Road Magic
If there is one thing I’ve learned from 15+ years of homesteading its how to troubleshoot. My brain is wired now permanently to a default setting that allows my thinking to overtake my emotions when trouble ensues. My first action was to get on the phone and find ANOTHER welder. I knew by the 3rd call I had found our guy. He was out in Aberdeen only an hour away and I could tell by our conversation this would be the last hitch weld. So we need to drop the trailer somewhere and head to the coast asap. Amazingly, just the day before , while we were pumping gas , Inana met an older woman who chatted her up about our endeavor and offered us a place to stay at her large acreage with lots of room for the bus! Little did we know we would need her hospitality so soon. We called her and told her the situation and she offered her place to drop the trailer! Now that is what we call road magic. So we rigged up the trailer so it would not fall off during transit and headed for her place out in Boston Harbor. Long story short, we sorted out the hitch and like they say, the third time has been a charm. We left Olympia after seeing Aunt Barb and Uncle Don and also visiting with our dear friends Lyfe and Nicole in Tacoma. From here we went coastal again, out to the Oregon shore and explored the quiet beaches and watched Ivy swim in the cold Pacific. We spent time getting more acquainted with Dreamweaver and testing out rhythms of our new life on the road. Could we still hold daily chores and tasks and keep the family running while on the road with all of it’s uncertainty’s? We knew we had to try , not only to keep the kids in a settled sense of place but for us to keep our sanity! So we keep rest time everyday while driving or parked. Usually an hour of down time, quiet by time in our bunks to allow Nowa espascially to ground out and maintain balance. Bed times in the evening have bercome a bit looser, though still we aim for evening wind down time after supper and in ed story time around 730.
Other than that, the girls schooling still happens most days and its has become more self directed with regular check-ins with Inana. So after saying our goodbyes to the west coast and playing a sunset flute song to the sea we left the shores and headed inland back to Olympia to get our trailer and continue east.
The next day we had tan appointment with the Cummins mechanic in Sumner WA, to see about the fuel leak. After they had a look and fixed an oil leak and replaced a seal and timing chain cover pan they said we needed a new fuel pump that would cost 5,000 dollars and another 1000 to install. Well we decided to wait on that little fix after already paying 5,000 for the other repair and try to find a less expensive pump. We limped to the Tri-Cities where we could go no further and parked in a vacant lot to come up with a plan. By this time we were losing too much fuel to keep on. So we parked and I searched the internet for another fuel pump, I found a company in Iowa that does rebuilding of these special pumps and ordered one for 2500.00. It was shipped next day air and we had a mobile mechanic come and install it for half the labor cost of Cummins. It sure felt good seeing it not leaking fuel! finally it felt like we had worked out all the kinks on Dreamweaver and could confidently hit the open road! yippee.