A short flight from Kelowna to Vancouver saw me face to face with Mike, a Sales Rep from Barnes Wheaton who’d sorted the truck for us whilst we were in San Diego and had come to pick me up from the airport. The whole transaction was surprisingly painless and I was soon heading for Highway 1.

First impressions. Nice looking truck, but unfortunately it feels like a truck. The manual stick shift took a little getting used to and, despite years mastering the art of gear knobs and clutches in the UK, I bounded?from the dealership lot like an overenthusiastic?puppy. This thing is a beast!

The Dodge Ram is known for?its steering or lack thereof. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how ghost like it would be. It’s non-existent. Lane drift is corrected with armfuls of understeer, thanks in part to a ‘woefully inadequate from the factory’ front end. I had no idea what a front end was. Buy an older Ram and you soon will. In this case, an utterly workshy drag link, lazy tie rod, and relaxed sway bar links were married to ball joints desperately holding onto the wheels. Look?under a car from the front and you’ll see a collection of metal bars and other wondrous items strung between the wheels. Some of those are the front end. Fortunately, all of this is to be ripped out and replaced with some heavy duty upgrades.

Another added feature which really generated some fun times on the way back to Kelowna was the surprise addition of air bags. These sit alongside your rear suspension and are used to level the truck when loaded. Load the beast up and the back end will sag, use an air compressor to pump up the air bags and your rear end sag is now supermodel perky. Lucky for me, the previous owner had installed air bags, removed the camper and left the air bags pumped up. With no means of deflating the airbags the back end of the truck wanted to bounce off every undulation. Trying to correct that with a shocking steering system and, as you can imagine, the trip home was a heady cocktail of novelty and danger.