Or “How we took the long way to Texas”

Ever have a moment that causes you to seriously contemplate your life choices?

We headed out from the Oregon Coast on September 7 after completing the bus roof raise, purging and downsizing our storage unit with two large yard sales, loading the bus to the gills, and with a plan to drive to Texas to Building Site #2. We figured 300-400 miles of driving each day would get us to NE Texas in about a week.

Life doesn’t always go according to plan.

About 280 miles from our starting point, the two passenger-side dually wheels, the ones we had just replaced, blew off our van Moose on I-84 at about 60 mph!! Watching this from the bus behind him, I was amazed that Calvin saved the van from rolling. We pulled over to the shoulder, walked about half a mile to retrieve the tires that had rolled off into the hay field, and called for a tow. We ended up parked in a busy and hot Les Schwab Tire Center parking lot in Hermiston, OR for several days while they made repairs, and kudos to them, since the last place to service the tires was Les Schwab in Lincoln City, the company covered all our repairs and towing costs.

Finally back on the road again, we got about 30 miles back on I-84 and the bus hit a bad pothole patch and activated a death wobble that made my heart stop! We limped into Pendleton, spent the night in a vacant gravel lot, and the next morning started making calls for repairs. Being harvest season, we were having a hard time finding a shop. We reached out to a local Boondockers Welcome Host who welcomed us to their 40 acre ranch just outside of town until we could sort things out. We loved our host at 5H Ranch and enjoyed visiting with another couple that came for the Pendleton Round-Up rodeo.

We figured our best solution was to take the long-ish route south to where we got the bus in the first place, Burns, OR, back to the Truck Shop and our friends Mike and Hilda Allison. We had managed to pick up the parts in Pendleton, which is a bigger town, but Mike was able to get us in for repairs in a week rather than three or four in Pendleton/Hermiston. They let us park in their fenced yard and we had at least 10 acres to ourselves where all our critters could safely explore. Mike and his crew made the repairs. By then we were waiting on our friend Chris to join us – He’d decided to return to nomad life and travel with us and help us with our build. The more the merrier. Even better, our good friends Lou and Jan, who were traveling through the area from Montana, stopped for lunch. That was an unexpected treat!

As we were doing the final check of the vehicles, Mike noticed a hairline crack in the bus’s coolant reservoir that had to be repaired before we took off. They knew a place in town and made a call for us. It took a couple hours, but it gave me time to do a little tourist shopping in the old downtown section before leaving. Finally, we said goodbye to Mike and Hilda, and headed east to Idaho, we got about 300 miles and stayed at Mr. Gas truck/travel center near Twin Falls. Nice place.

The next day, we passed into Wyoming and the van, which didn’t often have great power on hills, started creeping slower than normal. The fuel pump failed. Really? Amazingly, just before we left Lincoln City, Calvin’s co-worker had basically said, “I have a spare fuel pump, want it?” To which Calvin said, “Sure, why not?” So we had a second-hand pump on board which Calvin swapped out on the side of I-84, which got us in to the Little America Travel Center before that pump gave out, but at least we had a safe spot for the night. Calvin and Chris ran into an auto parts store in a nearby town that just happened to have a new pump, so the following morning repairs were made and we were back on the road again, but not before getting $.75 ice cream cones!

By now it’s October 1, and we are back on the road and Moose seems to have more power with the brand new fuel pump. We’re cruising through Wyoming near St Clair and Calvin pulls off suddenly and heads to an empty parking lot. Now what? We stop, make some lunch while he does some diagnostic wizardry, saying things just didn’t sound right. He says he had a theory and is going to drive the van back to the next exit and see how it runs. He calls a few minutes later to meet us at the TA Truck Stop in Rawlins. We’re losing a cylinder in the engine. Bad news.

TA graciously says we can park as long as we need to get repairs done, so we position the bus w/trailer, van Moose with trailer, and Chris’ minivan in the farthest corner so as not to be in the way of the truckers, and settle in until we can find a solution to this particular problem.

It was a beautiful warm fall day in October in Wyoming – every local we talked to said the weather is never this nice in October, but we enjoyed the people we met, the weather, hanging out talking, and just taking a breather.

It was a moment to reflect too. By this time we’d been on the road for three weeks and hadn’t made it even half way to our destination. If this was our first rodeo as full-time nomads, we would definitely have been rethinking our life choices. As it was, we recognized this as a one-off sequence of unfortunate events. The frustrating part is we only needed Moose to get us to Texas and through the bus build and the van could be retired!

Checking around Rawlins, a big trucking town, we got some quotes for repairing the engine which (gulp) hovered in the neighborhood of $15,000 and a couple weeks! Yikes, that wasn’t going to work. We didn’t want to put that much into Moose and we definitely didn’t want to get stuck in a Wyoming winter!

We opted to have Moose hauled to Texas for $5,000. While waiting for the lowboy, we ate out, caught up on laundry, and prepared for a cannonball run the rest of the way.

On October 5^th, we loaded up Moose and Trailer on the low boy, I set out in the bus and Chris and Calvin were going to blast through to beat the van to our destination so they could unload. All good, right?

About 35 miles into the drive, the bus started over heating again. Another hairline crack in the coolant reservoir. I called Calvin, who was just leaving Rawlins, and asked if it was okay to cry now?

The bus had cooled down by the time the guys caught up with me, and Calvin drove the bus into Laramie to a radiator shop, while I road with Chris. It took a couple hours, and a change of plans, but we got back on the road shortly after. Calvin opted to drive the bus to Texas just in case something else broke down, and Chris and I tag-teamed it driving straight through in his minivan. We took a few breaks on route, to visit Ames Monument (the Wyoming Pyramid) near Cheyenne, have lunch with a relative near Denver, breakfast at the Smokey Pokey in Oklahoma.

We finally arrived at our destination in NE Texas on October 7 – one month after starting out – and I poured out of the car and hugged the ground!

A few more mishaps – the cargo trailer wheel slipping off the lowboy as we were unloading. My fault. Took some creative jacking-up and planks to get it back where it was supposed to be, and of course the starter failed on Moose, so it had to be towed by our friends tractor to its parking space. And Calvin reported more steering issues with the bus, most likely a bearing. So more repairs are in our future.

We spent more in a month just getting from Oregon to Texas than we did all of the last year traveling across half the country, and yet every place we stopped we met kind and helpful people, saw beautiful places, enjoyed good conversations, and appreciated every thing we had.

We are so grateful to be welcomed by our friends Cheryl and Ken, who are truly family, and looking forward to finishing out our new home and retiring poor Moose.

Fingers crossed.