Bumps in the Road

We woke up yesterday to the roar of the ocean.  I’d forgotten how powerful it sounded and felt.  At times it felt like it was changing my heartbeat.  We just started south again on highway 101 when the front dash alarm went off identifying a low pressure on our front driver tire.

Our first flat.  Tim went into action, found the instruction manual, found the buried tools, and figured out how to release the spare tire and the hubcap. I got the hydraulic jack out with the lug wrench.  But the lug nuts were solid, Tim even tried using an extension on the lug wrench for leverage but they weren’t budging.  I said, “Here let me try.” They were not meant to come off.

In the meantime I am standing by attempting to look helpful but feeling very helpless.  I had suggested using our tire pump to pump up the tire but Tim said that would take forever if it even worked. When it looked like we were going to have to drive on a deflated tire, (Oh yeah, did I mention we had no cell service.  We couldn’t even call for AAA) I checked the air pressure valve and it was a Schrader valve.  Voilà!  I suggested I start pumping the front tire with our bike pump while Tim was putting back all our stuff we pulled out for this adventure.  At one point I started counting how many times I was pumping so that I felt like I was accomplishing something.  (Mind you we had to go from 14psi to about 45 psi) At one point I got up to 200 pumps, and then gave up counting, it had seemed like a good idea at the time but now I needed to focus on my energy and breathing.   We did it (Tim helped).  The tire was inflated and we were off again. 

Next challenge for the day was finding a place to get our tire fixed and getting my TB results read (one of my last dangling things to do before I start my new job and my deadline was 11/18 at 4:15pm or I’d have to start all over).  After Tim searched the Internet we discovered our best bet would be to back track to Crescent City, so that’s what we did.  Believe it or not accomplishing these things took all morning so once we were done we found a nice marina by the ocean, parked the van, had lunch, did our daily chores; emptying gray water, yellow water and doing dishes etc. 

Okay, now we’re ready to go play and it’s about 1:30 in the afternoon.   Luckily we had good people suggest where to go to see some gorgeous redwood forests.  We took Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway got out for a stretch and met this really nice biker named Phil.  He was so excited about sharing the best places here in this section of the forest that we were excited as well to be in such a good spot.  After a short walk on a trail we headed to the visitor center and found out which trails we could bike on.  OH it felt so GOOD to get out on our bikes again and on some single track.  About 2 hours of solid biking made us feel so good.  By the time we drove to Eureka, finished dinner we were exhausted.  We fell into bed at 9 o’clock.  Ready to see what tomorrow has in store for us.