An Adventure, to Say the Least...

Pulling out of last night's camp site this morning I knew something was not quite right.  I got out and looked around the trailer in the cold winter rain and did not see anything wrong, so we trekked on to our destination some 300 miles away.  All along I just knew there was something different.  The gas mileage was a little worse off by about 1 1/2 mpg and things just sounded and felt a little off.  I blew the poorer mileage off because of rather stiff north west headwinds and hilly countryside.  I just couldn't put my finger on it until we arrived at out destination, pulled up onto a relatively level concrete pad and Wendy says " wow, this right side really needs to come up" during our leveling process.  We looked around and indeed the left side was quite a bit higher than the right.  Then we started looking around and found one of the suspension parts was different than the other side.  We remember someone driving from Florida to last year's Oliver rally had experienced a failure of the suspension on one side and remember the effort it took to remedy the situation.  We're in Wetumka, OK and immediately thought "well, who's going to help us out here, in the middle of nowhere?"  First reach out was to Oliver via a service ticket followed by a phone call shortly afterwards to Oliver's service department.  Hannah is an Angel!!!!  We thought this problem was going to be a nightmare.  Hannah calmly told us she had seen this problem on occasion and told us that an axle part had flipped over and the fix was to lower the nose to the ground and it would flip back.  Keeping Hannah on the phone we tried the suggested action to no avail.  Rats!  She said try jacking up the nose instead.  We did.  The axle part was starting to move and Hannah warned us of a loud snap.  And the snap was loud, and the trailer shook, and the trailer was level again!!!!!!!!!  YAY HANNAH!!!!!!!!!!  We had hit a very large bump in the road on the way to our previous stop; big enough to scrape the flap under the bumper of our tow vehicle.  We are very thankful it was an easy fix.

Supposed to look like this.

"Shackle flip" they call it.  I called it something else.......

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We took off from AR for OK and probably should have waited a while longer.  We canceled our visit to the ice cream shop as it snowed very hard on that part of the state.  We took  a more southern route to Harold and Tess's but didn't know what to expect there.  The roads were fine until we got to their turnoff.  We took a 1 mile trip down this snow covered gravel and muddy  road.

Yikes....should we try this next hill?  It was pretty muddy in the turn and quite a climb around the bend.  No place to turn around!  Maintained a steady speed and did not step much on the gas pedal as we made the short climb.  Success!!!

You can probably see the muddy tracks at the start of the climb.  They probably had 4 wheel drive...we didn't!  But we made it :)

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Keeping our rig somewhat clean was NOT a success :(