RVing Downtown St Louis and picking up the FLAT TOW Bronco!

Last week we shared the big news that after six months of full-time RVing in the 34-foot Dynamax Isata, we finally added a towed vehicle to the mix. And there she is. Yay! The two-door Bronco. The two-door Bronco. And our first order of business is to get the flat tow set up and installed. Even though I've seen flat tows all over our RV life the past six years, I never realized how complex the setup can be. First you need to make sure your vehicle can even be flat towed because many cannot. And then you have to figure out all the products that make up the complete setup. Of course you got to start out with the RV tow bar and then you need to get a base plate for your towed vehicle to connect it to. Then you have the electrical cables, safety cables, breakaway switch, and battery charger. And that's not all. You have all the options to figure out with your and the lighting system for the towed vehicle. So to help cut through the noise, we chose to partner with E-Trailer and take advantage of their free installation program they offer for customers. Last, we left you off on dropping off the Bronco at E-Trailer's headquarters and heading downtown to St. Louis for the best barbecue of our lives and to check out the iconic gateway arch. It's smoking. Look how cool that is. Union Station. Whoa. That looks like good parking there but we're on the wrong side of the street. That's a hotel. That is fancy, man. Yeah and look at this view of the arch we have. Yeah, the arch straight ahead. If you had the towed vehicle behind you, would you be nervous? I feel like driving anything, when you get enough experience. No, you're not nervous doing it. What are these little signs say? No parking. Yellow. Well, at least we're getting close to it. Yeah. We're getting a good view. Almost looks like we're going to drive right underneath it. I know. This is special. Come on. Easy free parking right next to it. Wishful thinking. It's pretty cool. This is the closest we've ever been to it. Starting to feel the downtown squeeze on Pine Street. Yes, this feels downtown-y. Bush Stadium, the old courthouse was what that building was. You never know. We might just get lucky and find somewhere to easily park. The thing with any sort of parking in a downtown situation or like inner city situation is it's always luck. Look at this thing overhanging. Watch out for that. It's like overhanging the road. The old tortilla grill. Weird. Parking in new cities is always like super frustrating. It always makes me feel dumb because I like question everything I know. Like am I allowed to park here? I don't know. And you got to just use a sign. So there's sides up there that say like no parking here to the corner, which implies that behind that sign would be legal. Yeah, maybe we keep checking. There's a meter lady that is eyeballing you hard. Oh my gosh, do we ask her? Hey lady, can we park here? She is eyeballing you. I make a statement when I drive around. I'm not just a little fiat, you know. I'm big. You can see me coming from blocks away. Yeah, oh they're just security. I'm gonna run up there and talk to them. Okay. I shut the car off. I think we're gonna be good. Seems pretty legit. It's like a more uh working, what do you call it? Like a professional area? Yeah, professional area. I was gonna say not industrial. It's a white collar professional building area. Well I mean some of the blocks we went on look kind of abandoned. Like a lot of graffiti and you know you don't want to just. There were some rough blocks we just drove through. Yeah, it's like in any big city you got to just kind of like pay attention to your surroundings and park where you feel comfortable. And at least this has like a lot people walking around that are working in and out of the building and so this is the AT&T building and should be legit. What I like about this spot is people are exiting the parking ramp right here making this no yeah no parking right in front of us which means we will not get parked in and that's what we always need to pay attention to when parking the rig. You either need to have and like no parking in front of you so you can pull forward or no parking behind you so you can just reverse out and this is a good easy exit. We don't even need the Bronco anymore babe. Just return it. Let's return it. Return it. I don't know. I still don't know what it is. I think it's your sign to get up and walk. Like just get up and move. Get up and walk. It's just saying. Weird. I've never. The sun's like catching that. That is some pool art. Yeah what was that? Maybe three blocks? It was a really easy stroll. That's not bad at all. I mean we like walking so ain't nothing to get out and walk. Yeah then you get to really like see it from multiple angles and walk up close to it. Now I know you said yesterday you have a memory of a steel trap. No I don't. And I go you know I read that you can get three dollars off the entry if you bring your National Park card. Did you bring it? With that it didn't look like it. It's in the RV. That was not the memory of a steel trap. Nope. Nope. Yeah I totally forgot. Yes this is an actual monument maybe. Part of the National Park Service in some way. It commemorates St. Louis's role in the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century. That's the importance of the arch. Yes it's the gate to the west. It's the gate to the west. It's just the U.S. expanding from right here. Oh there's a sign there. There's an old court. That's an old courthouse with the official National Park sign. Do you remember what I told you to remember? No. Postcards. Oh yeah you did say you wanted postcards. And hopefully there's a little gift shop here. I don't know if there is or isn't but I'm gonna keep my eyes peeled. So this is the official view right here. It's like uh following the rainbow ends. You can see both ends. You know I threw on these layers and jackets thinking it'd be like cold and windy. Like I pictured myself up on the arch with wind all around me and getting cold but the sun is intense and I'm a little bit overdressed. So you can go up into the arch. See the windows up there? Yeah. I think I read it's I think you get 10 minutes up top. It's like a four minute tram ride. That's what I was talking about. You get a $3 discount. I think it's like $15 to $19 something like that. So I don't know if we're gonna do that today when the moon strikes. Okay it's really hard to capture a selfie with this thing because it's ginormous. I was gonna say doesn't it remind you a little bit of Washington D.C. where they have like the I think it's the Washington Monument and it has like the big lawns all around it. You got to do a lot of walking. It's just this huge you know monolith out there. A little bit like when we first walked past the courthouse and it was that grand grass to walk here. I kind of caught vibes of it there. But the monument itself is so different. So the Mississippi River is right there. I think this is like somebody said it's the largest arch west of the Mississippi. Which I don't know. It's big. We're just gonna say it's big. It's cool. It's fun to see it so close and to see how wide it actually is. There's landing. Is that what you ride up in? This is I can just hop in here. I don't know if you'd make it up to the top. I don't think I would make it up. Is that seriously the size of what you ride in? I think so yeah. So it'd be it'd be tight on the knees. We'd all be like kissing knees. Yeah I don't know. I don't know about that. Game over. Deal. No deal. Can we get our own cart up there? No. You'd have to you'd have to pay the extra heads. Step inside the replica. There is nothing like our tram in the world that says. Wow. Best tram in the world it's claiming. We like the one in Palm Springs. Yeah this is that's kind of claustrophobic. That's very small yeah. So it's very French founded here right? I honestly think I it might be St. Louis. Am I walking around saying St. Louis like an out-of-towner? This is a phenomenal museum. Yeah. Wow. I thought it was pretty cool that we can go see the reenactment or the live the live view at the top. Yeah. So you can get that view of the top without committing to going to the top. So if we don't make it up into the arch this is what it looks like. This is the live cam. Now the very very nice man who is at the welcome desk up front told us that today's weather is perfect weather. I think he said 35 miles of viewing which he said if there's gonna be a day to go look today is the day. But I don't think we are because we've been spending so much time in this museum. Remember we're on another two hour parking meter and we saw a sign that says you should expect 45 minutes to 60 minutes for taking the tram up and down. Not for the ride itself but for everything that it entails. So we might just be sticking with this view. Just close your eyes and open them and pretend you're right in the tram. So I'm going to insert a clip of Chris sitting in the tram and then. So if you look east you're looking at Illinois which is really cool because the river is dividing the two states right? There's a lot more going on in Missouri just because the city's right there. This is looking west you can see the stadiums. Oh we could probably see where did we park babe? We parked right there. Where's the the AT&T building? Yeah. Yeah it's cool it's always fun to see a baseball stadium. Yes. This is cool. Not bad. You know this entire museum I didn't even know that there was a museum in here for one and then you get in here and it's big and new and like a lot to look at. You could spend hours in here. If you are the type to go to a museum and read every single display there's tons of information. He said that it was newly expanded and remodeled in was it 2018? Yeah. So it has that brand new like state-of-the-art feel to it. It says gooey butter cake. It says it but it does look like fudge doesn't it? It's definitely all fudge. I think it's yeah fudge gooey butter cake flavored fudge. Yes you're not gonna get your cake here. Can you believe how fast two hours burns? Yeah time to go. Short little day trip to St. Louis. I mean now that we have been here it's like we need a couple days. Yes you know at first you're like oh we're just gonna go do these two things but then you dig in and there's a lot to do. But the big things that we would do that if we had more time and got recommended multiple times was the hill area which is the largest Italian population outside of Italy. Yeah he was boasting at no in the United States he said it was the largest Italian community in the United States even larger than little Italy in New York and he really raved about the restaurants there. There was one restaurant that he highly recommended called Mama's and he called it the toasted ravioli which is deep fried ravioli. He said that's where it was originated from too because you know everybody talks about toasted ravioli in St. Louis but apparently Mama's is where it was started. Which is pretty cool pretty cool and he he also said something to the effect of lasagna the size of this. And then what else? Mission? Mission bakery. I asked I'm on a mission to try to find some gooey butter cake haven't found any down here. He said that the best spot he recommends is in the hill called Mission Bakery. A couple cathedrals in the city. He also said it's the only city that has tooth cathedrals in the United States. So from here back to our campground campsite and tomorrow we get to pick up the whole setup. That's a big deal. Yeah before picking up the Bronco we had to get a little behind the scenes tour of the impressive e-trailer campus which includes their massive warehouse, installation bays, customer service areas and where they do all the videos and photography of almost every item they have in stock. I mentioned before they really got my attention with their 70,000 YouTube videos and as I was researching our flat tow setup I was blown away to see so many of the Broncos and all the products that fit it and so many complete installation videos. You know in the past six years of YouTube I've only made 375 videos. Pretty weak in comparison. They also have about a million original photos of their products, about 200,000 pages of helpful online information and they've been in the customer service industry for almost 80 years helping people out. So I feel we're in pretty good hands. So we're here with David from the marketing team and he's going to show us around behind the scenes. So one of the things that's really important here at e-trailer for us is you know again I'm going to mention the small shop over and over and over and that over-the-counter experience and when you think about your favorite small shop you think of a place where you can get really great quality products and we wouldn't be able to do that if we just put every single product on our website. So yeah so it's almost like they do the scrubbing to funnel it down to the best selection in a way. Yeah. And Aaron can correct me if I'm wrong here but when we first got the Bronco and he started that research task on okay how are we going to tow this thing, Aaron quickly discovered that there were so many components all over the place that's what led him to e-trailer to find everything all on one site in a way that he could navigate through. This is called the one shop and this is a really really fun area. So if you went into a shop and you were talking with an associate there they'd be able to take the product out show it to you let you get measurements on it and that's what this is. So this is again it's called one shop and the way it works is there are three different cameras right here the cameras come on and he has the product and he starts to talk about the product and then he controls all the cameras with this I don't want to you don't want to touch anything yeah he has he has this little remote here and this controls all the different cameras and he's able to pick the camera zoom with each camera stop record all those things and then in front of him he can have all the information that he's determined is important and he puts that on the screen in front of him and then on the screen to the left he's able to see what the camera's seeing so when he's zooming in he sees where the camera's zooming and this becomes a one man show and he measures the products and tells you all the different things again just just a general overview of the product. Yeah that's a cool behind the scenes shot I mean you see all these videos from eTrailer and you see it from you know this side here but you don't see what's going on behind the scenes. Yeah and if you and if you do go back and watch some of his videos or there's more than one but if you go back and watch their videos you will see them messing with this remote and and I didn't I didn't know until I came in here that that it was just a one man one man show just doing everything themselves and it's really cool to see it from this side when the monitor was back on and you can see yourself while you're doing it and then just kind of control the camera and they become really efficient and really good at it. This is studio goals. Yeah yeah. I like the teleprompter and everything. Yeah it's almost like somebody could be reading the news or the weather in here. Yeah you could get some fitness advice from the studio. I could this could be my fitness That's cool. Yeah I like the I like the red one the red one this one yeah. You're gonna wear a forerunner? Is that bad? That's not bad but you're gonna have to explain why you're wearing a forerunner every time. So what's the story behind that? So the story behind that shirt Kevin one of the owners has a forerunner so he like decked it all out to have all the off-road gear and do all the things so he put that as a shirt. Well here we are day number three back at e-trailer again and yesterday out in St. Louis I hope that is not our last outing in the Class C alone like traveling around. I hope that this new Bronco isn't gonna take over our excursions because I really like traveling around in the Dynamax like you parked downtown like a boss yesterday. I think you yeah it's not going to end it having a towed car won't end it we're just gonna be able to pick and choose what we want to do. We're gonna have a lot of options on stuff to do yeah pretty exciting All right this is the final setup we're gonna swing back around give the guys at e-trailer the RV so they can test everything make sure it fits as well as kind of finish up their filming project on the setup and then we're gonna go through our own little setup and make sure we know how to use it. Great. Are you nervous at all? Not at all should I be? There she is it's looking pretty good. An important part of the setup of your towed vehicle is to ideally be within three inches of level to your RV. A lot of times you'll need an extra part like this called a high-low adapter to achieve that but one of the cool things about this particular tow bar from e-trailer is that it has a built-in inch and a half rise or drop depending on which way you mount it. This way you can eliminate that extra piece and luckily ours worked out perfect for the setup. Once they achieved the proper height everything was torqued to spec and all that's left is to attach the tow bar to the bronco along with the safety cables electrical cable and breakaway switch. I might go over all this in more detail in a future video if there's interest but at this point the e-trailer crew was able to finish their installation and set up video which will be out on their youtube channel and once I see that published I'll link it to this video. After all that Bob from e-trailer gave us a thorough walkthrough on the complete setup to make sure we know how to do this thing on our own and I'm glad he did. Right now we're all hooked up ready to tow so we're going to go with the reverse here take it apart and then put it back together. This silver bar on the outside you need to keep that on the on the left side and out if it ends up on the right side and in you'll end up bending these tabs here so you want to make sure this is always in this orientation after you tow about three times this is all going to be really super easy too yeah so the first few times it's a little nervous it's not complicated but it is like learning something all over again you know it's just it's just like remember we hooked up the fifth wheel for the first time and we're you know got this giant thing going in the back of the bed of the truck and it was kind of scary yeah this is a similar similar thing you know with with towing so uh to take it apart you can just do just about anything at any time so if you want to grab the breakaway cable and that okay breakaway cable power cord you're gonna be out here helping me every time chris yes your next safety cables taking them off here and then you've just got your pins holding your tow bar pull that out and up then there's a tiny pin here I'm gonna pull that up high enough to clear and then that'll end up the same over here you can stow the tow bar like this you can stow it both arms left or both arms right when you're using the tow bar cover you're going to put them together on one side or the other and then you want to make sure you put these somewhere I'd probably yeah just lock them every time yeah and then you can take the whole thing out the thing out and this would be your driving when you're not out adventuring so this is your look on the front of the car when you're normally driving around when you're not I always get it all hooked up get it into flat tow everything's ready to roll and then I come back and I just kind of just point at everything one more double check it's kind of a habit of mine to double check everything like when I tow a trailer I double check everything in between the truck and the trailer and then I go and I touch every hub when I stop at every gas station everything here you can do that but don't touch the wheel hold your hand close if you feel a lot of heat coming off yeah there's something that needs to be checked out okay well it's good it's good to double check for sure guy here he tells everybody that if you go travel and travel with bob because you'll be safe well don't quiz me on how to put it back together again I'm not ready for that you're gonna re-watch the video yeah I have to re-watch the video should we take bob home with us yes bob you want to go on a road trip forever I would love to I mean I love doing that stuff I've got a camper hooked up in my truck back over there now we just got back from the leadership it's telling Aaron just don't back up the front wheels are gonna follow going forward but going backward they're gonna predisposed to go one way or the other all the way every time you push against it once they turn all the way it'll bend the tow bar because you're pushing away to the truck okay no reversing and it's not a big deal like sometimes you get into a situation and you're like we just can't go forward anymore yeah just stop just realize it's only five minutes yeah big deal yeah unhook move the car and pull the motor over up where you can pull behind it right straight away you're good to go okay flat tow mode this is the the crucial step to not frot your transmission definitely want to uh make sure you only touch the brake pedal when the instructions say to if you touch the brake pedal at the wrong moment you'll have to go back to the beginning and start over that's good to know okay switch uh vehicle accessory mode by pushing the switch on without pressing any pedals check press the two high button on the four wheel control check press and hold the brake pedal shift into neutral and then also do the the cluster at the same time this is where you got to hold the pedal in the whole time pedal in neutral settings neutral tow press and hold let's see here press and hold and confirm i heard a little shift did you hear that i heard it electronic yeah neutral tow enabled leave transmission in neutral and then it says release the brake pedal leave in neutral switch the vehicle off check how'd i do should roll now also if you look in here when you pop the door open it says neutral tow enabled that's kind of nice like each time you pop your door open you can like see that it's it's in there one thing i forgot to tell you sorry it's never in the instructions or very seldom in a vehicle's instructions but before you do all this turn your ac into recirculate mode so that the exhaust from the motorhome doesn't make the car smell bad that's smart all right so next we're going to do our first little tug this is like the tug test in that's exactly what i thought when he said tug test tug test i just didn't i just didn't scream it out loud i mean you got to do a tug test yeah it will when you hit the brakes it'll show you when the toad is braking it'll like flash red so that's like we'll find the visual yes that we need that okay start rolling forward very very slow looks good looks good you can keep going oh there it locks it was cool to see it in the mirror yeah to look in my little mirror and see it behind us do you ever have to test the the lights or the blinkers yeah you should do that real quick just so you can see it yeah it's kind of just like check everything yeah it's just like a just like when we hook up to the trailer this is why i avoided like towing a dinghy for so long because now it's like now we're rving again yeah i know it changes things but it does but the reward is worth the risk the reward is worth the work yeah work not risk bob you know what it is the juice is worth the squeeze there you go that's exactly yes we were having so much fun playing with the new setup we didn't realize how late it was getting and the sun was soon going to be setting not a great way to start out with this adding extra pressure and stress from a 30-minute drive back to the campsite in the dark it started out fine with the sun starting to set but plenty of light to still see but by the time we got to the windy country roads of quiver river state park it was pretty much pitch black and of course these are all back in sights so we even had to unhitch the toad in the dark but then i thought all the way back to the original tour of the dynamax and i remembered the docking lights they added to the back of it perfect to be able to see everything i needed in the dark we appreciate everybody watching this video stay tuned for next week when we share our very first travel day with the new setup 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 if you want to get stronger and feel better at any age check the description below for the links with my new client special or join in on our next and upcoming group challenge