Moving on with planning for OTR9, for almost 24 years, to get up onto my roof rack at the front, I stepped up on the runner on the passenger side of the Defender, grasped the roll bar and stretched my right leg as far as it would go onto the front fender and then stepped up with both feet onto the roll bar that runs the length of the bottom of the front window. Piece of cake. Not even some die-hard Defender experts knew how to do that until I taught them. As easy as that was, I always hated stepping down, as I had to search blindly and carefully with my left foot for the runner for fear that I might miss it and have to stretch that extra distance to the ground, an impossible task. Although I can still do it, with the residual problem left from my hip replacement (a damaged Gluteus Medius muscle), it is slightly more difficult. Instead of compounding one problem on top of another, I will not fight it and just ordered a telescoping ladder (see below) for $69.99. This beats renting some big Mercedes mobile mansion at $439 a night for three months, $39,510. This does not mean that I have decided the Defender will go with us for OTR9, but in all likelihood it will.
The URL for the ladder is here….
Incidentally, I use my blogs to help coordinate my planning for my trips instead of creating a separate one for this purpose. From time to time, then, you will see postings on here that may be uninteresting to you, but have significance to me, great significance in some cases, like this ladder.
