Preparing for next summer

I fully expect to get out in the rig this winter; I mentioned that I'm thinking of going over to Quartzite before the huge crowds around January events over there.

I'm thinking that I may spend more time on the road next summer than I did this year.  If I have a plan (firm as Jello, as Nina from the Wheeling It blog would say), it's to focus on New Mexico.  It's close enough to home that I can get to interesting places without spending days and days getting there; it has some really cool cities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and my friends the Reillys are in up in White Rock near Los Alamos.

There are some issues I've been thinking about for a while.  One is tire problems.  If I have a tire go out on me while I'm on paved road, I'm pretty confident that my AAA Plus RV coverage will help get me going again.  The tires on the rig are reasonably new, and look in good shape.  But what if -- what if I'd had a tire go out on me while humping down the seemingly endless dirt road to Hatch Point in Canyonlands?  I don't have a jack, which strikes me as tempting fate in a really big way. Kinda stupid, actually.  I posed this question to the rv.net Class C forum, and got some interesting advice.  Here's the tire trouble kit which a boondocking RV'er from New Mexico has assembled:

This represents a significant cost, and like any insurance, it's hoped that it'd never be used.  I already have the Viair 88P pump.  The bottle jack makes sense.  The electric impact wrench is probably the biggest expense, and the biggest "if."  I'm thinking of approaching this in stages:  get the jack, see how it works with the road clearances in my rig, see if I can get the lug nuts off my wheels without power tools.

In general, it seems to make sense to get over my newbie tire-changing anxieties in a nice safe storage lot in Tucson than out in someplace wild and wonderful. I'll keep y'all posted.