Let the 2026 Adventures Begin...

We started this year as we did last year.  We traveled to North Carolina to celebrate Veston and brother-in-law Frank's birthdays for two nights..2 and 3 January.

We left for a campground by Clemson, SC and fell 10 miles short of our goal.  We turned off onto our last highway and a passing motorist rolled his window down, as we were on the off ramp, to say something that we never heard.  We thought he was just inquiring about our trailer.  We stopped shortly after, for gas, and Wendy did a quick walk around to check for anything amiss.  Something was indeed amiss!  "We only have 3 tires!!!" was her report.  "One of our tires is gone!!!!!!!!!!!"  All of the mount bolts sheared off of one tire the tire departed on its own adventure!  After several minutes of careful thought we elected to drive across the street to a hotel and figure things out.

We decided to start with a 2 night stay at the hotel as it was already late and we had many phone calls to make the next day to figure out how to handle this dilemma.  We figured to backtrack along our route we took to get here in hopes of finding our wayfaring wheel.  We weighed our rig at a CAT scale some 40 miles back where we knew we had 4 tires and work our way back those same 40 miles on the other side of the Interstate.  Within 1/2 a mile from our exit to the hotel we sure enough saw a tire resting upright against the guard rail on the side of the road. It was 45 minutes after sunset and we could barely see but surely enough IT WAS OUR TIRE !!!!!!!!  NO DAMAGE DONE !!!!!!  Unbelievable !!!!!!!!!!!  It apparently sidled up to the guardrail and coasted downhill to a stop....upright!  We were very happy campers again.  Finding that tire was such a blessing as it saved us a lot of time and effort to locate a replacement.  We had a spare but it developed a leak in the valve stem the day we left Pinopolis.  We found that out the day we left on our most excellent 2026 adventure and intended to have it fixed soon....but not soon enough!  Now we had 3 tires and a flat spare, a real bummer.  Fast  forward, we coordinated with 4 experts across the country and formulated a plan to find some new wheel mount studs, take off the brake drum, have the sheared bolts driven out and new ones pressed in, and put the fixed spare put on.  And now I have a 3/4 inch drive torque wrench capable of delivering the 150 foot pounds of torque needed to reinstall the brake drum retainer nut.  Oh boy!  I hope to never use it again!  All is fixed for the moment and we plan to continue onward after a 1 day delay.  We'll keep a close eye on things the next few days.  Wish us luck :)