10/02/2026
Road trip prep with Bro and Nephew…
Awhile back I decided I needed a car top carrier for a paddle board and random things I collect along the way… but I had one very important requirement…. It could not look too obnoxious on my car. 😂
I searched forever and finally found an older Thule on Facebook Marketplace that actually looked semi decent. There was, of course, a catch.
It was missing parts. And apparently when Thule calls something a “legacy model,” what they really mean is good luck finding anything that fits this thing ever again. 😂
My mom had already bought me the cross bars when she was here, so I had that part handled. I stored the carrier at my brother’s house for a few months while I searched for the missing hardware and tried to figure out how I was going to make this thing work. I tried specialty stores but nobody had exactly what I needed.
Fast forward to me needing to get out of the north country and the cold it’s preparing for… i feel it in the air…. it’s time to get ‘er done and steer south soon… very very soon.
So… Naturally I went to Menards and bought several different lengths and styles of bolts with the very scientific plan of… Surely ONE of these has to work.
Then me, my brother and my nephew started laying everything out and trying combinations.
Nope.
Nope.
Ugh!
Maybe?
Nope.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, pieces started disappearing. I have my suspicions about the toddlers, but unfortunately the evidence would never hold up in court. 😂
Every time something vanished, my brother would disappear into his shop and come back with some random replacement from his stash.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it created an entirely new problem for us to solve.
At one point I realized a little piece I had been protecting for MONTHS was gone.
I had specifically put it somewhere safe… My pocket. Safe right!? But it wasn’t there. I searched everywhere. The ground. The carrier. The tools. Around the car.
Gone.
Until I eventually found it… in my pocket of course. 🤔 Apparently my jeans have one of those tiny little coin pockets inside the regular pocket that I did not even know existed. 🤦♀️😂
Eventually my brother had an idea to fix the hardware issue…. Heat the head of a bolt and melt it right into the plastic so it locks into place like the proper sized carriage bolt should.
So now we have a camp stove in the driveway, pliers, hot bolts, three people engineering a discontinued roof carrier and probably several missing pieces still being hoarded by toddlers somewhere.
And you know what?
IT WORKED!
That thing is solid too!
We pressure washed it, mounted it on the cross bars Mom bought me, secured everything and finally stood back to admire our masterpiece.
Months of searching, a cart full of random Menards hardware, my brother’s junk drawer, my nephew, possibly thieving toddlers, one mystery pocket, and a little backyard brain storming and engineering masterpiece…. It’s road trip ready! ❤️
I actually loved working along side of them.
Southbound prep continues…
That is… until another road trip prep session handed me another issue that stopped me in my tracks the next day.
Still working that one out.
… to be continued.
