As many of our friends and followers know, Andrew and I picked up and relocated to New England unexpectedly because our family needed us. What we didn’t mention is that we were between tow vehicles at the time. We had sold our old F-150 and we were in the process of hunting for a budget friendly replacement with the money from the sale. Andrew is still a student so buying a truck outright isn’t realistic and pulling together a cash down payment before selling the F-150 would cause us extra stress. Graduate school is already stressful enough.
Anyhow, we relocated to our hometown to help and had no tow vehicle to tow our 1970 31ft Airstream Sovereign. Rushing to get a tow vehicle isn’t something that we were willing to do. We raced around getting the Airstream ready to roll and tied up loose ends for some of our projects we were working on in our coach. We said goodbye to our friends and rolled to New England.
This is how we did it. It wasn’t fun or ideal but we made it work as this was a family emergency. We rented a U-haul box truck to get on the road. Interestingly, the U-haul had a welded ball that was the wrong size and a receiver 8 inches left of center. We put our receiver on the box truck and began the trip. It was strange to pull something so off center over such a long distance. Harrowing! We went slow but arrived 24 hours before our family member began treatment with our shiny tiny home. Surprise!
We got settled and began the hunt for our new tow vehicle. This is a very controversial topic in the Airstream community. This is what worked for us but to each their own. We knew we wanted something that could tow heavy airstreams. I was looking for a gently used gas or diesel F-250. Everything we looked at in our price range was a rusted mess. I eventually got frustrated and started going to local dealerships. They essentially said if I wanted something not totally rusted that I should just buy new. That wasn’t in our budget. On a fluke we stopped at the Toyota dealership. All our Toyotas through time for us and our family have been unbelievably reliable. We test drove a CrewMax Tundra and a Tundra Double Cab SR5. The Tundra can tow 10,000 lbs but they are expensive. They don’t depreciate quickly so it seemed unlikely that we were going to find a deal.
Andrew was wandering around the lot and discovered a used trade in 2008 Tundra Double Cab with 130,000 mile being sent to an auction. The dealership wouldn’t sell it to us. Andrew is committed to finding a deal and convinced they dealership to not send the truck to auction and to instead to sell it to us. Meet our new to us tow vehicle a 2008 Toyota Tundra Double Cab SR5 TRD 4X4.
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