Road Trip: 4,000 km in the 2015 Ford F-350

Dividing the space

The extended cab is plenty spacious for four — it seats five — but that luxury encroaches on the remaining space in the pickup bed. Furthermore, I hadn’t been planning for the trailer hitch hogging the centre of the bed, like a possessive cat. See the photo herein. It’s like some massive sausage maker or unsuccessful medieval crank toilet.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just remove it.

Nope. Designed to tow heroically like the Theodore Tugboat we’d be seeing soon in the Halifax Harbour, that hitch was well stuck on and going nowhere. We packed around it.

Sidebar: Teenagers have some heavy, sharped-edged things. The F-350’s ‘Tough Bed’ spray-in bedliner costs $550 extra but is a great investment to prevent scratching.

Here’s the thing about packing a work truck like it’s a family camper. Whatever’s in that open bed is susceptible to rain. We were driving two days to the Maritimes at the maw of hurricane season. Furthermore, we’d stop at a motel halfway. We could unpack, then carry the tonnes of student crap into our room for the night. (SFX: Snort!)

2015 Ford F-350 4×4 Crew Cab, cargo bed, bed loaded. Click image to enlarge

Double solution?

First I packed each suitcase, book box, stereo, etc into oversized heavy-duty garbage bags. Magically it all fit like a puzzle, snugly allowing the gate to shut. There’d be no shifting or banging of teen stuff during sharp turns or sudden stops.

Next, I covered everything with old tarpaulins and secured the whole mess with about fifty yards of twine.

Okay, so we looked like the Clampetts after they’d collected their first cheque for Jed’s oil, but it worked! If anyone were to check beneath the tarps while we slept, all they’d see is ‘garbage’.

On the road

Spoiler alert: I’m not a truck guy.

To say that driving the F-350 is a thrilling ride at first wouldn’t be a nose-stretcher or even an outright lie. It’d fall closer to the realm of sin. At first, anyway.

My wife: “Nice pickup.”
You mean it’s a nice pickup truck?
“No, it gets up to speed quickly.”

The exaggerated power steering demands full range of movement in your rotator cuffs, you’re circling so much in turns. The feedback from the road is delivered by email about every twenty minutes. And, at one point when we were about 140 km from Lac Mégantic just two days after the TSB report was released, I noticed how braking is a bit like stopping a train.

But those are issues you’ll have with any oversized vehicle. The F-350 quickly grew on me. (My family instantly loved it and wanted to move in.) By the end of the nine-day trip, I was almost sad to see it go.

Indeed, we switched drivers only infrequently because I was happiest at the helm. However, both my wife and twenty-year old daughter got turns. (The other daughter, two weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, though licensed wasn’t permitted according to the contract I’d signed with Ford.) They usually drive our aging Kia Rio and have never piloted anything so massive. Here’s what they had to say about the experience, live, from behind the wheel.

My wife: “Nice pickup.” You mean it’s a nice pickup truck? “No it gets up to speed quickly.”

The twenty-year old, who studies and practices environmental activism: “It’s unnecessarily big but fun. Smoother than I’m used to. And it’s really fast.”

That’s it?

“Yes” and “I like it.”