If you have been following along, you know that I promised to relate to you the good, the bad and the ugly. Well, we hit one of those bad days. We wanted to leave Houston between 9 – 10am but over slept as we have been binging “Yellowstone” for the past five days. Therefore, we got up around 9:30 and tried to leave by 11:30. We pretty much hit our target and since our site was long enough, we hooked up the truck there. When we started to pull out, our tag axle was “frozen” and the wheels didn’t turn. After leaving a ten foot long skid mark on the concrete we decided to call a couple of our friends and Freightliner. While we were waiting a return call from Freightliner, we got in touch with David Wood who recommended that we try backing up. After unhooking the truck and extending our jacks and then retracting them to allow out air bags to expand we backed up. It worked! Thank you, David! Once we were on the road we did get a call back from Freightliner who told us to do the same thing. Apparently because we had sat for a while and due to the rain, our tag axle brakes rusted up. Never happened to us before, but now we know.
That delay put us about an hour behind schedule which meant we got caught in Friday afternoon Houston traffic. We drove for over an hour in stop and go traffic and still hadn’t left Houston proper. Once we got out of the city we started getting up to normal interstate speeds when I noticed that our Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) was not registering the front right tire on the truck. We pulled over in a rest area to investigate. We couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t registering and we noticed that that tire was balding on the outside lip. Calling the TPMS manufacturer and the technician told us that the battery was dead with that sensor. We drove another few miles until we found a Buc-ee’s and pulled over to get some fresh batteries. After replacing the truck sensors, we realized that the technician was right. Now the sensors were working, but the tire was still looking bad after all we are estimating they have 47,000 miles on them. Katrina found us a tire place in Decatur, TX our next stop. It was a tiring drive watching the sensor the entire rest of the way!
With those delays our drive took us right into the Dallas Fort Worth area during rush hour. Again we had slow / stopped traffic to deal with. The five hour drive took us over eight hours. Exhausted, we got into the NRS Guest Ranch a little after 7pm which didn’t leave us time to visit their store, nor the restaurant.
Bear wasn’t exhausted and wanted to play. The best thing with staying at this Harvest Host was that we could open the door and let Bear out to play in the pastures. He LOVED it! Running, smelling and checking out the horses are all things right in his wheelhouse.
Great place for a stopover! If we didn’t need to get new truck tires the next morning we could have kept the truck connected to the coach and would have had an easier time leaving.
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