The Trailer

By Guy Lajoie

This book is a collection of short stories about the creation and use of trailers. The stories cover the creation and repair of some trailers but especially the many funny experiiences any family will have with trailers of any kind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guy Lajoie
• Release date: Jul 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781927766521

Guy Lajoie

Guy Lajoie, president of Emmaus Publications, 48 Partridge Dr.. Kanata, ON, K2M 2P5 Canada

Book preview

The Trailer

How Life Pulls you along

By Guy Lajoie

Published at Smashwords by Emmaus Publications,

Copyright © 2016, Merraba & Emmaus Publications,

207 Bank Street, Suite 330

Ottawa, ON, K2P 2N2

347-960-4474

Table of Contents

Introduction

My First Trailer

A Layer of Topsoil

The Sandbox

The Tent Trailer

The Track Team

The Boat

The Dump

Lake Whittaker

The Goderich Trailer

The Red Devil

The Archbishop’s Trailer

The Airstream

The Motor Home

Memorable Endings

The Ultimate Trailer

About The Author

Introduction

Anyone who has been raised in a big family knows how stories can grow in the telling. There are certain events and experiences that just make you laugh when you talk about them. Sometimes you do not need to retell the whole story to get a reaction. Sometimes just a word or a phrase will make the people present remember and start to laugh. I am sure this is true of most families not just very large families.

In our little family there are many such stories, so I thought it would be fun to collect these stories and to share them with family and friends. Hopefully our grandchildren will have them to read and treasure.

Guy Lajoie

My First Trailer

My wife and I have three children, two girls and one boy. We were living in the Westmount area of London, not London England but London Ontario. Our children were all two years apart and at the time the youngest was three years old. Needless to say it was a hectic time in our lives. Holidays and cottages were always an important aspect of our lives. In fact we lived for those few weeks each summer when we could escape and spend time at the beach with the kids.

One of the problems with travelling to a cottage is always finding enough space in the car for all the clothes, toys and junk which go into having fun at the cottage. Then one day the answer came to me. My neighbour from across the street was building himself a trailer. That is the solution I thought. If I had a trailer it would take all of our stuff and the family could sit comfortably in the car instead of having junk on our laps and in every nook of the car.

So off I went to talk to my neighbour. It turns out his construction company had several extra trailers which the employees couldbuy for the grand sum of $100.00. Wow, I said, could I buy one? Sure, he said, I think I could get you one but you have to know that they are very heavy duty units. They were used to transport heavy industrial compressors. Instead of the usual leaf springs found in most trailers they have torsion springs and they will bounce all over the road when there is not enough weight in the trailer. The trailer unit was in fact just two wheels connected by an axle with a small frame and heavy duty tongue which connects to the car. You have to build the box to fit on to this. I still think it is a good deal, get me one.

Within a week he arrived with the so called trailer. Now the hard work started. I had of course been dreaming of this project ever since he told me about it. Every night before going to sleep I would think about my options. I could not afford to weld a metal frame for the box and I did not have access to a welder. It would have to be made completely out of wood. But where could I get wood hard enough to withstand the pressures such a box would experience.

One day, as I was driving to work ,I noticed wooden skids in a construction yard. That would be perfect, I thought. All I have to do is find a source for strong hardwood skids. I then started visiting various locations where skids could be seen lying in fenced yards. After several visits to owners, I came upon a source. A trucking firm had piles of skids in their yard and the owner told me I was free to have any of the broken ones. Ironically I would need a trailer to haul them home so I borrowed a neighbour’s trailer and brought home several damaged skids.

What was ideal about the skids that I found was that there were different varieties of wood. Some were made of two by four frames covered by one by six pieces of spruce. The two by fours were of birch and very hard. They would be ideal for the posts of my trailer. The other kind of skids were constructed of four by twelve spruce for the frames and again covered by one by six pieces of spruce.

I had a devil of a time cutting the birch pieces into useful posts since they were so hard that my table saw could hardly get through them. The four by twelve pieces of spruce were ideal for the main support that I needed to cover the axle in order to build the trailer box.

For the rest of the box I purchased a few ‘two by four’ pieces of spruce and then I needed an unusually large piece of plywood to form the floor of the trailer. I wanted the trailer to