(written on the 12th)
My back was a heck of a lot better this morning in comparison to yesterday morning, having not used that leg support thingy that’s specifically supposed to help back issues. 😅
So that’ll probably get donated to the DI when we get to Utah.
We did some rearranging of the Van contents and then headed into Walmart to buy food and ice and what not for the day before heading back on the road.
Our travels took us through Wolf Creek pass and the Rio grande national Forest, an area that I thought was absolutely beautiful.
Sadly, lots of other people think it’s beautiful as well, so it was full of new construction, filling up the narrow canyon with all sorts of brand new buildings and RV parks and what not.
That’s the hard thing about beautiful places, is other people, of course, also think they’re beautiful, but they want to put buildings on those beautiful places, and I would rather live in a dugout cave in a hillside or sleep in a hammock than build a building In my beautiful Haven.
But I can’t fault people for loving the place, because it is absolutely beautiful, and perhaps extreme view of what feels like home to me is clearly not the norm for most other people.
Coming out of the other side of the pass, we saw a sign for chimney Rock, which both of us, for whatever reason, thought was in Wyoming. Neither one of us had ever been before, so we pointed Rover’s nose toward the big tall rock sticking out of the top of the mountain, and made our way over the entrance area.
Unfortunately, the park had just closed just as we arrived, but realistically, it’s just a big rock sticking out of the top of the mountain. So we enjoyed the Vista, took some pictures from a few different angles, and called it good.
At some point, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, I overheated the brakes pretty good coming down the path because A didn’t think about putting it in a lower gear and was just using my brakes the whole time. 😅
So the brand new brake pads on the passenger front were smoking super badly, while the brakes on the driver side weren’t smoking at all. That was a little odd, but I chalked it up to the brake pads themselves, as there was no difference in temperature of the calipers themselves.
I’m grateful there was no difference in temperature from the calipers themselves, as I had just barely replaced that caliber.
It was about that time that we started hearing what sounded like a bad wheel bearing. I had at some point in time mention to my mom that we needed to double check the torque on the wheel cuz I hadn’t ever done that, but I completely forgot about it. So though I thought about it in the beginning, I completely forgot about it Aunt thus, didn’t Dawn on me later, that the sound might actually have been from A loose wheel and not a wheel bearing.
I kept thinking wheel bearing because every time we would take a more sharp right turn, that’s when the sound would happen. And as a mechanic, I know that when you take a right turn and it makes a bad noise, that means the actual problem is on the left side.
So we pulled into a Walmart parking lot somewhere in the middle of the high mountain passes. The town was called Pagosa springs, Colorado.
We parked at the far end of the parking lot at the Walmart, and I started pulling everything apart. I had wheel bearings for the front, having come prepared with all of that just in case, and when I pulled everything apart, yes, the front wheel bearing was making some noise, not as much as I would have expected for what we were dealing with, but it was making some noise, and I reasoned to myself that the noise would be a lot worse under load than it would be without any pressure on the bearing at all, so it seemed like the smart thing to do would be to go ahead and replace the bearings since there was a sound.
So I replaced the bearings, greasing everything up and putting everything back together, but I wasn’t able to get it all the way back together because I realized that the AutoZone people accidentally gave me the wrong wheel seals.
Fortunately, there was a nice little older couple from Utah that was down also visiting the area, and they drove me to the nearby O’Reilly’s, where I bought the correct wheel seals.
Came back, installed everything, and there was no more noise when spending the wheel. So I figured all was good.
Well I had been working on it, there were a bunch of things that were going sideways, that I can’t even remember anymore. Sideways enough that I melted down at one point. Not as badly as I could have, but definitely a fair bit.
We got ourselves back on the road, and it wasn’t too long before we realized the sound was still there.
😕
I had noticed periodically that there was a clunk when I would come to a stoplight. Sometimes it would happen as I was coming to a stop. Sometimes it would happen as I was coming off the line. In addition to that, the sound that was so bad turning to the right also started happening while we were turning to the left, and by the time we made it to Durango, Colorado, it was making the sound while just going straight ahead.
So we pulled into the AutoZone parking lot Durango, and I was pretty discouraged at this point feeling like I’d made yet another bad decision or made another decision that made sense at the time that invariably turned out badly.
That’s been one of my larger struggles lately, it just feels like every decision that I make turns out to be bad no matter whether I go forward with a ready fire aim approach or whether I think it out and make a good solid logical decision.
So I was discouraged but not totally melted down at that point. Still relatively in good spirits, able to joke around with the AutoZone people whose power had just gone out as we got there. Thinking that I was dealing with a bunch of wheel bearing issues, I ordered a whole bunch of wheel bearing parts for the rear left, but then when I went and pulled off the hubcap, I realized what the issue was:
That wheel that I hadn’t properly torqued all the way back just west of Dodge City Kansas, had come loose and had rattled so hard and so badly that it had ruined the rim, making the hole the wheel studs go through twice the size of what they were supposed to be, and grinding about a third or possibly more of each of the lug nuts off.
😶
So there I was, the torque Nazi himself, the one who makes sure that absolutely everything is always properly torqued down, decides to not torque something down, one of the very rare occasions that I don’t, and it turned out to to cause us absolutely massive delays and me lots of money.
I didn’t need to replace the wheel bearings in the Walmart parking lot in Pagosa springs. And now because of my oversight, I needed to find a new rim, and I was going to need to remove and replace all eight wheel studs.
That’s when I made a ready fire aim decision.
It didn’t dawn on me that the AutoZone wouldn’t have wheel studs. So I started taking everything apart, not a small job to do, as you have to not just jack up the then and pull the wheel off, but you’ve got to pull off the caliper and caliper bracket and rotor as well, and then you have to adjust the parking brake assembly enough to squeeze the wheel studs past.
So I got everything pulled apart, we managed to pay for and buy all the wheel bearing stuff Even with them having the power out, only to realize that it wasn’t wheel bearing issues at all. Just that stupid decision to not properly torque the wheel immediately, Which led to me forgetting later. I wonder if one of the reasons why I forgot to do it later was that I always torque everything down, so it’s not something that I would normally have to remember to do.
Who knows. Either way, we found ourselves in the AutoZone parking lot with a bunch of wheel bearing parts, but only one wheel stud in stock. It was going to be until the 18th before they could get in the wheel studs that we needed.
That meant we were either stuck in that parking lot with everything taken apart, or I had to put everything back together, including studs that I had already pulled out of the axle.
So that’s why I call it a ready fire aim decision, because I did all that without finding out first whether they even had the parts in stock.
By that time, I was discouraged and melting down pretty badly because I had made that foolish decision to postpone torquing the wheel properly, which only would have taken 5 minutes to have done right then and there, and then it wasted all that time and energy and effort in the Walmart parking lot in Pagosa springs, and then there I was with a completely torn apart rear wheel assembly, and now I had to put everything back together, just as broken as it was before, if we were going to be able to move the van at all.
As I went to put everything back together, because of the stress on the wheel studs, two of the bolts completely sheared off, so we only had six out of the eight, and one of those six wasn’t properly seated and couldn’t get properly seated, so we had four tightened lug nuts on one side, and then the other side of the rim had two broken studs and one tight stud and one not fully seated stud.
😶
At that point, I was emotionally fully melted down, and not very functional in terms of being able to think well. I knew what The prudent decisions were, but I didn’t want to make the prudent decisions because that would mean losing more time on the Trip.
I just wanted to get moving at least forward and not backward, so to speak.
Nobody else in town had the wheel studs we needed. All needed to be ordered in from out of state, and so our only reasonable option was to put our hopes in the junkyard, the only one in town, that was about 10 mi back East on the road that we had come in on.
By that time, I had already been working in the dark, in the junkyard was long closed And wouldn’t open until 9:00 a.m. The next morning.
My mom suggested that we go ahead and stay, which was the better decision. I wanted to go forward and try and make it up to our first beautiful Vista destination, South Fork Mineral springs Creek…
But we had a bum wheel, and I knew what was the more prudent decision, I just loathed the idea of losing yet another day because I didn’t remember to torque the wheel down properly.
But in the end, that was the right decision, and I knew it.
In the meantime, I made backup arrangements, by ordering parts from the AutoZone in Montrose Colorado. They didn’t have what we needed, but they ordered them from the Grand junction hub, and so if worst came to worst, at least if we could limp our way from Durango to Montrose, we would have the wheel studs there waiting for us.
Neither of us were up making dinner after that nightmare, so we decided to head over to the Wendy’s that was just up the road.
It was just one of those days where everything went sideways. It’s been going that way for several days for me, where it feels like no matter how intelligent or how well thought out or how little thought out or whatever, everything just goes sideways, and everything I guess I won’t say goes As bad as it could possibly go, because because things can always go worse, but it was just one of those things where it’s ridiculous the number of things that just keep going wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong.
And it didn’t end after we left the AutoZone parking lot. When we went to the Wendy’s nearby, it turned out to be the worst Wendy’s that I’ve ever been to and I think for my mom as well. The fries were cold Aunt. The burgers were cold. They forgot to put sweet and sour sauce in the bag for the nuggets, and they gave my mom a little bit of attitude when she, very kindly went back to let them know that we didn’t have the sweet and sour sauce in our bag.
After going online and looking at the reviews for that Wendy’s, we certainly weren’t alone. The issues that we experienced were echoed by many other reviewers.
From there, I decided that it would be good to drive down to the Maverick on the East end of town, close to the junkyard, so we could just wake up and head over to the junkyard first thing. So we headed to the Maverick, got ourselves situated for the night and crashed.
Oh, one of the things that I forgot to mention about the night was that after we had gotten everything back together, and I was in the middle of my meltdown, my mom and I ended up talking for probably 20 or 30 minutes before going to Wendy’s, me melting down and expressing my frustrations about all of my efforts in life and where everything has ended up. I live in basically daily devastation, with overwhelm as my baseline, discouragement the norm, and desperation replacing hope.
So as days go, this was… a really really hard one. So far, the trip has been really hard for me, feeling like I’ve made all the wrong decisions, like everything I touch turns to crap, and I’m regularly on the verge of just calling it quits and putting my mom on a plane.
The more that time goes by, and the more that I see the circumstances of my life and the way my brain works, the more I realize that My brain isn’t capable of handling all of this. That’s not a thought born out of momentary desperation or overwhelm or one that comes only in the throes of pain: It comes after lots of thinking and recognition of what I am and am not and what I am capable of and what I am not capable of.
I’m not sure what to do about that right now. I know I’ve had people recommend that I see therapists or take medication…
As far as therapists go, I’ve seen therapists multiple times in my life, and no therapist that I’ve ever been to has ever been able to do anything for me in any of the struggles that I’ve gone to them with. It’s kind of like doctors. I don’t want to spend a whole crap ton of money, and honestly, there’s not anything that I can conceive of that a therapist could even do for me with the main issue in my life because it’s a decision that I have to make that I can’t make. I either have to throw away what I believe or embrace it, and I don’t have the ability to do either.
And no therapist has the ability to choose what I think is moral and immoral and have me believe it. Those are decisions that I make for myself.
And medications… Honestly, I think medications, for the most part, are overprescribed and do more damage than they do good.
I believe they have their place, some of them, But I’m not comfortable with them for me.
Lift the World 