It’s been a whirlwind of craziness the last few days. Sorry for not getting an entry posted! 😬
My mental health has been in the toilet, but I’ve been steadily pressing forward to get ready for this trip.
On Friday the 6th, One of the big objectives for the day was to try and find a mattress put crosswise in the rear, so that my mom would be able to sleep all the way in the back. It makes a lot more sense with us taking Rover to have my mom in the back.
With Rover, we can use the side doors, which is a lot safer for my mom getting in and out. Not only does Rover have the normal step before you get to the main level, something that all big Vans like that have, it also has running boards, so it’s got an extra step, which makes it much safer for my mom to get in and out of.
🥳
And also with my mom being something like 4’10 at this point, she can sleep sideways And be able to have her body fully extended. She can’t stretch out with her arms and everything, but it’s at least wide enough for her whole body to be able to sleep without having to bend her legs.
It’s also nice because the van came with a platform in the back, so my mom is sleeping on top of a big big board that runs from side to side.
The challenge was finding a mattress that would fit in that space. It was about 65 in from side to side, and toddler mattresses are 52 in, and twin mattresses are 75 in.
I was able to find a mattress online that was 63 in, but shipping would have been another 10 days or so, and we were trying to leave as soon as possible.
Given the time constraints, it seemed to me that the most likely solution was going to be to buy a foam mattress from somebody locally, and then take a sheetrock knife or something and cut it to fit. 🙃
I spent a good while on Thursday night looking for people who had posted foam mattresses for sale on Facebook Marketplace, sending several messages to several different people.
Friday morning, fairly early, one of them had replied, and I talked them down to $50 and arranged to meet them At their apartment in Bentonville.
About that time, my mom let me know that there was a miscommunication with the tire shop, so the shop that she had expected to get the tires flipped around on Thomas’s car was not able to keep the appointment. So she called tire tracks and headed over To Rogers to get Thomas’s car taken care of.
Since I was already heading to Bentonville, I figured I would swing by and pick up my mom and we could Work on cleaning out the van or whatever, and on my way to her, I was able to actually go pick up the mattress, so I took some recycling stuff to the recycling center, picked up my mom from tire tracks, And headed over to Bentonville to pick up the mattress.
I had my mom lie down on it to see if it was going to work, and it seemed like it was going to, so I went ahead and gave him the $50. He had told me that it was clean and As we were leaving, my mom got the phone call from tire tracks that they were starting to work on the tire flipping job As we were leaving, my mom got a phone call barely used, so it seemed like a great deal.
As we were leaving, my mom got a call from tire tracks, letting her know that they were getting , so we headed straight back to tire tracks, arriving just as they were pulling the vehicle out of the bay and into a parking place.
From there, my mom headed over to see if she could get pine shavings for our little toilet, but they didn’t have what she needed.
While she was looking for that, I headed over to the AutoZone in Pea Ridge and bought a whole crap ton of parts.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention! When I first bought Rover, sometimes I noticed that it would pull really hard to the right, like dangerously hard. I wasn’t sure exactly what the issue was, because it wasn’t reproducible. But as we were driving to pick up the mattress, the issue happened again, a0unt when we got to the apartment complex, I felt the rims on all four wheels, and the front passenger Phil was super duper hot.
😬
Which meant that I either had a seized caliper piston, seized guide pin bolt, bad brake hose, or bad master cylinder, or some combination of those.
Lovely.
So when I went to AutoZone, I ordered both front calipers, as well as front brake hoses, front brake pads, front brake rotors, and rear brake pads.
Not only that, but I ordered a battery, a starter, an alternator, and a belt.
🙃
I probably bought more stuff, but I can’t think of it right now. Oh! I bought parabolic Stick-On mirrors to put on the mirrors to make it safer to change lanes since we’re in a big behemoth that doesn’t have many side windows.
After buying all the parts at AutoZone, I headed over to my mom’s place, unloaded a bunch of bins into her basement that are going to stay there while we’re on our trip, and then I set to measuring and cutting the foam mattress.
I needed to trim off about 9 and 1/2 in, so I grabbed a tape measure, marked everything out, and then used my mom’s box cutter.
Cutting up a foam mattress is not as easy as I thought it was going to be. 🙃
After measuring twice and cutting once, and then cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting some more, I was finally able to work through the foam mattress without mutilating it too badly. 😅
With most of my bins out of the van and into my mom’s basement, I had much more space to start organizing the van. I brought out the mattress that I had just cut up, and gratefully, it fit fairly snugly into the slot where I wanted it to go.
I don’t remember exactly when, but I also found Dad the reason my check engine light was on was that the evap hose, the big fat one, that goes to the charcoal canister in the back, was completely split open, so all the fuel vapors were going right out into the atmosphere instead of cycling through the system properly.
Anyway, so I started doing some arranging of things, getting my mama’s bed into place, starting to arrange the rest of the van In the hopes that I would find a good way of packing everything so that it would be easy to get to everything, not too crayons, and relatively comfortable.
My mom didn’t have any twin bed sheets, so I left some of the new ones that I had bought with her to wash really quickly, along with some other clothes that I had, and then I headed out.
I don’t remember how the rest of the night went, but I know that I Believe that I went to the neighborhood market and bought some stuff there.
I had been hoping that we could head out on our trip on Friday, but it just… Wasn’t realistic.
I think I worked on trying to get drawers put into place in Rover instead of the bins that we used last year. It’s a lot easier to pull your clothes out of drawers then rifling through a bin or a suitcase.
I moved all of my equipment to the south side of the greenhouse, parking both my trailers, both my excavators, my skid steer, my two other vans, my pickup truck, and my Civic… Oh, and the lawn mower… All in the same area.
I filled in my little camping toilet. I mowed mowed the grass around the greenhouse area, and I think I played a little bit in the creek.
I think it was actually then, that I went back to the neighborhood market to grab some comfort food.
It’s funny… I made a heck of a lot of progress, getting quite a bit of stuff done, but I remember feeling like I didn’t get much done because I was still so far away from being ready to leave on our trip.
Anyway, that was Friday the 7th. I’m sure I probably spent a bunch of time on the internet and YouTube. I’ve been following Caitlin Clark’s career in the WNBA, something never thought I would ever do (follow what’s going on in the WNBA 🙃).
I probably also watched a few episodes of House. I’ve already watched every episode of every season in the past, but it’s been long ago enough that I don’t really remember The episodes.
Yeah, fallen completely off the bandwagon in every area. 😕
Saturday the 7th.
I thought for sure I was going to be ready to go Saturday. I figured maybe 3:00 in the afternoon before I was ready to go, but boy did I underestimate things.
😕
The day started out with a cool little experience. I woke up relatively early, but of course, it gets light early here, and so I decided to walk down to the creek first thing in the morning after getting up. As I was walking down, I noticed that there was a river otter or something like that swimming around in the creek In the part between the two springs.
I wasn’t able to get my camera out quickly enough to take a picture or a video, unfortunately. I definitely scared it quite a bit, as it swam over to the stump leftovers of the tree that had fallen across the creek that I cut up a couple weeks ago or so, and then climbed up the roots to the top of the bank and disappeared into the brush.
Made me second-guess myself on whether what I saw last time was a beaver or that same otter.
This thing was quite large, actually, whatever it was.
Anyway, I got to working on packing and organizing Rover. I figured that I could be done and ready by about 3:00 in the afternoon, but boy oh boy did I get that wrong.
Oh, I think I already said that. 🙃
I worked on trying to get drawers underneath the mattresses instead of bins, And my mom came over for a little while and helped out.
Before she came, I had been trying to remove the blade/ brackets that the old seats would have been bolted to, but it was a significant challenge because the bolts were fastened with nuts on the other end, so I couldn’t just zip them off with my impact wrench. I had to be both above the van and below it at the same time.
As challenging as it was, it took me probably a good 30 minutes just to get one of the brackets off, having to get a bit creative and contort myself To be able to reach both the wrench and my impact at the same time.
While I was under there, I also realized that there was an old old battery tray with a crazy old battery inside it.
Looks like it was the old location for the house battery perhaps prior to getting a generator?
Anyway, I got that assembly taken off, with a battery inside that was blown apart and completely dried out. I also got one of the brackets off inside Rover, and when my mom arrived, A gave her impact wrench duties while I crawled under the van to hold the nuts on the other end. That made things go a heck of a lot faster, and we were able to get the other three brackets off in no time.
Having the brackets out of the way meant reducing the trip hazards for my mom as well as making the ground flat enough to stack things on top without undue pressure at the point where the bin or whatever else was touching the bracket.
My Mom had brought over some of her clothes and what not, and we started putting the drawers in the van and having my mom put her clothes in them to try and do a dry run and see if everything was going to fit where we hoped it would go.
After getting all of her stuff loaded into Rover, still more at her house that needed to be loaded up, but the bulk of it in this go round, I had her go ahead and take off to go do things that she needed to do, as there wasn’t much she was going to be able to help me with from there.
I was still hopeful that we were going to be able to leave on Saturday, but as the day went on and on and on, it just got less and less realistic.
It took hours and hours and hours of going through tools and parts and what not to figure out what all was going to go with us on the trip.
A month ago, or whatever it was, when my mom and I were sorting through all of my tools and separating everything out and trying to get everything organized, I never got to the point of putting everything back together bags like I used to have them, so I basically ended up having to go back through all of my tool bags and check everything that was in them, and find all the different places where the tools had been separated out, and rebuild each of my tool bags with the tools that we were going to need for the trip.
It was a heck of a lot more work than what I expected.
I took the time to change the oil in that whole process, so that was good, at least.
I also had some odd concern that I’m not sure where comes from. Maybe it comes from that time back when I was 17, when I built wikiups Up Rock canyon that burnt down in the middle of the night while we were sleeping in them.
Anyway, for some reason, I was rather concerned about something spontaneously catching fire and burning up my vehicles and equipment. Maybe a Lithium-Ion battery. Maybe my jump box. Maybe some kind of chemical. I don’t know, but I just kept worrying about it.
So that was a bit of a stress that had me a little frazzled.
By the time I got even close To being ready to head over to my mom’s place to finish sorting through and packing up the van, it was already almost sundown.
So I reluctantly gave up on leaving on Saturday, and I headed over to AutoZone to pick up a fuel filter that I had purchased earlier in the day. The store closed at 9:00, so I raced over there to get there before it closed. I also bought a couple of gallons of coolant because I didn’t have coolant yet for it.
Anyway, at my mom’s place, spent a good bit of time trying to replace the fuel filter. Bringing the specialty tools that are required for disconnecting the fuel lines on that vehicle was one of the items on my checklist that I had already accomplished, so I grabbed the specialty disconnect tools Aunt was able to easily disconnect the side closest to the pump.
The side closest to the engine was a different story, however. For whatever reason, even though the connection is facing away from oncoming dust And water and what not, it was still an absolute pain in the butt to get off.
I wanted to replace it because the fuel filter that was on it was actually the wrong filter for the van. It was so fat that it couldn’t fit into the retaining bracket that was specifically designed to hold the fuel filter. That was a concern because Ford decided to design the vehicle so that the catalytic converter is right next to the fuel filter.
😶
I didn’t like having the filter, sticking out toward the catalytic converter because it couldn’t fit in its retainer, just hanging out there next to the hottest part of the whole vehicle.
So even though it had probably been fine for a long long time, it was not something I was comfortable with, so A worked at it and worked at it and worked at it until I was finally able to get the challenging side off. I found that somehow, the fuel filter had rusted where it connected to the main fuel line, so it was just stuck in place. I ended up having to get the pair of pliers to hold the line while I twisted the fuel filter in order to get it to break free.
Once the filter was actually able to spin, then I knew I was getting somewhere, and it wasn’t too long after that before I was able to finish removing the filter from the fuel line.
After getting that done, I I head ed over to Walmart again to load up on food for the trip, and then I headed back to Haven Hill.
And then I had something rather interesting happen. I was really dirty from working in the field all day, greasy from working on car stuff, Dusty and dirty from being sweaty and having the dust kick up all over me in the wind, so I decided to take a midnight bath in the creek.
So I grabbed my soap bin and little microfiber towel and glove washcloth thingy, and I headed down to the creek.
I decided to check on my little burn barrel to see if there were any Kohl’s left, and I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow I ended up dropping my phone into the burn barrel. It disappeared into the ash, and there were indeed live coals still in the burn barrel, plenty of them. In fact, it was full of live coals.
😬
I quickly reached my hand into the ash to try and grab my phone, but I couldn’t feel it right away.
Knowing that the burn barrel was full of live coals, and my $700 phone was hanging out with them, and no longer having a flashlight to see anything because it was midnight, so everything had to be done by feel, since I couldn’t feel the phone right away, I knocked over the burn barrel to knock all of the ash and cinders and Kohl’s and everything out onto bedrock Bank of the creek.
The burn barrel was nearly half full of Ash and everything, So there was a lot to sift through.
Again, since I didn’t have another source of light, all I could see was the gazillions of glowing coals on the bedrock.
My phone clearly, even though the flashlight was on, must have been pointing down, because there was no glow coming from my phone.
Concerned that my phone was still at the bottom of a pile of hot coals, I started kicking the ash and cinders and what not all around, trying to thin the piles so that it would be a lot less likely that my phone was going to continue to be buried in coals and Ash.
Even after kicking all the coals around, I couldn’t find my phone anywhere, so I stumbled carefully along the bank of the creek in the pitch black, up past the spring, winding through the path through the woods, and up To Rover. In Rover, I had another phone that at least had some charge, and I turned the flashlight on and booked it back down to the bedrock Bank, shining the light everywhere trying to find the phone.
Eventually, I was able to locate my pixel 7 pro covered in Ash and no longer powered on. I hoped that maybe it had just turned off because it had gotten hot, and when I picked it up, it was crazy hot to the touch.
So I crossed my fingers and hoped that maybe somehow the phone was salvageable, even though it had just been cooked pretty severely.
In addition to the phone itself being super duper hot, the protective case was melted. There wasn’t really much I could do immediately, because the phone had to cool down before I would know whether it was okay or damaged or what, so I took it out of its case, blew off the ash, and laid the phone directly on the cool rock, and figured I would just leave it there to cool off while I took my bath.
So I took a leisurely bath, despite it being rather Cool outside, and then I picked up the phone, which was still quite hot, walked up to Rover, started the engine, and turned the AC on, propping the phone up against the HVAC vent.
It wasn’t too long before the AC had significantly cooled the phone, so I pressed the power button and crossed my fingers.
Gratefully, the phone did power on. I held the button for what seemed like an eternity before the colored Google letters glowed on the screen.
So the first big scare was out of the way, it did power back on. The next question was whether or not it would actually function.
After a successful boot up, I was able to successfully use the touch screen to navigate, and I seemed to be able to run apps and processes like normal.
I did notice one thing, though, there was a yellow spot in the top right corner of the phone screen, about the color of mustard, and about the size of my ring fingernail or maybe my pinky nail.
And it just was… bright yellow. 🙃
No matter what I looked at, unless the color was really dark, that yellow spot was there, which I learned later means that the sub pixels in that area are most likely damaged, So they present themselves as yellow except when it’s really dark or black, and then you don’t see the yellow at all. But it’s like putting a slide on an overhead projector with a yellow spot on the projector screen itself.
If that makes sense.
Also, I noticed that my selfie camera lens was covered in Ash dust on the inside, so I popped the screen off the phone, and spent a good little while cleaning Ash out of the inside of the phone itself.
It was then that I also realized that the yellow burnt spot on the screen was the only place where the screens backing plate had a break in it, and so it must have overheated super badly from the back side and because the screen backing plate had an open spot there, the heat from the back scorched the screen in only that spot.
Anyway, so my phone seems to work just fine so far, other than the mustard spot that I get to see every time I use the phone. I haven’t verified that the cameras still work. At least not the lenses on the back side. I’ve used the selfie camera, and it seemed to be fine, but the other cameras were on the side of the phone where it got hottest, so I guess I’ll figure that out at some point soon.
Anyway, that was my Saturday. I’m grateful that my phone at least mostly still works. It’s what I’m using to dictate this journal entry right now. 🙂
After that, I’m pretty sure I veged out for a little bit online, and then crashed.
The last couple of nights, it’s gotten down into the 50s overnight, I think, so it’s actually gotten relatively chilly inside the van, Which I like quite a bit. 😁
And that… Was Saturday the 7th. 😊
Sunday!
The 8th.
Surely, if I was almost ready to leave Saturday night, then I should be ready to leave relatively early on Sunday, right?
😅
Well, I had tentatively decided to leave the on-again off again seizing caliper for later in our trip, thinking that since so much of the trip was going to be spent on highways without needing to do much breaking, maybe I could get lucky, and we could drive most, or all, of the trip without needing to change the caliper.
But then I looked at the actual brake pads on that wheel, and they were just a few sheets of paper thick, by the looks of it. Ready to grind at any time.
So that moved up the timetable to immediately.🙃
So I headed into Pea Ridge, stopping first at the O’Reilly’s to see if they had 1/2-in inside diameter fuel line, which they did. AutoZone doesn’t carry it, but O’Reilly’s, though their prices are a little bit higher than AutoZone’s, generally, they do tend to have some of the specialty parts and supplies that other places don’t carry.
So I got the hose there.
Then I headed on over to the AutoZone, wanting to do the work At the store itself just in case I needed anything.
While I was there, I bought a thermostat as well to be better prepared for potential issues while driving on our Trek West.
The caliper replacing job went decently well. Of course, it took a long long time, but it went relatively well.
At first, it was my intention to replace both the caliper and the brake hose, since I was already in there and I might as well replace the hose at the same time. Unfortunately, though, the fastener that connects the rubber brake hose to the metal brake line was rusted and in a super awkward place to get to.
I tried a couple times to get it to dislodge, but then I decided to just verify that it was indeed a seized caliber and not an issue with the brake hose, and if I could verify that, then I was was just going to replace the caliper and not the hose.
Trying to replace the hose could come with all sorts of challenges. Sometimes the metal is so old that you end up bending and damaging the metal brake line. And with this band being as rusty as it is under me, it looks great on the outside, but it’s rusty underneath, I decided I didn’t dare risk trying to disconnect the line from the hose.
Gratefully, when I did the test to see if it was the caliper, the guide pins, or the hose that was the issue, it turned out to be the caliper.
🥳
Well, I guess party-face would have been if it were just a guide pin issue, but still, I was a lot happier to have it not be the gray codes, given how challenging of a job that was going to be.
So I replaced the caliper, doing the little tricks That I know to pre-bleed everything via gravity, so I didn’t have to have a second person there to Get the bleeding job done.
That took a good little while, but it was relatively successful.
I still did a handful of manual bleed cycles, but for the most part, it was just a gravity bleed.
One odd thing that I ran into, the caliper didn’t come with a new banjo bolt. 😶
Calipers always come with new banjo bolts.
Gratefully, I went back into the store and was able to get another banjo bolt for it. They had one in stock, and they gave it to me for free because mine was missing.
🙏
So I got that one all taken care of, new caliper, and I put new brake pads on it as well, of course. The rotor was definitely improperly worn, but I decided to just keep it as it was. If it were a customer’s car, then I would have most likely replaced the rotor, giving them the option first, of course.
Since it was my own vehicle, I was fine with it not being perfect.
So I was there for quite a while working on the caliber job on the one side, but I got it done, and then I headed over to the driver side to do the pad slap.
But when I pulled off the wheel to begin the job, I looked at the brake pads that were on it, and they were basically brand new. The stuck caliper had burned through the pads on the other side crazy quickly, but the pads on the driver side were still almost new.
So I didn’t bother changing anything on the driver side, just leaving it as it was. Then I headed back over to the O’Reilly’s to try and get my hands on a half inch splice connector to be able to splice that damaged evap line that was causing the check engine light to come on.
No dice.
Apparently half inch metal splice connectors aren’t a thing at auto parts stores. I could get it at Lowe’s, but Lowe’s is quite a ways away.
So I headed home from there, loaded up a handful of more tools that I realized that, while I was doing the caliber job, realized I wanted to have with me. That included my torque wrenches and A a fan clutch removal tool set.
I also took the time to go back through each of the vehicles and make sure I had them ready for storage, batteries disconnected, doors locked, everything out that I wanted out, etc.
Once I was done there, I went down to the creek and took a quick bath, as I had gotten quite dirty doing the jobs all day.
Oh! I forgot!
After I finished the caliber job, when I started the vehicle, I heard a weird whining noise. I tried and tried to figure out what it was. It sounded like a pulley was whining, but none of them were making noises when I used my stethoscope to check them out.
Amazingly, and I’ve never run into this in all my years as a mechanic, I found the source of the noise, and it was coming from the PCV valve on the passenger side of the engine.
😶
Good gravy! The PCV valve can make that kind of noise?
Anyway, I was happy to find that the AutoZone had the right PCD valves in stock, so I slapped it in
I ran into Jim and Stephanie at the Walmart gas station, we pulled up at the same time, me to top off the last few gallons to make sure we started the trip with a full tank, and they because they were pretty much on empty as they were heading home from church.
I headed over to my mama’s place I think around 3:00? I don’t remember exactly.
I figured it might take me an hour to get everything situated and organized and ready for us to drive away.
No such luck.
It took forever to get all my tools situated, partly because I spent the whole crap ton of time trying to figure out how to fit a shovel inside the van, just in case we ran into an issue where we got stuck. I thought it was a great idea, it was my mom’s idea, but I just couldn’t find a reasonable place to store the shovel.
There was lots of arranging and rearranging and moving stuff all around trying to make sure everything worked. Several times when I thought I had everything set, I realized that things that I had previously packed were pushing against the drawers, causing the drawers to stick out from underneath my mattress much further than they were supposed to. They were supposed to be basically flush with my mattress.
It definitely would have been easier if I were okay leaving the drawers sticking out further. It would have given me a heck of a lot more room to situate the tools, but in the end, it worked out.
I arranged and rearranged and packed and sorted and what not. I also cleaned out about three Walmart grocery bags worth of stuff that I was going to throw away.
I went through the bin that I had recently brought over to my mom’s place just a day or two prior, pulling out a handful of additional items to take with us, including some essential oils, lavender for Burns, just in case one of us gets the burn of some kind, and peppermint as a deterrent for mice when parking in campground parking lots.
For those who were Reading my blog last year, You might remember that we picked up a mouse at some point that ate through a fairly substantial amount of our food.
Anyway, peppermint oil is supposedly a deterrent. You fill a spray bottle with water, and then you drop in maybe 20 or 30 drops of peppermint oil, and then you shake up the water and spray it in the wheel wells and in the engine bay and what not, and the strength of the peppermint irritates the eyes of the mice, and they leave your vehicle alone.
That’s the Hope, at least.
With that in mind, I sprayed down Happy, my Z3 that my mom drives.
Cross the fingers. I hope it works. 🤞
I went back through the bins that I had brought to my mom’s house night before last, grabbing a few extra things to bring with us, and then we headed out!
We’re currently stopped at a Love’s truck stop in the middle of Kansas, And boy am I ready for my eyes to close.
😴
Though I’m probably going to vedge out just a little bit because… I need to unwind a bit.
🙃
Rover is making some funny noises, And we stopped in the first 10 minutes of our drive to see if we could figure out one of the noises, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I’m just going to push on through and pretend it’s not making any noises. 🙃
😅
Boy, am I tired!
The biggest question on my mind right now, is what kind of gas mileage are we going to get?
Smart money says somewhere between 10 and 12 mi to the gallon, I think. Anything higher than that is gravy. If we could manage to hit 13+, I’d be stoked.
Rover’s odometer starting mileage was 248,631.
If he survives the trip, it’ll probably be around 256k by the time we make it back to Arkansas.
🤞
G’night, y’all.
Love and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 