Sideways…
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know I love my rooftop tent. I particularly love that its on the rooftop of my Jeep, so I’m well away from all those sneaky creepy crawlies, and the fact its bolted to the car means it’s never coming off, not even in a storm.
Recently though my faith in its location was a bit shaken. I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago that I took it off in order to clean up the roof rack and bar work. We put it back on in time for me to head off to a rodeo I’d been looking forward to. I had mentioned to a friend where I was going and she was keen to come along too.
So off we went before sunrise, heading to the rodeo… woohoo!
I wrote about our rodeo trip a few weeks back. What I didn’t tell you then was that while on the way we heard a bit of movement from above. When we put the tent back on there were a few issues but we thought we’d overcome them, and replaced some of the hardware at the time. It had been suggested that I take some ratchet straps with me… just in case.
Bloody lucky we did, as it turned out. That movement from above that I had stopped to check a number of times with no problems found, turned into a potentially big problem.
Driving along after a few hours with not too much further to go till we reached our destination, I had a funny feeling that I needed to pull over right then, so I did.
My heart stopped when I saw that the tent had moved, and it had moved a fair bit. Any further and Im sure it would have been sliding off the top of Jack and onto the side of the road or stuck clinging to side of the vehicle.
It wasn’t like that before!
Crikey! You know when you instantly break out in a cold sweat? Well that was me.
After a few minutes of absolutely allowable freak out time, and eternally grateful I had some help with me, we managed to push it back in place and those ratchet straps in the boot went straight on… as tight as they possibly could go.
That’s better, let’s go!!
We didn’t have many options, and weren’t too far from where we were heading so carried on, stopping every 5 minutes or so to check the stability and security of the straps above. That tent wasn’t moving even a smidgen. As I said since we left I’d been checking the bolts to make sure they were tight, turns out the culprit was some metal plates inside the cross bars, that had bent upward a bit.
You can be sure that once we got home the tent came off again and every single piece of hardware including plates, nuts, bolts, locknuts was stripped and replaced. While some had initially been replaced, this time every single one was, and the plates were replaced with extra long ones enabling extra bolts to really make sure nothing is going to move
I also have brand new replacements for double the amount of nuts and bolts I need stashed under my seat, and a brand new set of top quality tools to keep everything as tight as can be.
That was a really close call, and interestingly enough, the next day I saw a post on Facebook about a rooftop tent sitting on the side of a road. Im so glad it wasn’t mine.
Im so grateful we caught it in time and had the gear to secure it even temporarily.
What do you keep under your front seat?