The Nightmare of the Kayak Rack

I had my first happy van dream the other night. An unknown person asked where I lived and happily, I pointed out a random window to the van. It took some convincing to get them to understand that this truly is where I am at home now. Even so, I was just so happy to call Greywacke, our 2019 Winnebago Travato 59GL camper van, home in my dream, as in life. No, every day is not perfect, nor is every view worth capturing, let alone being post-worthy. But so far, this is a good life…

Enter in the nightmare…

Last year (2020), I had a nightmare. (Well, duh who didn’t – it was 2020 after all, but I digress). This one was about Rob, the van, our exterior racks, and our “toys.” Today, we got a couple questions about our kayaks that we carry up top and that online discussion brought back this nutty nightmare.

It went like this…Rob and I were riding bikes somewhere warm and sparsely inhabited. Lovely. All of a sudden at an intersection at the top of a hill, a large white truck intentionally strikes Rob (because he didn’t like the colors of his bike shirt??). In the nightmare, Rob was really hurt, but an ambulance arrived and took him away immediately. Somehow, they allowed me to ride along to be dropped off at our van. Once at the van, I became perplexed because the kayaks were on the ground, not up on the roof?! Oh NO! I needed to go back to the accident scene and retrieve our bikes and then get to the hospital. I knew Rob’s kayak installation method would not work for me, being too short to heave the boats into their racks and tie them down. Nobody tall was around to ask. Well really nobody was around at all. I loaded the kayaks inside awkwardly and went back to get our bikes. Then I could not get both bikes up in the high bike rack and Rob’s bike was a mess. Somehow, I folded up what was left of his into the lounge area of the van and managed with the help of a random bystander to get my bike up in the higher bike rack. However, the kayaks had to be removed, and left behind at the roadside which caused me a great deal of worry – stay with the boats or go forward and leave them behind? In my nightmare I became panicked about all of the system maintenance things Rob does that I heretofore hadn’t worried too much about. In my nightmare, I sold the van and all of our gear to a taxi driver the police had called, who then drove me to the hospital.

OK it was a crazy, bad dream. But I woke up afterward, worried about not being as capable or as expert as Rob at some of our van set-ups and systems. I am working on that. My bad. Reality is, if for any reason Rob cannot hoist our kayaks up into the racks or down from them for that matter, I’m sunk. Folks ask us all the time how we get the kayaks up and down. My response is, “It is Rob, all Rob!”

Today Greywacke got a much needed bath at a self-serve coin-operated car wash in Fort Myers, Florida. Rob had to take the kayaks down in order for Greywacke to fit in the bay. It was ever so close – the header was just an inch or so too low for the van to fit with the kayaks up top. It occurred to me in my fairly useless state of ladder guarding to take some shots of Rob putting the kayaks back up top. I thought it might be helpful for those interested in doing the same, or carrying something similar, on top of their van. Ideally Rob reports Thule cross bars would better as they may be more rigid than the Travato’s OEM rack which flexes a bit. Our kayak racks are Thule Hull-a-Port J Style on both sides. Yakima makes a similar one that likely would work just as well. Note that on the passenger side we have a Carefree Awning (currently troubleshooting to try to get it to work again…but that’s a post for another time). As you may spy in the photos of the light green kayak, the awning and the passenger side rack play well together. Now for a few photos: