D(eparture)-Day

D-Day came at 10:30 am on Monday, December 10. Unfortunately, it was short-lived.

As we pulled out of our driveway, my first concern was our icy road. Although it had been plowed, they hadn’t spread any sand and I was afraid we wouldn’t even be able to make it from our road to the highway. Fortunately, we made it with no trouble.

Our first stop was Ace Hardware in Westby to get propane. As we pulled into the drive, the Big Rolling Turd got stuck on the ice. I tried to pull up the hill to the propane tank, but the Turd wouldn’t budge.

I tried to back up, but the tow dolly doesn’t like to back up. In fact, the owner’s manual for the tow dolly says NEVER back up with the tow dolly attached, but I had to give it a try anyway. The tow dolly jack knifed and the front of our van (which was on the tow dolly) smashed into the right rear corner of the RV. The RV got scuffed up a little bit and the front license plate was ripped off the van. Otherwise, not too bad.

As we waited for the folks at Ace to put down some potash to give up traction to get up the hill, I noticed that the tires on the tow dolly were horribly under-inflated. When I towed the tow dolly empty after buying it, this made sense, but then I forgot to fill the tires after I got it home. Oops…

As I was walking back to the front of the RV, I noticed a screw embedded in the left front tire. D’oh! How many things could go wrong at one time? Thankfully, the Ace Hardware store has a tire store connected to it, so they took a look at the tire. As it turned out, the screw was short and hadn’t penetrated all the way into the tire.

As we were putting air into the tires on the tow dolly, Rich, the guy at the tire shop, noticed that the left tire on the tow dolly was really loose. The bearing cap was missing and the nut that holds the bearing in was almost falling off. He checked it over and it appeared that whoever greased the bearing (before I bought it) hadn’t tightened the nut. Rich tightened it and said he thought we would be alright. Even so, he suggested that we get a “bearing buddy” (cap over the bearing) before we hit the road. So it was back to Viroqua to the auto parts store.

We just had to laugh that we had only gotten three miles from our home and so many things had already gone wrong. And after about three hours, we were back in Viroqua getting ready once again to leave.

Of course, there is another way to look at this. If we hadn’t gotten stuck on the ice at Ace, we would have never known that the tires on the tow dolly were so under-inflated and we wouldn’t have known that the wheel was falling off the right side of the tow dolly. We also may have pushed the screw in deeper to where it did penetrate the tire. Overall, things worked out pretty well. I guess it’s all in your perspective.

Rather than jumping right back on the road, we’re going to get some lunch at Subway. Hopefully, we’ll make it more than three miles from home this time.