Racing the Storm
Christmas in Utah
Wow, it has been way too long since we updated our Substack. So much has happened. Life gets away from you sometimes, and we just have a hard time keeping up. The further behind we get, the harder it is to catch up. But we are finally in a less crazy phase of life, with a little room to focus on something like this again.
The best way to get everyone caught up is probably to just keep putting our stories down, the way we have been doing. We kept journals through most of it, so we can lean back on those. We have some big changes from the last few weeks that we will get to before long, but first I want to tell you about racing the big storm out of Crescent City.
The Pacific Northwest has been magical for our family. Hyrum especially thrived up there. Honestly, we just did not want to leave, which is why we stayed until a few days before Christmas. We debated staying even longer. The weather had been near perfect the whole time, temperatures never dropping below comfortable, and what rain did come blew through fast and never amounted to much. We kept waiting for that famous rainy season we had always heard about. Then the news reports started rolling in, a big storm system with a second one right behind it, something like ten days of heavy rain in the forecast. We figured that was our cue. Time to head for warmer weather.
So with a bittersweet feeling, we started packing up the rig and getting everything ready as the storm pushed closer. We set our departure for December 20, just five days before Christmas. The day before we left, I started hearing a squeal from the truck’s brakes, and a quick look told me they were almost completely gone. There was no taking them on a trip like this, so I ran to O’Reilly’s, picked up rotors and pads, and spent a good chunk of that night on them.
While I had the front end apart, I noticed one of the wheel bearings making the faintest noise when I spun it by hand. It still felt fine, and in my experience a bearing like that will usually run a good while after it first starts talking to you, so I figured we would deal with it once we got where we were going.
Our route would take us south along the 101, then east up through Redding and over the mountains to drop down toward Arizona. The plan was to dodge the worst of California’s traffic and gas prices and find quieter places to park as we worked our way south.
As we headed down the coast, we came to the turnoff that would carry us away from the ocean for the last time that year. You could feel the melancholy settle over the truck. Our whole family had fallen for the Pacific Northwest. We had come all the way from the far northwestern tip of Washington, right up by the Canadian border, down into northern California, and we had spent the better part of the last five months just loving that stretch of coast. Hyrum had been the best we have ever seen him, happier and more compliant than usual, and part of what made leaving so hard was the fear of losing that. We worried about the cold and the rain settling in and him being miserable. We were also starting to worry about the RV getting moldy, since it is awfully hard to keep one dry on the coast, and even with a dehumidifier running we felt like it was time to let it dry out before another coastal run.
We turned up the 299 and headed east. About half a day of driving in, maybe an hour short of Redding, just past the little town of Douglas City and coming down a canyon, the front of the truck suddenly jerked, made a sound like a crash, and dropped a little. My first thought was that we had hit something. Then it clicked, and I realized we had a complete bearing failure. We eased over to the side of the road, where it just so happened there was a big gravel lot, easily large enough for a couple of semi-trucks, which was about the size of our rig anyway.
Once I had a good look, I knew this was going to be a fix I would have to do myself. It was Saturday night with Sunday coming, so in the pouring rain we unhooked, and I called a tow truck to get us scheduled for the next morning. I had found an O’Reilly’s in town they could drag us to. We set up for the night, and it rained nonstop, heavy and steady. I could not believe how much came down.
The next morning the tow truck took me, Eden, and Emerson, along with the truck, to that O’Reilly’s parking lot. We spent the next four to five hours there, the kids shuttling between the dollar store and the cab of the truck, while I replaced the front right wheel bearing in the rain. We found out later that Douglas City got four inches of rain in those four hours, and I believe it. I was soaked head to toe. The parking lot had basically turned into a pond. It got so miserable that it almost looped back around to funny, the kind of thing you just put your head down and push through. And even then, the size of those mountains and the sound of all that rain still got to me enough that I never quite landed all the way in miserable. Just humbled.
It was coming on mid-afternoon by the time we finished the truck, went back for the RV and the rest of the family, and got on the road again. We made it another three hours, winding through beautiful forest and up and over the hills, before I started to notice we were losing power and hearing a strange whooshing sound. I pulled off in a thickly forested stretch where we had not seen a house in quite a while. We were up in the middle of the Klamath Mountains by then. It was already dark, so I grabbed my wife’s phone to use as a light and crawled underneath the truck, where a one to two inch stream of water was running under the frame from all the rain coming down the side of the road.
It did not take long to find the problem. The hot side intercooler hose had blown a small hole and started to tear. I grabbed a handful of zip ties and tried to reinforce it, hoping to keep the hole from spreading or flexing so we could hold onto enough boost to have the torque to get up and over these hills. While I was working the zip ties, that little stream running around me started to pick up. Before long it was three inches deep and rushing past, and I got into enough of a hurry to finish and get back in the truck, soaking wet as I already was. By the time I reached the truck door, I just stripped off most of my clothes and threw them in the back, figuring I would drive half naked but at least not sopping wet.
We started easing forward, as gently as I could manage so I would not pop any of those bands holding that intercooler boot together. A few minutes in, my wife asked for her phone back, and it hit me that in my rush I had left it somewhere up in the frame underneath the truck. We pulled over to check, and it was gone. Turning that big rig around on those narrow little highways took a while before we found a spot, and it was already dark. We spent two hours driving up and down that road, stopping and getting out to walk, half naked and soaking wet, using my other phone as a light, trying to spot hers. Service was almost nonexistent, and the GPS only narrowed it to a rough two-mile area. Eventually, after checking everywhere we could think of, we gave up and pushed on, up and over the rest of those mountains and down into Nevada late that night. We rolled into a truck stop in Fallon, set up the RV, and basically fell into bed, exhausted and a little defeated, but grateful to finally be out of the torrential rain.
My sweet wife, who is ever patient with me, decided to treat losing her phone as a chance to take a complete break from it. She even told me she did not want another one.
The next morning we had a slow start and got my parents on the phone, telling them about all the trouble with the truck and letting them know we had made it safely across the mountains before any of the snowstorms that were supposed to be moving in. Out of nowhere, my dad said we should just come to their place in Morgan, Utah, for Christmas. We could see family, take a real break, and get the truck repaired and back to full strength. The moment he said it, we realized it was exactly what we needed.
We said yes almost without thinking. It was, without a doubt, the right thing for our family right then. We knew it would put us a good week late to the RV park we had already paid for, but that was fine. Christmas with family, and a well-equipped shop to fix the truck in, was more than worth it.
We spent the rest of the day driving across Nevada and coming into Salt Lake City. It felt a little strange. It had been a while since we had been back to Utah, our home state. We pulled into Morgan that evening, and I stepped out of the truck amazed to find myself perfectly comfortable in a T-shirt. A few days before Christmas, at 5,500 feet up in the northern Utah mountains, that warm spell was unlike anything I can remember. Morgan is usually downright cold in December.
But we ended up with a wonderful Christmas week. Our kids had the time of their lives and kept telling us it was the best Christmas ever. Brittney and I loved being around family. Everyone came over, and we got to see just about all of our people. It reminded us how good family can be, and how much we miss everyone.