After spending the best part of two months in Alaska and Canada we were used to having plenty of daylight as we setup camp and prepared the evening meals. Unfortunately, as we headed further south, the nights got darker and we were forced to start using our head-torches. It wasn’t long before we realised that our head-torches and our single underpowered lantern were not going to cut it for lighting our camp sites.
There comes a time in two perfectly reasonable people’s lives when they decide that driving cross-country to New York is a sensible thing to do. “Now wait a minute” I hear you exclaim “Aren’t you driving to Argentina? That is quite a lot further away from Alaska than New York and therefore a slightly madder thing to do!” I’ll grant you that the plan of driving to Argentina does sound a little crazy, but ultimately it comes down to a question of timeframes.
Somehow the 4Runner was filling up with stuff (more than could fit in the front seats if we needed to sleep in the back). Also, our spare fuel container had leaked inside the car on the Dalton highway, which prompted us to never have any sort of fuel stored inside the car. The main roof rack was taken, we could have arranged something with the new tow hitch/bike rack. But in the end, after a visit to ReRack (a company in Portland that sells new and used roof rack systems) we decided on a second roof rack.
Factory Roof Rack fail. It was about six the morning of the third night in our roof top tent when we heard the first loud pop, which was followed about 15 minutes later by second loud pop but this time it was accompanied by the tent shaking … oh dear.