Texas to Iowa

I've finally finished up with Texas and have moved on to Iowa. The trip up was a tad expensive and not only just fuel. I planned on taking three days to make the almost 1000-mile trip. The day I left I back tracked from Waco down to Temple to a Winnebago dealership to get some work done on the rig. We've had a hydraulic leak for months now and it really needs to get fixed. I tried to get the work done while we were in Boerne but the man didn't have the tool needed to fix the line. So I thought maybe a large dealership would have the ability to fix it. The line is leaking at the fitting so a new fitting needs to be crimped onto the end of what we thought was a jack line but turned out to be a line for the slide. Anyway, that was a wasted 60-mile run down to Temple as they couldn't do anything for me.

I left Temple around lunch time and headed up to Dallas to have a short visit with Alan. He had just finished Covenant orientation the previous day and was waiting at the hotel to be picked up by his trainer who was supposed to be there by six. I got there around 5 and we had just started to sit down to eat when his trainer showed up early. So we quickly said our goodbyes and I left right after he did.

I probably had driven almost an hour and had just gotten to the north side of Dallas when a truck in front of me lost a 55-gallon plastic trash can off the back of his truck. It bounced to the side of the road and I thought I'd get by it but a semi in the lane next to me in front went by and the draft caught it pulling it back onto the interstate. I had nowhere to go as that part of the road was elevated and I had a wall of jersey barriers on my right side. So I slowed down as fast as I could (I was in heavy traffic) and hit the can doing probably about 45. It made the awfulest racket as it got caught under the rig and I was dragging it down the road. I was thinking *please* don't let it go the rest of the way under the rig and take out a bunch of stuff with it and then hit the truck. So I'm dragging this thing about a quarter mile until I can get past the jersey barriers to pull over on the shoulder.

I get out and look and the bottom of the can is stuck between the exhaust for the generator and the front axle. I get back in and carefully back up about 10 feet (not supposed to back up with a car in tow) but all I do is drag the can backwards. Crap! It's not coming loose. So I call Alan and he immediately comes up with the idea to put the jacks down to lift up the front end. Awesome! So I leave the rig running (to keep as much air in the bags as possible) and manually lower the front jacks. Then I have a look and I can see daylight over the top of the can. Let me tell you that I was nervous as hell scootching under the front of that rig while cars and trucks were whizzing by not more than six feet from me. I'm thinking that if somebody hits the rig I'm toast. But I get the damn can out and I threw that stupid thing as far off the road as I could. Then I get back in, put the jacks up and am back on my way. I stopped to get a few hours sleep at a Flying J in Oklahoma but a truck next to me had his engine running all night so sleep was tenuous at best. I woke up at four and said the hell with it, I'll just go ahead and leave. At daylight I found a rest stop and pulled over for a couple more hours of sleep as it was much quieter.

I get to the campground in Topeka, KS on Saturday where I plan on staying for a couple days to have a visit with my son, Shane, and his family. It was good seeing Lucas. He has grown so much. He'll be two in November. He and Catherine took me out to dinner and brought me some "Cat booze" as David calls it. It had been over a month since I've had a good drink mainly because the stuff is so expensive that I haven't bought any. So that was a good visit.

I left at 10 Monday morning (Labor Day) for the last leg to Iowa. I had 350 miles to go and figured on getting there around 6 in the evening. I was almost to the Missouri/Iowa border when a car pulled along side of me honking the horn. I thought it was because I had drifted over a bit when they passed me. So I kept going. Before I'd left, I'd researched the places where I could stop for fuel. I was down to a quarter tank and approaching my first possibility for fuel so I was trying to calculate whether I should stop or not. In the end, I decided that since it was a holiday, I better stop just in case some of the stations were closed.

It was a good thing I did.

I found out why the car was honking at me. I had a flat tire on the Mariner. The truck is so light that the rig doesn't even know it's back there so I have no indication by feel that there is trouble. I had the back video camera on to keep an eye on things but I can't actually see the tires -- only the towbar, hood, and roof. When I made the turn into the pumps I glanced in my side mirror and my heart sank when I saw the flat on the front driver's side wheel.

I dreaded going back there. But it appeared that the damage was minimal. The rim looked to be fine. But the tire was shot. And it was a new tire. I'd just bought it back in April when I took the truck in for an oil change and they found a sidewall cut on the old one. Crap.

So it's Labor Day and of course everything is closed. I make a call to GMAC (my insurance) and they send a tow truck out to get the Mariner to a place that can fix the tire. When the tow truck driver gets there, he thinks he can fix it at their shop so I go with him 8 miles up the road. He has a tire and $116 later I'm back on the road. We determined that it was a bad valve stem that had caused the tire to lose air and when I got to looking at the other valve stems they all had cracks in the rubber. I had been losing air in the right front tire for about a week and after studying the valve stem I figured that was probably where it was going. So I crossed my fingers and pressed on to Iowa hoping the other tire would hold.

I arrived at 9:30, well after dark and it was a pain in the ass trying to find the campground without the Magellan (which had frozen up halfway to Kansas). But I eventually made it and Tuesday I called the nearest Mercury dealership to make an appointment to have the rest of the tires looked at. There was also a problem with the tire pressure sensor (it had a fault) so I figured it was something that didn't get hooked up when the man mounted the new tire.

Well, come Wednesday morning, I find out that the reason why I had a sensor fault was because there WAS NO sensor. It must have come off during the time I was dragging the truck with the flat. Crap! A new sensor cost me another $210 and they went ahead and replaced the other three valve stems (which WAS causing the other tire to lose air).

Several months ago I was looking at buying four more Pressure Pro sensors to put on the Mariner when I towed it. But they cost $50 each and at the time I didn't have the $200 to shell out for more sensors. But if I'd have had them on the truck, it would have saved me the extra hundred it cost me in another new tire and a factory sensor.

So that was my adventure. Hopefully my trip to Illinois next month will be a little less exciting.