We shouldn't have made that video.... Flat towing with your RV

Well, we probably shouldn't have done that video about why we don't have a towed vehicle because it set off a pretty big journey for us. It was a trigger. And there she is. Yay! The two-door Bronco. The two-door Bronco. And we are very excited about it. Aaron is pumped. I'm pumped. Very happy about it. We'll explain a lot more why we chose this, how we went through the whole process, but it was a journey. We weren't planning on towing, toting for a while, but inevitably we knew it was going to happen at some time. And the time is now. Yes. And we didn't try to go all matchy matchy. The color was a complete coincidence. So today is going to be our very last travel day and one of the only few that we've done driving separately. Yes. Because there's no way that we're going to go through our RV journey and drive separately. It's just not going to work for us. No, I don't even like doing it for like one or two trips. You know, this is a temporary thing that we're getting to get properly set up. And I like riding with Aaron. I like having my sidekick. I like, you know, part of what we love about RV life and just travel days is being together for the journey and having the four pack us two plus the two dogs together. It's fun. So I'm going to miss you today, Aaron. I'm going to miss you too, but that's why we are headed down to St. Louis, Missouri area, because we need to put a change in action pretty quickly and we need to figure out our complete tow setup for these two rigs. Yeah. Sticking with the Ford family. You gotta love the Bronco front end. I know there's a lot of Jeepers out there and trust me, we were looking at Jeeps, looking very, very hard, but the Bronco was calling our name. Yeah. We were pretty open to either a two-door Jeep or a two-door Bronco, but you could say the heartstrings pulled us a certain way. And the universe. And the universe. We had a couple bad experiences with some Jeeps. That is We'll talk more about that later. What are you doing, Louie? He's playing with a little towel. He's like, what are you guys doing outside? So it's time to get in these two bad Fords and head on down the road. I can't wait to get this towed setup done. It is just not fun. It takes the fun out of RVing road trips. You're going across the country and you're just sitting by yourself. Hi, do we have to check in there at that visitor center? Well, I also saw on their website that there's a self check-in. Yeah. It definitely says campground this way. Yeah. Do you know what site we're in? Yeah. 50, I think. Okay. I'm going to keep going. Thank you. Okay. Here we go. Keep on trucking. This is narrow back here. Looks like we kind of just missed all the beautiful fall colors. It's still a little bit, but not too bright. This is back here. This place is empty. It looked like it was all kind of booked up online, but nobody here. Pretty good. We fit the Bronco and the Dynamax. Decent spot. Pretty beautiful. Can you believe it? We fit. We fit and the little Bronco fits up there. It just tucks right in. Yeah. I believe it. Nice. Pretty level. That's good. Yeah. It is cold and it is fall. Fall is flipping. It's fall, y'all. We're only like an inch and a half off, which means the auto level works perfect. That's good because we're going to be coming and going a lot on this day. Yes, we are. So it's nice not to mess around with ramps and what do you call it? Blocks? Yeah. Blocks and ramps and everything. We just make it nice and easy. Today is the windiest day that we've ever driven this Asada 6. The windiest day ever. It was like a two hands on the wheel at all times kind of a day. Yeah. Did you see we passed a small short class A towing a two-door Jeep? Yeah. Did you see how much that thing was swinging? Oh, that thing was moving all over. Yeah, I did see that. And did you think, oh man, and it made me think, I wonder how much more we're going to feel the wind once we're pulling a towed car. Yeah. Is it going to like start, what are they saying? Are we going to feel that pulling behind us? The tail wagging the dog. It was fishtailing back there. Yeah. A semi like almost came into me. I had to like be defensive on that one. It was a defensive drive today. This is good. This is good off-grid camping right here. Hey, you're not going to be able to see any sweet boondocking for a few months until we get back to the west coast. The camp, the park, state park is the closest I'm going to get to being in real wilderness. So I better soak it up. That's what you're telling me. Yep. Okay. Let's get settled in. Ignition off. No, ignition on. Ignition on. Still need the slides. Let there be room. Ah, there's stink bugs everywhere, babe. Indiana had so many bugs. Get it. Maybe you shouldn't eat that though. I heard it was a bad year for stink bugs. Yeah, we witnessed that. We were, we probably took 50 stink bugs out of here. All right. Vacuuming. I don't have anything to set up outside. No electric, no power, no water. That's good. Did you lock up the car? No, I got to unload it. Okay. So that's it. You got to unload and we're set up. Yep. Easy. Buddy, I'm home. I don't even think we said where we're staying tonight. We're at Quiver, Quiver River State Park. I think. Quiver. It looks like it would be like Couvre. Couvre. It looks very French. I heard somebody say Quiver River. Quiver River? Yes, but I'm not sure. We'll have to check into that. We'll look into that. What a beautiful state park here in Missouri, right on the river. Yeah. It's fall time, so there's just leaves and wind blowing and it's like the sun is shining. I know. I'm loving the sunshine that's just crashing in on us. Yeah, we got a nice sight. Well, let's start with dinner. That's the easy part. I'm going to sauté a chicken breast, which, you know, when we lived in our van, we used the sauté, the skillet for everything. Everything. So when we're doing just a quick couple night stays, we usually don't set up the grill and I just cook inside. So I have lots of like tricks that I remember from the van and I use my kitchen shears and I just slice it into tender like shapes so that they sear up very quickly. You know, if you were to try to do a big honking breast indoors on your skillet, it would it would take some time and energy. But this is very foolproof. It's like six minutes per side, give or take, and you're done. And I love to use these parchment papers. I've shown these a lot. I do all of my seasoning on that. So it's very easy cleanup where I don't have to waste a lot of water scrubbing raw chicken off my cutting board. We're putting to use the extra 400 watts of solar that Dynamax installed on this baby. Are you seeing a good bump from that? Yeah, we're still sitting at 100%. We've been sitting here, you know, for an hour or two. That's exciting because tomorrow night, tomorrow night I want to make hamburgers and we like to make french fries in our air fryer using russet potatoes and they turn out great. But the only downfall of that is it takes 30 minutes and I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore, do I? No, and we have the backup of the generator. If we ever, you know, start to run out, we'll be fine. But yeah, and when we were backing up in here, I'm pretty sure we needed that extra two inch lift to clear that curb back there. Yeah, we haven't talked about our upgrades as much. We just got those done. We really haven't got to explore and use them yet. So we're excited to share more on the two inch lift and the extra solar. And I know it's coming up to winter time, but we can now run this air conditioner up front off of batteries. This trip to Indiana, it was all about checking things off of our wishlist and we just named off a few. We also picked up the Bronco. So we did a lot of busy work there. We didn't do a lot of sightseeing. We didn't do a lot of like touristy stuff, but we checked some things off of our list that we needed some attention on. So back to dinner, back to dinner. We're going to do green beans in the air fryer. I'm just craving a big salad and that's it. It's going to be pretty simple. We're going to go to bed early. We're going to just relax. Even the short travel days can be exhausting and we have a big few days coming up. Not only are we super excited to go to E-Trailer tomorrow, but there's going to be some time for us to go explore St. Louis. Yep. And we've never been here before. So we're looking forward to that. The next few days, they're going to go quickly and we're going to try to pack in as much as possible. Did I get us level? Oh yeah. Usually I always report back to Aaron. When I drizzle in my olive oil into my skillet, if we're not level, the oil will, you know, like melt to one side and I'll say, Aaron, in case you were wondering, we're tilted passenger rear or whatever it might be. Yeah, but it's pretty good. It's so easy to just throw on some spices onto your protein and just sear it. Like it's so quick. Literally takes 10 minutes. Yum. All right. These look good. I think I use my kitchen shears eight times a day. Use them for everything. It's so easy to cut without a cutting board this way. Like there's nothing you really, well, I can't say there's nothing you can't use kitchen shears on, but there's a lot you can use it on. It looks really good. It smells great. I know I'm drool. Good morning. Big day today. Absolutely peaceful out here last night. Super dark, no neighbors, a little chilly, about 42 degrees overnight, but not bad. But today is going to be the big kind of a little bit of an unknown for us. We're heading to trailer, you know, in doing research for the flat tow set up for our new Bronco, you can quickly get overwhelmed. There is a handful of options. There's a handful of different pieces you need. And it's not just like you go buy one thing and you're done. It's like you need these multiple pieces together. You need to orchestrate all of the components. Yeah. And like not everything works together and everybody's vehicle is different. So there's just like a lot of like unknown. So e-trailer was a great source for me. Like looking online on YouTube, they have a ton of videos. And that's what I started first noticing was all of these flat tow installation videos, step-by-step like professionally done. I'm like, wow, that's what we need. So we did end up reaching out to e-trailer to partner on this project for this flat tow. And they actually do some really cool stuff like installation for their local neighbors here. That's how they do all of these videos that they have online. They have like, I think it's like 17,000 videos or something crazy like that. Yeah. So I think the program works like if you purchase your parts, your components from e-trailer and you arrange on their schedule for your installation to be done by them, they will do the installation for free with the caveat that they get your rig and your RV for the entire day so that they can do these instructional videos for their channel. Yeah. Which is a win-win for both you and them. So the free installation is something that anybody can take advantage of as long as you're willing to work around their schedule, which could be booked out a couple of months. And I imagine a lot of e-trailer's customers are DIYers. Yeah. And that's also good about it is that you have, you know, professional help on which products you need. Yeah. And then they actually have like almost everything. They have pictures of the products, they have videos of the products, and you can really kind of see what you're getting into. And I am so jazzed about it. I'm excited to go there. I'm excited to meet everybody. And I am super excited for us to get set up so we can get back on the road together as one cohesive team, driving in one unit. Yeah. Nobody likes driving separately. The dogs don't like it. I don't like it. Chris doesn't like it. I don't like it. I'm going to get connected. We need our dinghy and our RV to connect. Yeah. I'm ready. Worst part about driving separately is getting gas in the Bronco. You got to fill up twice. It's a little harder driving around two vehicles in the city. In a quarter mile, turn left onto E-Trailer Parkway. Here we go. So first steps, they're going to look over the Bronco, pick it up, and bring it back to the bay. That was it, huh? Yep. That's it. Easy. Everything works good? Yep. There goes the Bronco. So we're here with Scott, our installer for the Bronco. Appreciate everything you're going to do for us, Scott. You bet. I heard you're a Jeep guy. Yes, I am. So does that mean we got to watch out for what you're going to do with our baby? No. Actually, yeah, I'm a Jeep guy. We do these all day, every day, so it's nothing to worry about. Appreciate it. So you understand that we want to do some off-roading and some trail riding and things like that. So anything that could be up and high and tight and out of the way and all that, we would appreciate it. Yes. The way these are set up, what's going to happen with these is we're going to remove the tow hooks in the front. Everything will go right here in the front. Okay. So everything will be tucked away, and any of your wiring or anything like that, we're going to have that tucked away as well, so we won't have anything down here, so you won't have any clear patches at all. Excellent. In the world of RVing, there's so many steps and checklists. It's a lot more work than what people think. Yes. And in our discussion, you know, Aaron was going back and forth, because every option has pros and cons. My biggest thing was, okay, well, we don't know all of these cons have an equal chance of happening, right? Right. So which route is the easiest for you to navigate every day based on just usability? Yeah. And it seemed like this was the right way to go for that. As full-time RVers, you know, we're not just towing a couple times a year. Right. We're going to be towing basically every week. Yeah. You know, maybe multiple times. So anything you can do to make it a little bit easier and cut some steps out of the checklist, this is going to really help you out with that. It's just going to be basically put it on, put it on your tow bar, plug everything up and you're ready to go. Awesome. Well, we are excited to see the final result and we'll be able to come back, pick it up on Friday. Absolutely. We'll have you ready to go. Thank you. Do you feel like you're dropping off your favorite kid at camp right now? Yeah, kind of. So that's it. We completed the drop-off. We met Scott. Seems like a really nice guy. I love that he's a Jeep guy. Yeah. The whole team here is really nice. They were very patient with us as we worked through our questions and our decision. And that's just super comforting to know that we weren't being rushed or judged for the time that we took to go through all the options. And Jamie up front, she was really helpful. She said she's worked here for like 15 years. So yeah, it's nice to have some expertise, some expertise to just, just, just ramble about pros and cons without trying to push us one way or another just to just educate us. And so that was really good. Yeah. So excited to get her back in a couple of days and, you know, finish the whole process and learn more about it. Yes. Welcome to day number two. The Bronco is continuing to get worked on all day today. So we're back to how we normally are, which is just us, the dogs and the class C, the Dynamax here. Yeah. So we're kind of excited. We have a free day to head out to St. Louis. You can't be in this area and not go check out the arches, right? Right. It's kind of late. So we're not going to have a huge day out there, but we got two major things that we want to do first. Barbecue. It has to be barbecue. We are such big barbecue fans. And then we got to go check out the arches. So we are going to head the hour and 15 minutes into St. Louis. Here we go. So I think this is kind of like the college district down here. And, uh, I think they call this midtown. So we're not quite downtown and you can feel it starting to get a little bit busier, but, uh, it looks like parking should be fairly easy down here. So Pappy's is literally like up here on the right, but see up there by the green field and where that van is, that's where I saw some oversized parking on Google. And, uh, I think that's where we can go. All I smell is barbecue. Yeah, there's the pole. It clears the regular door. Oh, good. I'm not sure how much parking is, but there's the bus stop. No parking bus zone 15 feet after the sign to the corner parking $4.45 two hour limit. Yeah. That's not, that's fine for eating, but not good for our arch plans. Yeah. Well, first things first barbecue is priority. Number one, we're going to go take care of that. And then we'll figure out the parking sitch after you can smell this place from a block away. We smelled it just driving by the smell is insane. I'm starving. I'm excited to eat this Pappy's when Aaron and I were researching the St. Louis Pappy's smokehouse came up for both of us as the place to go, like the top smokehouse in the city. And then additionally, when we were with David yesterday at E trailer, he recommended this location as well. There's two locations for Pappy's smokehouse, one in St. Louis, the second in St. Charles. I don't know if there is a difference in the product itself, but we would want to go to this one anyway, because it's the OG and it just looks a little bit more cooler. We wanted to come to this area and here we are. We have high hopes. Okay. Enough with the teasing already. I could just spend all morning here in the entrance hallway. Yeah, I guess. Do you have any recommendations right off the bat? I got to say the ribs near the top there. That's probably the most popular thing or what people come here for. We have no wrong choice at all. Whatever's speaking to you, you know? Okay, cool. Appreciate that. We'll just need a minute. So they were pretty impressed with our order and we didn't take too long either. No, we did a pretty good job. We did, we did the ribs combo, which comes with a couple sides. The ribs are what they're known for. So, and those ribs look pretty good. Like you don't need sauce on them. The guy who delivered the food. Yeah. He said, you guys look like you've done this before. I don't feel you've done this before. He gave us a little rundown. He said, you don't need sauce for the ribs. This brisket. We got a side of au jus for that, which we've never done before, but we'll see how that goes. And then these burnt ends, they look a little bit more shredded than what I usually see. They do, but I'm going to grab this right here. Good. I'm just going to grab. We can't even wait. Wow. For the sides, we went with the mashed or the baked potato. Look at that flaky salt on there. That just makes my mouth water. And then this is fried corn, which normally comes as one piece, but they cut it in half for us because we're sharing. I think they're pretty well known for that as like one of their signature sides. Yeah. And then this is a vinegar coleslaw. So there's no mayo, which I typically don't order coleslaw, but since this is a vinegar based slaw, I think that this looks like a really nice option for a less starchy side. So barbecue is a pretty tough thing to record and eat at the same time. Yeah. So why don't you slice off one of those ribs? Because I'm pretty hungry myself here. We got to get to eat. You might remember yesterday, Aaron said we're going to have a little Duke's versus Pappy's. Yes. I can already tell you these ribs look way better here. Yeah. Like a lot meatier. Yeah. This bark is amazing. I did like Duke's barbecue quite a bit. That was really good. But I think Pappy's is another level there. This is just falling off the bone. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. Let me get a close up of that. Oh yeah. The brisket's a little thinner than what we usually see. I saw them slicing it with like an actual deli slicer. They weren't hand carving it back there. Very smoky. Is it? Okay. I'm going to give it a 10 out of 10 and I haven't even tried everything. Yeah. Look at that monster bite. Should I do it? Sure. It's huge. Chris did check to see if they have the butter gooey cake. I did. Yes. And he said, I wish. He said, I wish. He said, unfortunately not. I asked for a recommendation on where to go get it and he said Park Avenue coffee. So it might be one of our missions today to get some of that gooey butter cake. So, you know, traditionally like baby backs are supposed to be the best, but these are really good. I usually don't order ribs. I know. Because they're, they're just not that great. They're usually drenched in sauce. I would order these again in a heartbeat. Wow. I would come back just for the ribs. Okay. This is a very big deal. You've heard me say Aaron and I were brisket people. When we go get barbecue, oftentimes we'll just get a pound of brisket and that's it. St. Louis is here to challenge that. They, these ribs are the best ribs I've ever had in my entire life. I would come here just for the ribs. I've already forgotten about the brisket that's here. Like what brisket? That's hard to say too. That's so hard to say. I'm actually blown away by how obsessed with these ribs I am. So Pappy's Smokehouse St. Louis ribs stole my heart today. Do you agree? Yeah, they are really good. Unbelievable. It's the most meatiest, most tender, this pork meat. I've just never had anything this good before for a rib. Ribs number one, burnt ends number two, brisket number three. Which is crazy to think about. I think I really like these ribs because like you said, they're not saucy. They're not, they're not bathing in sugary sauce that's covering the taste of the meat. All you taste is the smoked meat and that delicious bark. They got such a good bark on these ribs. I could sit and talk about ribs for an hour. Yeah. Who knew? Chris just said even if we drove an hour and 15 minutes just to Pappy's and we turned around and went back home, worth it. I'm not exaggerating. I would drive, I would drive two and a half hours round trip for that. Yeah. And like I'm totally satisfied with my St. Louis experience right now. Now I can't believe how obsessed I am with those ribs and it's a good thing that I didn't make a judgment on St. Louis ribs based on Dukes yesterday. Yeah. And it's no diss to Dukes. Dukes was excellent. I would have been, I would have been completely satisfied with Dukes. Yeah. But Pappy's, whole new level. So we didn't know how much time we would have here in St. Louis to kind of like scope around. I did a little bit of research, you know, of like things to do and St. Louis, it's, there's not, there's not a lot of like huge must have things to do besides the arch. I think arch is number one. There's this really cool park. I can't remember the name. I think it's called Forest Park. It's 1.5 times the size of Central Park. And it reminded me of Central Park because it's a big green space in this city. And as I'm looking at Google maps, there's a lot of green spaces here in St. Louis. So this seems like a really cool town and how they have it laid out. Yeah. And in there is the St. Louis Zoo, which is free to go to. We don't normally go to zoos, but that price was speaking my language. And really, I just wanted to check out that green space and, you know, since it's free, you know, why not just check it out? Uh, if we had more time, we were going to do that. Anheuser-Busch is, you know, one of their old factories is here. So they have tours, you know, some nostalgia there. I don't know. I used to drink that in high school, college or whatever. Um, and you know, like there's just, there's just a handful of things to do here. Um, so I think we're going to do the barbecue, check out the arch. Yeah. And that's going to be our St. Louis experience. Sometimes adding too much to a day makes it too stressful. And we're just embracing, Hey, if we got, if you got a couple things done, including the best barbecue of your life, I'm satisfied. Oh, and you know, I did some research on parking. We're in the RV. Obviously, if we were in the Bronco, it'd be a lot easier. Um, there's some RV parking down by the arch, but not a lot. There was something called the levee parking lot, which is like this really slanted right down by the river. And, uh, it's not ideal for big RVs, especially if they're busy. There's a casino that you can park at maybe, or stay at. We were going to ride our bikes because we're about two miles away from the arch, but I think we're just going to keep driving and find another little spot to pull off and park. And then we'll just walk, hopefully a couple blocks to get there. Yeah. We're just going to change zones. You know, if you move zones, if you move your car from one zone to another, then you're complying with their two hour rule. That's city parking and that's what we got to deal with. Fire it up. Ever wonder where the name Irene Iron Travels comes from? It's actually named after my online fitness and nutrition coaching business, Irene Iron Fitness. I help people move better, feel better, and eat better with strength training and real food. No fad diets, no harsh restrictions, no counting calories, and absolutely no processed food in a package. 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