Karla's Blog

August 22, 2021

As I mentioned before, we headed to the west coast to escape the heatwave and smoke from the fires. We were heading to Moses Lake to boondock for the night. Along the way we were having a hard time finding a place to dump our tanks. Larry found out that the Spokane Valley Fairgrounds has a dump station so we went there and discovered that they have RV sites with full hook-ups! Hooray! We decided to stay there rather than drive another hour and a half. Well . . . when we went to unhook the car we saw that it was covered in oil and so was the back of the rig 8-{. Everything was really hot so the next morning Larry got under there to see what was going on. He determined that a seal on the rear left wheel was leaking. UGH!

We had noticed an RV repair shop a block or two away called Washington Auto Carriage but, since it was Saturday we had to wait until Monday to contact them. So, we settled in. It was a decent place except that right behind us was a train switching station. I didn’t know what a switching station was but quickly learned. It’s where the trains connect and disconnect. The engines run all the time and the connecting sounds like explosions! Not to mentioned the honking! It goes on pretty much 24 hours a day so, needless to say, we didn’t always get a great night’s sleep. Nevertheless, we felt pretty safe there.

Monday Larry went to the repair shop. They would have to order the part but insisted that once they had the part they could fit us in right away but it would be about a week. In the meantime smoke from the fires was causing the air quality to get pretty bad. UGH!

We saw a couple of funny things around Spokane, such as:

Church of Pop Culture??? LOL. And I love how people play with words to make business names.

Nine days later they replaced the seal and we got back on the road but not for long. About 60 miles west of Spokane we heard a loud CLUNK and we lost power. Thank God we were on flat ground close to an off-ramp (off the I-90). We had just enough momentum to get onto the shoulder of that ramp. Wide-eyed and with our hearts pounding we got out to look and saw smoke billowing out from the wheel they had replaced the seal on! We saw that the wheel hub and bearings had burned up and the axle was completely disengaged!!! WTH??? Larry, with a pretty good knowledge of this kind of stuff, determined that the mechanic had not topped off the oil in the differential and it overheated and caused everything to burn up. Even the bearings were melted!

We spent the night on that off-ramp. Roadside Assistance would be sending help in the morning. Thankfully it was not a busy ramp so we were able to walk the boys reasonably safely. Off the pavement it was thick prickly brush so that wasn’t even an option.

Between the situation itself and the ridiculous amount of big rig traffic on the I-90, we didn’t get the best sleep. Go figure ;-). On the bright side, at least we had nice sunset that night :-).

The next morning a guy shows up with the biggest tow truck I’ve ever seen. He had to hook up the rig by the rear end because of the disengaged axle. Then he had to back it out of the off-ramp to get onto the freeway. I was sure I got pics of that but now I can’t find them. :- {. Anyway, he couldn’t go more than 35 mph so we lead the way 60 miles back to Spokane and to Washington Auto Carriage. They made a spot behind the building in the repair yard and the rig was tucked back there. We stayed in the rig that night since we had nowhere else to go. It was in an industrial area and the gate was locked at night so we felt pretty safe. The air quality was still bad so the setting sun was orange. Horrible, but beautiful :-\

The next day the guy who did the seal replacement started working on the axle/hub. Since everything was melted together he banged and banged and banged. I wondered if our rig would ever be the same. Eventually they told us that one of the parts they needed would take at least a week to arrive so we decided to take a road trip in the car. So we packed up and headed to Blaine in the northwest corner of Washington.

To be continued . . .