Tuesday May 14
The Dalles, Oregon Les Schwab parking lot
We woke up at 7:30am, getting roughly 4 hours of sleep. The short version is that it took them until 12:30pm to confirm that it was a broken axle. The longer version includes offloading the camper onto the side of the building and a bunch of impatient waiting. Then the scramble began. Charlie was able to locate a used rear end/axle thinger in Tacoma. Charlie’s friend, who if he left Rainier right that second, could get there before 5pm to get it and bring it to us. He also located a recommended mobile mechanic who could install it the next day. This is also the short version of the trip to Tacoma to get the part. Our timeline to getting to Flagstaff was getting tighter. We wanted to arrive Thursday night but had to be there Friday morning by 9 for classes we had signed up for. It’s an approximate 20 hour drive to Flagstaff from The Dalles.
With nothing more for us to do at the Les Schwab parking lot we walked “to town” as the lot is outside of the downtown area. We shared fries and a shake and looked around a bit and walked back with a bounce in our step that things were going to workout after all and we’d be back on the road the next afternoon.
The mobile mechanic arrived at 7:30am the next morning and started dismantling the truck, the axle arrived and we left for breakfast. We were on our way back when Charlie got a phone call from the mechanic. “We have a problem” is never the best way to start a conversation, but it is direct. After arriving back at the parking lot the mechanic informed us that the axle mounts are in the wrong location for the body style of the truck. Charlie’s truck is a fleet chassis not a standard truck chassis. Inserting long version of picking up part in Tacoma - the person who took the order for the part asked Charlie for all the pertinate info including the VIN number to find the part. Charlie told her that his friend was picking up the part and gave her his name, she said it would be no problem. Well, it was a problem, the company policy is that the person paying for the order is the only person who can pick up the part. So Charlie’s friend ended up paying for a very expensive part to be able to take possession. So not only did she not know the company policy, she also did not know how to correctly look up a part. The mechanic originally thought he could cut off and weld new mounts in the correct spot, but then they also discovered the new part was also too short. Everyone called any likely leed they knew in search of the correct part for the next two hours all to no avail. We were also brainstorming alternative plans to get us to Flagstaff and to Mexico. Sprinter van and planes tickets were my top two options. Then there was the problem of having two trucks and a camper in The Dalles. Also how to get the camper out from behind the broken truck that was sitting on jacks. The new plan was put into place. Charlie and his friend left me, the camper, and the broken truck where we were and drove the 2 hours back to Charlies house. The friend would return driving the truck and bring the camper dolly so it could be rolled sideways and loaded on to the second truck and taken home. Charlie would return in his “house”, as I refer to his class C RV, that is actually a Chevy Kodiak with a custom RV thinger (see photo).
My job was to pack up everything we’d packed in to the camper for the next 6 weeks mostly for Mexico to transfer to the RV that we would not be taking into Mexico. That’s right, Mexico was shelved, we did not want to take the RV into Mexico at this time. Our sole focus at this time was just to get to Flagstaff on time.
After everything was transfered, loaded or ready to be towed at a later day we got back on the road.
2:00 AM Thursday and we left The Dalles with a goal for driving straight through. At 3:30AM we ran out of gas! That’s right, in all the rush to get back on the road, a certain someone didn’t look at the fuel gauge. I actually can’t see the fuel gauge from the passenger seat. But I sure learned how to lean over far enough to see it in the future! So we slept til it was daylight and Charlie hitchhiked to get fuel. It’s a diesel, but I think saying running out of gas is more descriptive to me. We had made it just outside of Boardman, Oregon. I was starting to wonder if we’d actually make it out of Oregon at the rate we were going. By 7:40 Charlie was priming the engine (diesel engine thing when you run out of fuel) and by 8:15 we had filled up the tank and we were back on the road! Charlie is a driving machine, he loves to drive and staying up late is no problem for him. I wasn’t holding up as well, and I had never drove this house thing on wheels and now didn’t seem like the time to start. We drove until Friday morning at 1am. We had actually made it out of Oregon and all the way to Utah somewhere when we stopped to sleep for 3.5 hours. We were back on the road by 4:45 AM.
Thank the kitties that Arizona doesn’t participate in daylight savings time! We thought we were going to be an hour late but in fact we arrived at 8:30 am Friday morning and made it to our first classes at 9! Phew!
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