Cody’s blog

Needles KOA Journey
5400 Route 55
Needles, CA 92363

760-326-4207

July 31, 2021

In the summer of 2021, I moved from Tehachapi, California to Windsor, New York, traveling by truck and trailer with my two cats on a 17-day journey across the country. I had never pulled a trailer before, and I’d only owned it for about a week when I took off, so it was quite a learning experience!

I headed out Saturday morning at around 10 PM. I’d planned to stop at a rest stop along the way for a leisurely lunch in my trailer, but all the rest stops seemed to be closed for repairs except for the one I finally stopped at, and it was so full I could only pull off along the side of the road next to the highway. Between the road noise and the heat — 100 F and no way to hook up the electricity to run the air conditioner — I just quickly ate my sandwich and continued down the road.

I arrived at the Needles KOA at around 3 PM, checked in and parked my truck and trailer at my site. I stayed mostly in KOAs along the way, because they were conveniently located along the highway and had nice pull-through sites with full hook-ups. As a new trailer user, I had hoped to be able to just leave the trailer hitched to the truck the whole way, but I found out that, even with a drop hitch, the truck was too high and lifted the front end of the trailer up, so it would never be level. For this first stop, I decided to leave it hitched up anyway, because I didn’t have leveling blocks and it was out of level side to side as well, so it wasn’t going to be level anyway. And also because I was already stressed by the trip and didn’t want to deal with hitching/unhitching the trailer along with all the other new things I was dealing with.

Fortunately, once I was plugged in, the air conditioner worked just fine. I hadn’t had a chance to try it out before leaving. It would have been a very uncomfortable trip without air conditioning! I had the cats in large soft travel carriers in the truck while driving, which they weren’t very fond of, but once I brought them into the trailer, they settled in comfortably on the bed.

It was a nice little campground, although I wouldn’t recommend Needles, CA in the summer! It was sooooo hot. Even with the air conditioner running all night, it never got below 90 F.

But I was on my way! One day down.