Introduction

This log entry was written down trail sometime in June of 2013. I forgot about it and it remained in my "drafts" folder until today, which is the date that this log was published.
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It must have been June 3rd that I left my hometown of Painesville, Ohio.  I have a 2008 Chevy HHR that I built a 48" wide pop out to fit a 6" thick memory foam mattress. I used some 3/8" ply wood to build three walls that fold and separate in the center for transport.  The floor is a 96" long piece of 3/4 ply, where 32" at the foot separates... also for transport.  When erect, I cover it with a heavy duty tarp where I've folded the corners and then secured it with bungee cords to my roof rack and holes in my tire rims (I haven't been using hub caps)  Sometimes, it's the Chevy HHRv, but I prefer to call it "The Cramper."

During use, The Cramper was tested by tornadic winds at Wolf Run State Park, and multiple rain storms where it didn't leak at all.  With the tailgate being open, I've had to manually disable the interior lights by turning the hatch mechanism to the lock position by hand.  For about two days, the lock failed to return to the unlock position, so when I was driving to town, I had the door bungeed down.  Somewhere in a couple days of driving, it just corrected itself somehow and started working again.  Which, I'm very pleased about because I was not looking forward to peeling off the interior tailgate plastic to diagnose it's malfunctioning lock.

I am a hiker/ maintainer/ cyclist.  The Buckeye Trail (North Country and American Discovery Trails concurrent in part) is a 1,444mi circuit within the four corners of Ohio.  At present, the official count is 54% off-road and 46% on.  Of that 54, Buckeye actually owns less than 2% of that.  The rest is in local, county, state and national parks and forests.  Sometimes Buckeye's volunteers perform the maintenance, while in some instances they're forbidden to work on it unless the park manager requests it.  Where Buckeye does have maintenance, they're often short on maintainers in a few places.  That's why I was driving around with a 4' x 8' utility trailer full of tools and gear.  There's always something unique about every trail segment that I've ever worked on.

There are very few volunteers who go around the state as visiting maintainers like I do.  Most of them work in a group, and there's probably only a dozen of us in the state.  Off-road trail is harder and more time consuming per mile than the on-road.  A good size off-road adoption is about 3mi, but the entire length requires maintenance several times a year.  My 16.9 mile on-road segment only requires that it be reblazed once every 3 years.  For a person working a full time job that's also married with children, I'd recommend adopting an on-road segment that's no more than 20 miles long, given that cut brush for the entire length, but only reblaze 1/3rd of it every year.