Discouragement

As we walked around the fairgrounds this morning, we saw that people were gathering for the charity auction. We walked through two buildings full of stuff--everything from furniture and appliances to plastic containers to paperbacks to you name it. Most of it looked like the stuff you'd find at a church rummage sale. We found it hard to imagine how one auctioneer was going to handle sales of all this loose stuff. Most of it wasn't even in boxes or really grouped together by kind or anything.

We didn't stick around to find out. We pulled out before the auction started and headed on south. We were expecting the sun to come out for at least part of the day today and warm things up, but instead it was pretty much socked in, chilly, and rainy all day. That matched our experience. First we touched the bedrails on the way into a Dillon's parking lot. By the time we were extricated, we had swirls of scratches on the underside of our overhang.

Then we had the same problem pulling into a fuel station, so we pulled out and went on down the road. Just inside Oklahoma, we came to a large service station next to a casino where we were able to pull in and fuel up easily. But just a few hundred feet down the road, our tire pressure monitor warned us that a truck tire was losing air. We connected the compressor and refilled the tire, but it lost pressure rapidly again. Ken decided that the valve extension was probably leaking, so he took it out. That solved the leaky tire problem.

Then when we got on the Oklahoma Turnpike, after we were committed to enter, we saw that vehicles over 13' 6" were prohibited. We were told at the factory that we were 13' 5 1/2"--so we sweated it out to our exit. Breathing a sigh of relief, we pulled off the turnpike only to realize that we were smelling something burning. We stopped and looked around, but couldn't pinpoint the problem. However, we did see that the passenger side wheels on the trailer were covered with fine black stuff--maybe brake lining?

We were only a few miles from our campground, so we continued, but slowly. On the way into the campground, we touched the bedrails again. This time we added 20 lbs. of air to the hitch, which raised the trailer enough we could make it into the driveway, but on the skid wheels hard. When the skid wheels dropped off the highway and into a muddy patch on the driveway, the entire trailer sunk so that we cleared the ground in back by only a few inches.

At our site, we raised the trailer up on its leveling jacks and tried to spin all the trailer wheels. Unfortunately, we found that at least two of them, and possibly a third, are definitely making scraping noises and not spinning freely. We'll be calling for help on Monday. Meanwhile, we are very discouraged campers.


Our site is in some trees, so no luck pointing the satellite dish. Fortunately we were able to get some over the air channels, so we watched a statewide Oklahoma news report. We like to get to know the areas we travel through.

Ed and Julie and kids have moved into their new home in Cumming, GA. Julie is working hard to unpack. It sounds like they are all doing very well and liking their new home and job and school.