"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." - Willa Cather
Coordinates:40.5070° N, 111.4133° W
It’s nice to have a plan, you know? Except, sometimes, the
plan kind of gets shot to pieces. Thanks to God, we’re in beautiful Canada, but
not before we’d be roasted, jiggled and visited Urgent Care. Yet the journey
has still been awesome, but the plan? Well…
Day 1 of our first day on this Canadian/Alaskan adventure was Wed the 13th, and we
spent the night until 3 am preparing, packing up the trailer and finishing up
all the necessary details when you are going to be spending 2 months away from home.
Jason Winterton was such an integral part of the crew getting ready for this
trip, since he noticed a rather obvious issue—like, the wheels couldn’t turn
right. Which is a problem. So Jason spent the night helping Dad (captain)
re-weld and repack the trailer. Then after he went to bed at 1am, he came back
over around 7 am to help send us off! We are so grateful for Jason’s help and
dedication, we couldn’t have done it without him, but we were pretty sure then that
our problems were over.
Ha! Once we left Vernal, about 10 mins out we smell burned
rubber and pull over, discovering the wheels are rubbing against something under the fenders. Since its
pretty hard to drive 2,000 miles on rubber scraps, we turned right around and buzzed
down the protruding object. After this
false start, we were finally on the road, sweating like pigs on a treadmill
because the AC had coughed its last and it was 95 degrees outside.
Turns out, the only thing that hated heat worse than us was
the Jeep! Every thirty minutes lights would flash, the engine temp would
skyrocket and we’d pull over to splash water on the radiator. Limping into Heber
City an hour late, we managed to get ourselves to an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts,
dismally wondering if we would be heading north at all.
In steps God, and a mustached angel in O’Reilly green. Literally
just as we were huddled around our suffering Jeep in the blazing son to say a
prayer for direction, an older gentleman in his O’Reilly uniform comes out of
the store and yells, “Your cooling system has a block!”
We get talking to him and discover we just happened to stop where a man worked who
knew exactly what was wrong with our Jeep and had been a mechanic on Jeeps
since he was 12 years old. Despite working mostly in the stockroom, the
gentleman explained we had an air pocket in our cooling system and there is a
specific way to flush it. After they flushed it, we headed to SLC and only had
to pull over once to douse the radiator with water. It had worked!
We weren’t done with problems, as it turned out. Dad’s
finger was jammed welding, so we had to get it checked out, snatching a
blessedly air-conditioned dinner at Golden Corral, then heading north again
when the temperature had finally dropped below eighty.
Yet it was worth it. Another day down the road we got to
meet up with some relatives that Alyssa and I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. And
it was FABULOUS.
But perhaps that should wait until log number 2.
Skipper Krystal and
Crewmember Alyssa
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