(written on the 10th and 11th)
It was a super rough night last night. I brought along my leg pillow that keeps my legs elevated and supposedly decreases the pressure on my back, but I think I’ve learned pretty definitively that it actually makes everything a heck of a lot worse. I noticed it I think a couple two or three times back when I was living in the 13801 house, and the first time I tried it again here on the road trip, I was in bad shape when I woke up.
Well, I should say in bad shape when I woke up for the last time, as I was tossing and turning and up all night last night.
My back was a major issue, and then I also forgot my routine from the last road trip I went on with my mom. She snores pretty loudly, and being the light sleeper that I am, she could barely make a whistle through her nose and I’d probably wake up, but she’s a really loud snorer, so I have to put my headphones in and put my noise maker on, and I totally spaced that about last year’s trip, so between the pain and the noise, I didn’t really get much of any sleep.
So I woke up in really bad shape, and it was enough that I was in that space where I just am ready for life to be done. Pain is really hard to deal with, physical pain, with all my other struggles right now. It’s already hard enough for me to find reasons to stick around without the physical pain, and then when you add that, with no respite, I just am ready to go.
This is an exaggeration, but I think in some small way it’s like people who are being tortured who would rather just be killed instead of continue to endure the pain of torture.
No, the pain isn’t anywhere near torture, but there’s just something about near constant pain and no ability to relieve it.
Anyway, so the day was pretty rough.
One nice thing about the night was that we were able to stay at a Love’s Travel Stop, and they didn’t give us any grief. That was also good because we hadn’t yet picked up the pine shavings for our porta potty, so we needed to have a 24-hour available toilet.
After getting up and getting ourselves situated, We resumed our Trek West, heading toward Dodge City and beyond.
About 30 miles before Dodge City, we had an unexpected incident with the rear driver’s tire. All the sudden there was just a loud pop /bang, and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the tire tread rolling down the highway behind us.
😶
So I quickly pulled over and looked at the tire, and it was still completely inflated, but the tread itself, all the way around the tire, had blown completely off like often happens with semi truck tires.
😶
Old Rubber.
So I packed up the van to go back and pick up our lost tread, took another look at the tire, looked at the maps and decided to instead of changing the tire out to put our spare on right then and there, just seeing if I could limp it all the way into Dodge City, so we popped ourselves back on the highway, going between 35 and 50 mph, and miraculously made it all the way to Dodge City, going a grand total of i think it was 392 miles on our first tank and burning through 27 gallons for an MPG of just a tich under 14.5!!!
😶
🥳🤣🥳🤣🥳
I never would have guessed. No joke, that first tank (and who knows what it’ll be from here) was better than ET’s first tank on the same exact stretch of highway! (Though it was raining for ET last year…
But still!!!
Amazing. 😊🙏🥳
Anyway, so while on the drive into Dodge, I had been calling different tire shops to see if they had the tire size that Rover requires, and several of them didn’t even have the right tire size. Of those that did, we got quotes everywhere from $180 for one tire with installation up to I think $250, maybe more.
I decided to take a look on Facebook Marketplace to see if anybody was selling the tire size that we needed, and quite quickly, I found a gentleman who was selling five supposedly brand new tires, a great Brand even, for $200 for all five.
He lived about 35 minutes Southwest of Dodge City, under normal driving speeds, but with us limping along, it was going to take about an hour.
Still, we decided to do it because five brand new tires was going to be the same price as one from a regular tire shop, so hopped back in the van and limped it along As we headed out toward his place.
We got to about 5 mi or so away from his place, when we turned onto a dirt road, and pretty much immediately the tire popped after turning on to the dirt/ gravel road.
As Mom said, about 200 ft is all we got.
So there wasn’t much of a choice at that point, didn’t want to ruin the rim, so I pulled all the tools out to change the tire, which is a bit of an ordeal because the Jack is being stowed in the side compartment which doesn’t have a lock on it, so I bury it the Jack behind a whole crap ton of other stuff that’s less enticing to a would-be thief.
Anyway, after getting all the tools pulled out, it ended up being a bit of a challenge just getting the vehicle jacked up because of how high off the ground it is. I tried I think two or three different spots before I finally gave up and put it underneath the axle. It’s fine to put it under the axle, it’s just the last place I like to put it.
Part of the challenge was that the road was a really fine dusty sand, so the jack would sink in a fair bit as it raised Rover up.
Eventually, I was successful at getting it up and getting the spare put on. I didn’t torque the wheel down with my torque wrench, just did some trigger pulls of the impact to temporarily get us going because I was in a hurry to get to the guy with the tires, figuring I’d properly torque the wheels later with the new tires–something like that.
Well, the “new” tires were new in that they had never been installed on a rim and driven on, but they were 16. years. old.
😶
Uh… no.
We drove a fair bit out of our way to get there, and… even though the rubber might look totally fine, you can’t trust 16-year-old rubber. 😕 In fact, i don’t think it’s uncommon for tire places to simply refuse to install tires that are more than 10 years old.
Old rubber.
😅
So yeah… those were a no go.
Ugh.
So now it was later in the day, and we were well past Dodge City, and it’s an uncommon tire size, and… yeah.
So we drove from there to Garden City, first on dirt roads, and then back in the main country road, with me cutting Rover’s engine over and over again as semi trucks loaded with some agricultural product drove past us the other direction stirring up massive clouds of dust that I didn’t want rapidly clogging up my brand new air filter.
While on the drive to Garden City, I was calling tire shops and gratefully managed to find one with the right sized tire in stock. It was far more than I wanted to pay, but it was a tire, and it got us going, and it was the same price as the cheapest one in Dodge City ($180ish after tax).
They also checked the air pressure on our spare, and though it took them a good little while to get it done, we left with a brand new tire.
From there, it was on to Tractor Supply to get pine shavings for the porto-potty I got for my mom; and following a successful purchase of the shavings, we were back on the road again.
With all the craziness of the last days, I was exhausted and well on my way to falling asleep at the wheel not too long into our continuing journey. Gratefully, my mom started talking, mentioning one of my posts and something I’d written about the WNBA.
I’m pretty passionate about what’s been going on since the arrival of Caitlin Clark, so I woke right up and went on a lengthy… whatever it was about my perspective on what’s happening.
😅
At the very least, the conversation helped me stay awake while driving. 🙃
After a long, frustrating day where we didn’t make the travel progress I was hoping to make, I wasn’t up for shopping for and making food, and neither was my mom, so we bought just a few little things from Walmart, ate dinner at Wendy’s, parked Rover at the Maverik on the Western end of town, and crashed.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 