Guided Where We Needed To Be

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning when we were leaving Ruidoso Downs New Mexico. We were sad to leave there as the weather was beautiful, even with the rain, and we were enjoying the mountains around us. But we knew we were headed to Arizona with similar temps and elevation and were excited to be in the woods again. That’s not where we ended up spending the night or any of that week.

Before leaving Michael added the rest of the tire pressure monitoring system (tpms) to the tires that had been under the slideout and hard to access the night before. In doing so he noticed a tire going bad with a tear forming on the sidewall. I started looking for a place to get tires in Arizona once we got there so we could take care of it there. We knew we had the tpms so we could monitor the tire temp and pressure as we drove.

We were 20 minutes in to our drive heading down a huge mountain that was about 2 miles long at an 8% grade. It was super steep coming down and we had driven it the day before without the trailer to go to Capitan so we knew what to expect. As we were almost down that mountain Michael started seeing/smelling smoke and got us pulled over to the side as soon as possible. Our brand new front brakes that we put on the truck a week before we left were very, very hot – almost on fire. It was a very scary few minutes while we assessed what we were going to do next. Between the brakes and the tire going bad we felt we had to get out of the mountains the quickest we could and decided to come back to Oklahoma near family and get things taken care of. I sent the tire info to Pop and asked if he could see if anyone had tires near them as we decided to replace both the tires on that side as they were both looking a bit rough. He set up a tire and a brake appointment for us so we could get things fixed while we stayed near family. We also figured out why the front brakes had to work so much harder than usual.

For a few weeks Michael when towing the trailer he said the trailer brakes didn’t feel like they were engaging right. About a month and a half ago as we were traveling to Louisiana on another trip (more about all this soon) we had a bearing go out on one of our driver side trailer tires, almost caught fire, we got it in time thanks to a very nice truck driver on the road getting our attention. We limped to a repair shop where they were able to get the part the next day and fix the whole bearing, axle etc. However, it appears they didn’t adjust the brakes right while under there so they weren’t engaging right when he was trying to brake. Pop to the rescue again. He found a YouTube video on how to adjust trailer brakes and he and Michael climbed under there yesterday to tighten said brakes and discovered this is probably a big reason our front truck brakes had to work so hard coming down that mountain. They proceeded to try to put the tpms on the passenger side trailer tires only to discover they were the wrong load range. Their max. capacity is about 1400 pounds less than what we need.

Between tires, brakes and trailer brakes it’s been a stressful week around our world. New correct tires will be in tomorrow (Tuesday) and we should be able to head on to Cedar Hill State Park in the evening to be in the woods again soon.

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