Episode 20: I'm back!

Big plans for 2025, including new upgrades and jeep trips.

Transcript

Welcome Jeepers! It's Art. This is the Talk is Jeep show. I know it's been a hot minute, almost a year, but I'm back, solo right now. But I have big things planned for this year and the podcast, so appreciate you sticking with me. I'm going to take you back to my Jeep beginnings. I don't remember how old I was. I was a young boy and I was reading a book I got from the public library called The Year of the Jeep. And I remember reading it just thinking like, wow, it would be so cool to have a Jeep. The story was basically a young boy finds an abandoned Jeep in a barn, World War II Jeep or something, and saves up his money and goes and buys a part and puts it on and takes him the whole summer. But he gets the Jeep going at the end of the book. And I was like, man, I want a Jeep when I get to be older. And I did. I bought a Jeep when I was able to. My first brand new car was a 1990 Jeep YJ. Two-door at that time was all I made, sport. And it was bare bones. No rugs, no air conditioning, soft top, half doors, $12,000 and change out the door. And that was my first Jeep of my own. And I'm sure if you go back and listen to episode one, you'll hear me ramble about my first Jeep and some of my experiences. It wasn't. You know, it was a bit of a hot mess in a sense that I didn't know anything about Jeeps or four-wheeling, off-roading. I never had any experience with that. And I got the Jeep. I read all the magazines of the day, four-wheeling, off-road, and four-wheeler, and a couple of other Jeep-centric magazines. I don't remember the names, but this was, you know, all I could do back in 1990. I did, on the first day that I had it, decided to take it in the woods, which was just off the highway. It looked like a little trail that went alongside the river. And I went through a puddle, what I thought was a puddle, but was really a gatekeeper. And I sank the Jeep up to the fenders in water, had to get towed out, and that was it. I was off to the races, bought a winch, you know. In those days, I didn't really know where to go anywhere off-roading. I think when they were building the interstate in New Jersey, where I live in New York, they were building this big connection. It was like, I don't know, 50, 60 miles of interstate. Well, when I was under construction, we would just go four-wheeling on there, and that's about all we had for four-wheeling. That was a rabbit hole. But it really was my first Jeep experience. And then I started, you know, getting into it a little more, reading some books. I read the adventures of Mark Smith, the founder of the Jeep Jamboree, hearing his stories about traveling the trails from South America to Alaska. I mean, it just sounded like an incredible adventure. And that has always been, like, you know, one of my bucket list things to do is to run the Rubicon Trail. Anyway, that's a bucket list trip that I've been wanting to do. Since the last episode, though, a few things have occurred. Tom and I actually did a special Jeep Jamboree in Moab. We did the Moab Odyssey, which was interesting. It was a four-day trip. I had never been out to Moab at all, let alone to do a jeeping trip. But it was a different kind of event in the sense that we flew in and we were provided a Jeep as part of the Jamboree experience. So the only way Tom and I could have done that trip was to do it the way we did it. Fly in, use the Jeep they provided, and then fly out. But that wasn't ideal. And I'm going to talk a lot about that trip in an upcoming episode. We shot a lot of video, and I have some things planned to talk about that trip. Because it was a really unique experience that I may never get again. But I'll save that for its own episode or two coming up. But it got me thinking about really what I wanted to do, which would be take my own Jeep on that adventure. Not just use, you know, some generic Jeep that didn't interest me as much as I thought it, you know. It wasn't bad, but I wouldn't want to do it again that way. Let's say it that way. So I started thinking more and more about the Rubicon Trail and that bucket list trip of taking my Jeep out there. And I knew there were some things that I was going to need in order to facilitate that, even before I was able to start planning. Because driving my Jeep cross-country, it's not really practical anymore. My back is too old and tired from working in the TV business for 35 years, lifting heavy cameras, crates, and cases. So sitting in the Jeep for that sort of a trip, you know, just not ideal. Tom and I took my Jeep up to the Drummond Island Jeep Jamboree, which is the upper peninsula of Michigan. And that was only, I want to say that was like a 13 or 14 hour drive. And that was quite taxing. If you want to hear that tale, that's episode eight and nine, I believe, of the Talk is Jeep podcast. You can go back and listen to our adventures from Drummond Island. Knowing that I wasn't going to drive my Jeep out to California, I said, well, obviously, I either have to pay to have it transported, which is crazy, crazy expensive. I don't know if you've looked into it or not, but I got quotes of anywhere from four to $7,000 each way to transport my Jeep out to California, which just doesn't make sense. Then I looked into, you know, maybe getting a trailer and that's viable. So I wound up doing just that. I actually turned in, I had a lease on a Volvo SUV. I was kind of done with that car. I turned it in and I decided to lease a F-150 crew cab. And I got a nice one. I got a Lariat with a five liter Coyote V8, which can, you know, pull just about 10,000 pounds. And I got a big tech car hauler trailer. Not a huge one, just about 16 foot. Just enough for my two door Jeep to fit on. And I said, okay, that's phase one. That's going to allow me the option to sign up for Jeep Jamboree in the Rubicon and do it if I, you know, want to. I didn't know when I wanted to do it, but I knew that was the first step. So that was last year. So as a trial for the new truck trailer Jeep thing, I decided I would take my Jeep to the Bantam Jeep Festival. That's like Butler County, PA. It's about, I think it's about 10 hours, 12 hour drive from where I am in New York out there. And I was going to go, you know, for like a long weekend with the wife and she got sick, of course, maybe on purpose. I'm not sure, but I wound up doing the drive myself as like a shakedown run. And I'd never been out to that festival. I don't know if, you know, if you're on the East Coast, you've probably received mailings or seen ads for it. I wasn't even sure what to expect. I signed up for a couple of trail rides, which were minimally interesting, nothing serious and nothing that you would build a weekend around. But they had a big parade. You can line your Jeep up on the side and check out all the Jeeps in town. It's a whole like weekend of activities. Interesting. I don't know that I would go back. Anyway, I did that as a shakedown run. And everything went pretty well, except that on the way home, I had nicked one of the, it's a tandem axle trailer. And I had nicked the curb as I'm pulling out of the hotel to drive, you know, 12 hours back home. And I'm on this windy little one lane country road to get out to the highway. And I started hearing a flop, flop, flop, flop, flop, which of course was one of the rear tires on the trailer. Got pinched on the curb was when I ran it over. And I didn't have a spare. When I bought the trailer, they didn't have any spares to go with it. I said, oh, I'll get it later. And never got the spare. So that was a little bit of an issue. I thought at first I pulled off into some big church parking lot where I could at least turn it around and get off the road. And I thought, oh, I'll call AAA and they'll repair the flat. And they told me they basically don't repair flats. They'll change a flat. They'll change your tire if you have a spare. But they don't do any real repair of tires like that. And afterwards I thought, yeah, that makes sense. But of course it didn't help me. This is now like Saturday evening, probably around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Small town. Everything's probably getting ready to shut down at 5. I called a couple of tire places to see if they had mobile service. They couldn't come out at that point. One place had a tire. They said, if you can get it here in the next 30 minutes, we'll put it on for you. And I said, okay. And it was about at 5, 10 miles an hour. It was about a 30-minute drive. It's all I could do. It was hope that I don't bend the rim. One lane road. Cars are stacked up behind me. It was quite comical. A little nerve-wracking for me since I was, you know, doing this solo. But anyway, I got it to the tire place. They were great. They changed the tire. I was on my way in about a half hour to make the journey home. And I made it without any incident. But I did go out the next day and buy a spare on a rim. And now that's all set. So I have the truck. I have the trailer. I did the shakedown run. So I said, you know what? Let's see what happens. Let me see if, you know, the schedule with my work lines up with the schedule for a Jeep Jamboree when they release the schedule in December. And if you've ever signed up for, you know, Jeep Jamborees, you know, a lot of these trips sell out within minutes of them going online. The Rubicon Trail is one of those trips sells out. But luckily, they've been adding trips. It's not just one Rubicon trip now. There's like three or four different times of the year. So I didn't have my work schedule by the time they released the registration. They opened the registration. I didn't know if I could go or not. I wasn't, you know, ready to commit to, you know, some money. Even if I couldn't go, I'd still lose, you know, at least 10%. So I waited. Of course, the trip sold out. My very first Jeep Jamboree, which was the Killington, Vermont Jamboree, when I first got my JL, I put myself on the wait list, not thinking I was going to get a call. And about a week before the event, they called and said, hey, a spot just opened up if you want it. You're in. And I did it. And it was great. And I said, you know what, let me put my name on the wait list for a couple of these Rubicon trips. There were two that I thought might be okay, like in the summer, August time frame where I'm not usually too busy, but I didn't know for certain. And I put my name on the wait list. And like a day later, it popped up and said, a spot just opened up. And I said, you know what, I'm going to go for it. Let's hope it works out with work. But let me at least secure the spot. So I'm in. I'm going to do the Rubicon Extreme trip in August. And I'm going to do it with my buddy Pete. Pete's a longtime friend and hasn't been on a vacation, you know, of his own in a long, long time. So this is going to be a special trip. We're going to take about four days to drive out, do the jamboree, which is about four days, and then another four days to come back. We're not going to push it too hard, but we're going to try to make it a great trip. So that's what's sort of going on, you know, this year. I have a couple of other jamborees I'm doing. I'm doing the Penwoods in, I think, July. And I'm doing the Casco Mountains in September. So I'll have three jamborees this year on my schedule. And I'm planning to do, you know, more podcasting around all of those things. But obviously the big trip this year, the bucket list trip, is the Rubicon Trail. And just to kind of set up where I'm going to go with the podcast over the next four or so months, there's very specific requirements to go on the Rubicon Trail with Jeep Jamboree. Luckily, my Jeep is pretty well built. Not 100% the way I want it, but it's pretty built. So I talked a lot about my Jeep build already on episode 16. You can listen to that on the podcast or on YouTube. There still are some things that my Jeep will need to do this particular jamboree. Like I said, I have most of the requirements met. I've got bumpers and rock sliders and tow points and lockers. I have ARB lockers front and rear. I've got a winch. I think those are the most of the requirements that I need. The only thing that I do not have is 37-inch tires. So I think my 3.5-inch lift will accommodate 37s. But there's a lot of questions I have about doing that upgrade and certain things that I'm concerned about. And then there's some other upgrades that I'm thinking about doing in addition to that that I'll get into as we get down this path. But I'm very, very happy with the capability of my Jeep. I'm just a little concerned about a couple of pieces that might need upgrading. So that's what's happening with the Talk is Jeep podcast and the plans for this year. Hope you stay with it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of these things. 37-inch tires. What do you like? What do you don't like? Have you done the Rubicon trail? You got some advice for me. Trailering. Anything that you want to share about any of those things, you can email me. Talk is Jeep show at gmail.com. All kinds of things that I'm getting into the middle of now for the first time. So I appreciate you sticking with the podcast. Looking forward to a great year. Till next time.