The Great White Knight has been living up to its name lately! In the last week I’ve towed two people out of different situations. I’m really glad I picked up a tow strap before this trip!
So we’re all headed back from Mexico, complete with another police escort through Mexicali again, and waiting in line at the border. When I’m about 4 rigs back from the border, the very slow progress crawls to an absolute stop, which happens from time to time. After a few minutes, I found out that Mary (one of the Xscapers) is stopped, in traffic, due to some kind of engine problem and the vehicle won’t move. A border agent suggests that someone with a pickup could tow her across and it actually took me a minute to figure out, “hey, wait, that’s me!” (Took me a minute to remember I had a new tow strap I’ve never used before.)
With the assistance of some other Xscapers and some border agents, I shuffled my rig to the front of the line. We hooked up Mary and slowly made our way to the border agent point. I had the shortest interview possible to get me across the border. I then towed Mary up to the checkpoint, she also had a very brief interview and I towed her across the border.
I towed her a bit further to some public streets where she called her roadside assistance company and got a tow arranged. She got into a repair shop later that night, and since she’s in an RV, had no trouble finding accommodations!
That was the warm-up for the next real event: Towing Topher’s Class A Diesel Pusher out of the sand! This was an absolutely awesome experience that I throughly enjoyed!
Topher wanted to be towed backwards onto a firmer area since the sand ahead of his rig looked just as bad as the stuff he got stuck in. So, we attempted it. The Great White Knight pulled and pulled as hard as it could…
Until all four wheels were digging into the sand trying to haul that giant Class A out of its rut.
What was thoroughly surprising to me though is how easily I was able to get myself unstuck after burying myself. Simply putting the truck in reverse and gently applying the gas, and it crawled right out of the ruts and mounds of dirt it had created and popped right out on top. Very cool.
After several more attempts, we (Eric, a good Samaritan that stopped when he saw trouble) finally convinced Topher to go forwards (which was also a bit downhill), and that worked after only a few minutes.
Success! Between the setup, digging under Topher’s rig, the failed attempts, and finally getting the rig out, we probably spent 2 hours on it. I was having a blast!
A half hour later we had a pot-luck in Topher’s rig with Eric and Marilyn (our new friends), and it was a nice wrap-up to yet another RV’ing day.
