I was just prepping the blog for an upcoming trip, without the Airstream of course, and read back the last post I did about our fifteen years of towing with a minivan. One particular photo jumped out at me, so I thought I'd expand on it a little.
It was after a few days at Rondeau Provincial Park, Ontario, back in October 2021. We were on the South Campground, site 17, and while the trip had started out fine and dry, the weather had closed in and left everywhere very wet. Nearly all of the sites at Rondeau are on grass, and there develops after a few seasons a dip on the site just along the edge of the loop road. The reason is quite simple; rear-wheel drive tow vehicles hitch up in the wet, go to haul their trailer off the site, and spin their rear wheels. Nearly all the sites have this dip, and of course water collects in them, making the next wheel spin easier, and the dip to get just a bit deeper. The park people do periodically go around and fill the dips with crushed stone, but after a few more years, the dip is back.
The photograph shows us hitched up, ready to leave. The rear wheels of the van are in the water but, and it's a big but, the van is front-wheel drive and those wheels are just on the loop road. Despite our ordinary all-season tires, and an apparently lack of muscle, the van's front wheels gripped the gravel on the loop road and hauled the trailer out without even a glimmer of wheel-slip.
The thing is, I've been told constantly that front-wheel drive tow vehicles don't work. Yet this was the third time I'd hauled the Airstream out of a partially flooded camp site, on grass, and the third I'd experienced no trouble and no wheel-slip. Odd, that.
Yet another reason to say that I could tow that with that.
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