April Fools

Well, Spring is officially here but the weather sure has been playing with us. We finished out our winter in warm weather with a month in Tucson, then planned on moving up slowly to southern Utah. But plans were altered when Gail's sisters moved her mother into a senior apartment. We rented a car and zipped up to Idaho from Las Vegas and spent a week moving and getting her settled. Our truck continued to give us some problems and this allowed us to leave it at a repair shop to work out the problems. It was cheaper to rent the car, get great gas mileage, then drive the truck to ID and back. Getting it repaired definitely wasn't cheap tho.

When we returned to Las Vegas, we then headed to St. George, UT for 2 weeks. Our youngest son, Kyle, lives there and we wanted to check out some of the state parks for possible volunteering next winter. The weather was very nice in St. George, pretty red rocks and hills and a nice size town. It has every thing you need, and a good snowbird spot for the winter. A couple of state parks have potential for next winter. We stocked up the trailer with staples as best we could as the nearest Walmart will be about 2 hours away.

The fateful day to travel to Escalante arrived, April 1, and we set out in the rain. As we climbed toward Cedar City, it changed to snow and slush on the road. We still had a pass of about 9000 to go over and kept our fingers crossed. It turned out ok, only some slush on the road and on the other side it hadn't even rained. I was more worried about the wind possibility but that didn't come about. And to think the day before was warm with temps in the 80s. But the fun was not over yet!

We were traveling down UT12 to the park and about 5 miles out we heard a pop/bang. We are the only ones on the road so it wasn't traffic noise. We thought out loud "what was that"? Bill looked in the rearview mirror and said "oh, I know what it was". The dreaded blow out on a trailer tire. But luckily it didn't shred apart and rip up the bottom of the trailer. The road has no shoulders, soft sand on the edges, but we pulled over as best we could. Bill worked on the tire, got the spare down, the bad one off and as he is ready to put the spare on.  That's when I discovered that the spare tire was on an 8 lug rim and the trailer has only 6 lugs.  It won't fit! And this is what the factory gave us. So it's Sunday, in remote UT, barely any cell service, absolutely nothing open and what else can we do but limp the 5 miles to the campground. That's what we did at 5 mph, made it in without completely shredding the tire and ruining the rim. Since then, replacing a good tire on the good rim has been resolved, we received an entire spare rim and tire from the factory, a local repair place has been very helpful and now we order a good for the other end of the axle, cuz one other tire is probably about ready to go.

Anyway, aside from some fickle spring weather, it is good to be back at "our" park. It's good to see our former friends and coworkers, Bill is already having fun on the tractor and we're ready to do some more exploring/hiking of the Escalante area. We will be here till July working and enjoying things.

And there are fish in the lake, a camper brought us 2 nice trout the other day. YUM