Getting There

As some of you know, I have a new truck. It’s a Dodge Dually 3500, and it’s my first dually. I’m THRILLED with how it pulls my trailer (first time out, I had to keep checking to see if the trailer was still there!). I needed a larger truck because of my new and improved trailer with a tiny slide out (which is WONDERFUL); my Ford F250 was simply overloaded.

WELL....

I got pretty darn good at maintaining (and changing!) truck tires with my Ford, so I assumed the Dodge would be a piece of cake.

WRONG.

En route to Edmond Oklahoma and the Woodlands Equestrian center, I noticed that horrifyingly consistent “bump, bump, bump” which usually means a bad (or underinflated) tire. So I stopped for gas and prepared to check the pressure and fill the tire….except that for some reason, they put the stem on the INSIDE of the dually tire…which means, short of taking the damn tire off, I couldn’t check the pressure, let alone fill it. Believe me, I tried. For about 30 minutes.

Finally, I saw a man at a pump with a truck just like mine, and I asked him about it. “Well,” he said, “you can get an extender, but I ended up pulling the stem out of my tire with it. Your best bet is to go to a tire store and have them fix it.”

SIGH.

The good news is that no light was coming on telling me my tire pressure was low. And it only started bumping over 65 mph. So I simply drove 60 the whole way, adding about 45 minutes to my trip.

The good news is that when I arrived, David and Laura were very kind, and I was able to find a really nice stall and to park the trailer nearly level , next to my San Angelo friends from the KOC clinic, Trish New and her daughters Tori and Elli, and their trainer Ellen Doughtey from Willow Draw. What great people eventers are!

Tori and I went for a walk with our horses in the dimming light, enjoying the cool air and changing colors of the trees and the skyline. I had planned a quiet evening home, but I was convinced to go to eat with the News, and we ended up at Old Chicago Pizza where we had a lovely dinner and I sampled my first Smithicks beer (an Irish beer, of course, suggested by Ellen who was a bartender in Ireland for a time!).

It was COLD tonight! I tested the heater in the trailer (it works! Yea!), and brought out the down comforter. We need to make sure to get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow!