and preps, blacked out windows, 4×4, satellite phone and radio,tv and uses flex fuel. Well, at least that is what I keep telling myself…. :)
Another option: If you know where you are bugging to, you may want to consider investing in a storage unit in that town.
Thanks for all the comments and ideas; this is just the kind of info I need! I wasn’t very hopeful about building our own & probably checking yard sales & our free trade magazines might be the best approach, as well as keeping an eye on the gov’t site for many useful things!
10 years ago, my plan was to pack up and go to my parent’s house in the northern part of our state (I’m in the middle) which would work for anything except a nuke problem since they lived nearer a nuke plant than we do.
Then my plan, when my parents moved to my town, was that if anything happened to their residence they could come stay with us for awhile or if something happened to ours to make us leave our building, we’d have a tent that we could pitch either in our little back yard area if it was just some contained damage to our condo (and the tent may even be bigger than that little piece of earth) or the golf course green below us.
If we had to get farther away from our condo, due to wide spread storm damage, then we could go to the local state park about 20 miles down the road (phone number & hours of operation, etc, on my emergency phone list) and hopefully pitch our tent which is why at that point, we’d take several empty collapsable water containers with us and probably use the soft-side luggage carrier on top to carry them. All of this assuming the ‘disaster was over’ & we could return to our home in a few days.
Now parentless, if I had to go farther away than locally, I’d have a chance to pitch a tent about an hour away on my brother’s mountaintop property in the country. There’s not much water on-site, but a big low area on the entrance road that puddles so badly right now I could get muddy water from there. We have a Berkefeld water filter so I could use ditch mud and filter it if that’s all the water we could find (God forbid that happen), but it’s such a great filter, we’d probably be OK, if we could find some sort of water source.
If we had to leave so fast that we didn’t get to take the Berkefeld with us, I have Daytek water packets in each of our bug-out bags including the cats’ bag, so if we can’t take containers with us, as long as we have our bag or bags we’d survive a couple of days on that water.
I vaguely thought that if we had to travel elsewhere(before my brother bought his land)we’d try to go to a Motel 6 or a Residence Inn somewhere — they routinely take in pets so they’re on my list. I keep a phonebook in my car trunk so I’d be able to call ahead for reservations, assuming they would honor reservations after a disaster. Anyway, it’s weak, but that was the best, most ‘useful’ plan I had.
Honestly until On the fence – at 00:19 made the comment above about investing in a storage unit in another town I hadn’t worked on that long-distance plan any more than that. The comment did reawaken my brain to the need to consider re-adjusting a plan for dealing with having to go a longer distance away than I’d originally planned. It sort of shook my brain awake on that issue again.
We have other state parks in the state, or we have family in a small town in Tennessee and in urban Georgia, neither of which seems ideal to me, just because both are so urban; their only redeeming quality is that they’re more than an hour away! :-) I’ll start brainstorming that issue again for some alternatives.
I did mention taking the rigid sided water containers in the Jeep, but I bought those for use at home rather than for traveling & I guess they would be a final resort when packing the car, depending on space, time to pack, etc.
As for my kids — I mean the cats — I have one 25 lb. box of litter for them in their bug-out bag (figuring if we’re in a tent we’d have their pan set up & one or the other of our loos, one a true camp toilet & one a bucket & a seat where we’d use kitty litter too), and a military folding shovel for when we run out of that kitty litter and have to dig dirt! I also have their first-aid kit & 3 cat first-aid books that cover different sorts of things. Then there’s their leashes, their dry catfood which I vacuum sealed & I rotate out periodically along with some canned food for them AND baby food — an amazing & useful addition if having to give them medicine or just if they need a treat! I have a cute & serviceable collapsable canvas pet food container that zips shut once you’ve opened the vacuum-sealed food, and the bottom of it can hold water. You can unzip it into 2 pieces so food & water can sit side by side, or you can zip it all up & carry it safely all closed up.
Oh and back to my trailer issue, we have 2 little storage units that we rent here at our condo community — not sealed from bugs, but at least not out in the open. We keep extra Christmas stuff in them, and more of my prep supplies. We rented them to have room to store house stuff when we do various remodeling projects & had to have a place to store things. I figured I’d get an all metal trailer so I didn’t have to worry about the bugs that eat through wood, and I could maybe stand the thing up on it’s end, if that didn’t hurt the taillights & height was reasonable, and store it in one of those units, or just push it in & store stuff on top of it, like our insulated coolers, etc.
I’ve rambled too long — sorry. But you’ve given me several things to think about & some more knowledge about trailers than I need in order to make a good decision about how to carry some of our stuff.
I will say that now that I’ve finally gotten the basics together, my goal is to shrink the bulk of our BOB’s as well as any gear we carry to more manageable size. For instance like pack LESS clothing (have both summer & winter packed) by purchasing some disposable travel undergarments (from Magellean’s) that are less bulky than men’s folded up shorts, and shrinking equipment - we have an old wind up Freeplay shortwave radio for the house that’s BIG. They make smaller ones, & I want to invest in that.
I also keep a cigarette lighter inverter & a wind-up solar radio in the car trunk, but broke one of the knobs off the radio recently & need to replace it, so I may get a wind-up that’s smaller & also charges cell phones. Considering the sidewinder but need to confirm adaptors will fit my phone and the list gives my phone, but not my model number so must check with the company to be sure.
I hope that we don’t ever have to bug out somewhere, but my plan is, when it gets cooler weather, to take our BOB’s and pack the cars with the cat carriers, the BOB’s etc, to see exactly what all we can realistically carry so I’ll know in advance how much to trim down!
I hope that if we use a trailer it would be for hauling lumber from Home Depot for a new remodeling project, or at worst to haul trash to some distant location.
Thanks again for all your input, and if others have some ideas, please let them flow.
Check out a trailer made from the bed of an otherwise wrecked/salvage pickup truck. I believe they basically just cut the front end (cab on forward) off the truck and weld on a towing hitch. Sorry I can’t explain it better than that, but I’ve seen plenty of them around and figure they must not be too expensive.
That’s an interesting idea too! I’m considering everything anyone has mentioned — thanks & hope you all had a safe Labor Day!
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