Yesterday my wife and I took a day off work and moved our daughter back down to college for her junior year.   

This is the first year our daughter is in an apartment, so the little things we took for granted in the dorm were gone.  Like a bed.  And a desk.  And a dresser.  And lighting.  Fortunately, our daughter worked all summer (except the week she came with me to Top Truck Challenge for the first time) and used some of the money she earned to purchase most of the housewares she needed from second hand shops and garage sales.  Whew.    

All that stuff is the rock bottom basics for college students nowadays however.  It's pretty clear to me that college students today have fully embraced technology.  They show up at school with an impressive arsenal of tech goodies that'll make your eyes bleed.  Computers, printers, routers, card readers, digital cameras, iPods, HD televisions, DVD players, webcams... you name it.  Heck, I remember when the pinnacle of technology at school was a Texas Instruments calculator.  Now even those are obsolete.  They need a graphing calculator.  You don't even want to know how much those things cost.  Then there are cell phones.  The social networking staple.  Heck, I'm a rabid techhead, but even I was stunned at all the students packing smartphones like BlackBerrys or the latest and greatest touch screen cell phones.                      

Anyway, we actually pre-planned and took the big stuff down in a U-Haul trailer back in June so this go-'round we only had to haul smaller stuff.  There was a lot of that "small stuff."  Good thing we had the Gobi roof rack on Trailhugger.

I applied some of the creative packing techniques gleaned from the Holman/Brubaker H2our DeForce and Trails 'n Tents tours.  On those trips we packed the cargo area from top to bottom and side to side.  Breakable stuff and electronics go on the back seat.  As you can see we had Trailhugger packed full both inside and out yesterday.

Since I have an unhealthy fixation on MPG I couldn't wait to run the numbers after the 3-hour drive.  Turns out that having all that stuff in the truck and on the roof only dropped fuel mileage by less than 1 mpg on the highway.  That'll work.