Remodeled to help folks with slow connections....

Part One: Background (Below)

Part Two: West-to-East via I-10, and NC House Shopping (Done)

Part Three: East-to-West via I-40 a.k.a. "Burn The Pavement" (Done)

Part Four: Get CA House Ready to Sell (Done)

Part Five: West-To-East II via I-80, etc., a.k.a.: "Visiting Folks We Missed On Part Three..." (Done)

Part Six: Welcome to Raleigh (New Saga Starts)

Background...

We decided that this year, we'd try to visit friends and relatives on our yearly-or-so trip around the country. Normally, we fly to places like North Carolina and Florida, where the ones furthest from easy-driving distance live.

This year, with more close friends having moved out of CA, and with the daily cost of dog-sitters looking pretty steep for a multi-week trip, we looked into renting a small camper for a cross-country drive. A few bunches of dollar-signs later, that started to look pretty expensive, too, including the new, high prices for gasoline!

"What If.....," this intrepid lunatic thought, "we could drive our Prius cross-country?" We'd taken it to Truckee and back, with suitcases and dogs, several times, and it ran fine. Don't tell the CHP, please, but the Prius kept up with traffic at speeds upwards of 83 mph, all the way uphill to Donner Pass on US Interstate 80, and still turned excellent gas mileage for the round trip of about 500 miles.

Well, the next What If.... popped out of my engineering brain: how about hooking a small cargo trailer to the car? If I could find one which weighed about 350 pounds empty, we could probably toss a few hundred pounds of travel gear, laundry bags, some doggie-crates and stuff into it and not overwhelm the hybrid powerplant of the Prius.

Research began. What would it take to make the Prius pull a trailer. First, a trailer hitch and all of the accessories to go with it; second, a trailer and all of the accessories that go with it.

Research on www.priuschat.com led to CoastalTech's trailer hitch kit that I could install myself. Done: no damage to the car or myself, other than some strained tendons in my left elbow. I wanted those bolts to be tight!

With a full 2" receiver, it fit very well and didn't hang any lower than the air-skirts on the back of the car, so there would be no difference when going up sloping driveways, etc., when the trailer and tow ball were removed.

Now for the trailer. Canvas local stores: nothing. Shop eBay: many selections, but the one I really wanted was pulled off the listings, even after I bid on it. Off to second choice: (Some Assembly Required.)

The hitch didn't come with any rings to hook the trailer's safety chain to, so I had them added at a nearby trailer service and accessories shop, and they also installed an electrical module that would light the trailer's lamps without interfering with the Prius' sensing circuits or directional signal flasher, etc.

Finally, it was time for a shakedown run. Where to? Truckee, CA, again, of course! 500 miles or so, round-trip, up the west side of the Sierra Nevada to Donner Pass at over 7000 feet, then partway down the east slope to Truckee. And back. The east slope is steeper, so that would be even more stress to test. So, just before Mother's Day, May, 2005 we left Cupertino, trailer in tow. I tossed a 50-pound weight into the trailer, just for good measure, before we left.

Of course, there was a nice snowfall after we got there, so we stayed an extra day until CalTrans could get I-80 cleared at the summit, then we motored home, once again, cresting the summit with no problems at all. It looked like the normal 40 miles per gallon that I'd been getting with the Prius would drop down into the mid-30's, and the ten percent decrease seemed pretty reasonable, considering the extra weight to pull up hills and the effects the trailer would have on the otherwise-excellent aerodynamics of the car alone.

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