(written on the 30th)
After decent night’s sleep in the Walmart parking lot, having woken up a good while earlier than I needed to be in Payson to pick up my mom, I decided to take the time to clean out the van a bit.
So I gathered up trash and threw it away. I think I did a little bit of shopping, ate breakfast, and then had the thought that I had probably better check to see if our spare tire still had air in it.
It didn’t.
Lovely.
It’s no wonder that junkyard owner has super bad reviews.
Grrr. 😒
So now I was back to having tire issues, while needing to pick up my mom to leave and continue on our journey west… ish.
Hoping to get lucky, I jumped back on Facebook Marketplace looking for a better deal than $180 per tire… and hopefully without a repeat of the Kansas experience. 😅
Amazingly, I did find someone selling a set of four that, like Kansas, were basically new. This time, though, the date on The tires was acceptable (they even had a photo of the tires with the manufacturing date on them. They were asking $250, and I negotiated down to $220.
So I arranged to pick the tires up later, headed south to pick up my mom, broke the tire news to her, got her all loaded up, and headed north.
We stopped off in Pleasant Grove to pick up the tires, and they appeared to be exactly as advertised, so I handed him the cash and loaded them up.
From there, it was over to my brother’s school where I chatted for a bit with one of the teachers while we waited for Jared. When Jared got there, we made some exchanges of things (he left us with a parting gift, and I left him with a book for my Dad, because it was likely that he was going to see him before I did, and said our goodbyes,
Had some things to pick up from Richard’s place, as well as some things to give him, so we headed there next, dropping the flat tire and rim and one of the good tires off at the Walmart auto center in Herriman before heading over to Richard’s place.
Chatted with Richard for a bit, picked up the wheel/tire combo, and headed out.
On the road again. 🚐
First stop post Utah/Salt Lake Counties was one of my mom’s friend’s places in Smithfield, during which I worked.
Following that, we met my Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia at a local Mexican place just a few minutes away from my mom’s friend’s place.
It was really good to see them again, especially since they are getting ready to move. They’ve been in that same house for… Maybe 40 years? I don’t remember. It’ll be weird to have them somewhere else.
I’m grateful we were able to connect on short notice, since I hadn’t even mentioned to them we were coming until we were basically on our way, I think. But with my mom wanting to see a friend up there in the same town, it was a no brainer.
Oh hey! Guess what?!?!?! 16.33 mpg on that tank!
🥳
From there, we headed up Logan Canyon. It was after dark, so there wasn’t much to see, so I thought maybe it would be good for us to try and find a place to stop as early as we could, so there was a better chance that we could enjoy the beautiful drive the next day.
I think the first place I looked was a no-go… Or maybe it was just that we stopped off to use the bathroom and it wasn’t a failed stop. I don’t remember at this point. Anyway, I saw a road on the map pointing to a campground joe we left the main road Aunt headed up a little side Canyon along a river until we got to the campground.
The campgrounds turned out to be closed, but there were several pullouts along the way to it, and we stopped at one that looked pretty decent, organized everything for the night and crashed.
~ stephen
Lift the World 