Good morning from Bandelier National Monument. Camping here was one of the experiences that led us to decide to move to New Mexico, so it is fitting that it’s the first place we visit in the Highlander.

Update: current time is 14:27. I didn’t manage to get much writing done this morning before getting distracted by breakfast and hiking prep.

Just post The author’s posting station

We did the Tuyonyi overlook loop, then switched to the Frey trail to drop down into the canyon and have lunch at the visitor center. MJ packed us sandwiches, but the cafe down there has ice cream, so…

Alright, overnight trip report time.

Firey New Mexico sunset Sunset the first night

We don’t yet have a sleeping situation worked out. We’re about 98% sure we’re gonna go with a Helebox . I probably would have ordered one last week, but that’s when they announced then that the double was coming out, and that they would be making available shorter legs.

The Highlander is actually big enough to fit two single Heleboxes. They’re good enough to put full specs on their website, and I have a measuring tape, so that was easy to work out. But depending on the design of the double (which we don’t know about yet), it may make more sense to go in that direction.

At the moment it doesn’t really matter though, because yesterday Hele announced that they had sold through their initial production run in 3.5 months, after expecting it to last a little over a year. Gonna have to watch out for the preorder going live next time and jump on that.

For right now we are simply using a pair of foldable, 3" thick, 24" wide, memory foam pads/mattresses from Amazon. Honestly, they’re nicer than I would have expected from something that cost $25. If I was in a low-budget/no-budget situation I would be pretty tempted to just stick with these for a while.

Camp Without a tent, our camp setup is now just the shelter over the table

But I am a middle-aged bourgeois variety desert rat, and I have the discretionary income to throw at the problems that the cheapo foam blocks have:

  • The second-row seats in the Highlander don’t fold fully flat – close! but not flat, so we ended up sleeping on a very slight incline. Of course, I’ve slept many nights in tents that weren’t perfectly flat, so I didn’t expect that to be an issue. And, in and of itself, it was not. But cars are more rigid than tents, and I just barely fit into the back of the Highlander. So anytime I would move myself around, I tended to slide slightly toward the liftgate and then my foot/feet would be pressing against it. Which was sometimes uncomfortable
  • When unfolded, they leave zero space in the back. They fully consume the area behind the front seats. This means there’s nowhere to put any of the stuff which was in the back while driving.

These are pretty much the exact problems that sleep platform systems are designed to solve. They all do basically the same thing, and a lot of people make their own. However:

  • I don’t have any woodworking tools
  • More importantly, I don’t have any woodworking skills
  • Wood is heavier than aluminum tubing
  • And I already think a lot about how much heavier the Highlander is than the Forester
    • Even without the tire carrier, but that’s for another post

The above complaints are very minor though. Overall, I slept better than I had been sleeping in a tent in recent years, and I didn’t have to construct and deconstruct the elaborate underpad system that we had evolved to cope with temperatures at elevation. Out here, in the middle of summer, it can be cooler than an autumn night in the southeast. We once spent a late September weekend at a BLM campground near Great Sand Dunes Nat’l Park, and the low was 19F on our first night there.

When it’s gotten that cold for a little while, ground temperatures drop. And when it’s your thermal mass vs. the planet’s, you’re gonna lose every time. Cushions in the back of a car don’t have that problem.

Campfire What’s not to like?

Finally, I was drifting off to sleep with a very pleasant breeze coming through the half-open window, when it started to rain. And this leads to the single fairly large irritation that we’ve found with the Highlander so far. To be fair, I think it’s true of every vehicle with power windows but… you have to turn on the car to raise/lower the windows.

When you’re almost asleep (or actually asleep) and realize it’s raining and that you need to close things up, it is a hassle to unlock the door, crawl out from atop your foamy nest, get in the front seat – where you’re currently storing all the stuff that can’t fit under your sleep system because you don’t have one yet – and turn on the car to let up the windows.

Dark sky over shelter, softly lit in purple Stargazing mode

Also, we forgot that locking the doors with the key fob engages the security system and if you then manually unlock a door from inside the car it triggers the alarm. So sorry, people in adjoining campsites.

I thought of a workaround for that this morning though, and tested it just now: unlock the car with the fob to disengage the security system. Manually lock and close the front doors, then climb in the back and lock yourself in. No alarm. Phew.

The title of this post starts off with the words “new shoes”, but don’t worry, I will say very little about wheels and tires.

I will just note that earlier this week the Highlander got switched from 20" wheels with Michelin Defender 2 235/55R20s, to 18" wheels (that I think look a lot better, and so did the guys at the tire shop) paired with Yokohama Geolandar CV4S 235/65R18s.

Highlander with new shoes

I think the ride is nicer (so did the guys at the tire shop). I also think they drive better, but that might just be confirmation bias from knowing that they won a shootout of all-weather SUV tires, in combined wet/dry stopping distance, skid pad lateral Gs, and emergency lane-change slalom.

Having ATs on the Forester has made me a tire snob. I want to know that the tires are gonna stay where I put them. I had never considered tires as “a tool for driving” before the Forester, but I definitely do now.

Finally, if you were hoping this post was going to be about Bandelier itself, my apologies. I do love it here, and think it’s an amazing place (expecially in combination with Valles Caldera, which it abutts). But this series is meant to focus on the How rather than the What and Where. I’m sure I’ll start going write-ups that focus on that too. I’ve had too many wonderful experiences; it would be a shame to not write them down.