I have survived my day piloting the giant Ford and all of my stuff. I definitely made use of the truck feature!
I’m also happy it was a crew cab since I stuffed the inside nice and full as well. Going up my hill from sea level to 1400 feet in 2 miles was definitely a workout but the truck champed through without any turbo issues or exploding transmissions.
The best part of getting home though was the view!
The recent winter storm dumped some snow in the nearby mountains. This is a pretty rare event since I can look in the other direction to the Pacific and it’s always balmy climate. Soon enough the nearby hills will be awash in green and yellow with the colors of spring.
Anyways, overall the truck was great. Clearly well maintained since those Hills were no joke and the truck has 200,000 miles on it. Granted that’s probably not a lot of miles for a diesel truck but it definitely took some convincing to get it up those Hills. And going downhill with all of that weight was definitely even more harrowing.
I ended up using about 7 gallons of diesel for the trip which brings to about 14mpg total. That doesn’t sound bad at all to me, especially considering the amount of stuff I moved and the elevation changes required for the trip both ways. To get here and back I go from 800, to 2000, to 0, to 1400, to 0, to 2000, and to 800. Along with countless other small dips and rises. And with the 4 speed automatic deciding whenever it felt like to shift, it definitely didn’t optimize itself for the hills. Plenty of times I had more than enough torque to maintain 4th gear at about 45-50mph, maybe 3rd on occasion, but it almost always threw it in second while going uphill.
Nearly everything is moved now though! My room is a bit of a disaster but I’ll work on that this week. Couch is still going outside but my two helpers and I couldn’t quite get it out the damn sliding door. So I’ll try a bit of disassembly to get it to fit. It “fits” like this but it’s definitely not ideal. I’ll make better use of the under bed area to store some stuff as well to make it a little more liveable.
I'm finally a real resident of Malibu!