the trip from hell

We went camping over the weekend and ordinarily it's pretty uneventful.
This weekend was definitely the exception. Thursday Rain got sick and
almost came home from work which would have meant that we couldn't leave
early for the trip on Friday so she stayed at work. I loaded up most of
the gear on Thursday so I wouldn't have to load and unload on Friday.

Friday morning I woke up with what Rain had on Thursday. This was
definitely not good and I seriously considered not going at all, but I
knew it was a 24 hour thing and I'd be better for Saturday so I took it
easy and got things loaded up. Around 1:00 Rain calls me and says the
black Jeep won't start. I already had the trailer all hooked up and
wasn't in the mood to unhook it to go look at the black Jeep so I took
the trailer with me. It turned out the Jeep was just not fully in park,
so the safety switch was preventing it from starting.

As I was backing the trailer into the driveway, I noticed something odd
with one of the trailer tires. I'm glad I looked because one of the
inside sidewalls was split. I broke out the hi-lift jack and changed the
tire and put the spare on. For some reason I decided to bring the
hi-lift along as well since I don't usually bring it with the blue Jeep.
I was glad I did. About 50 miles into the trip, the other trail;er tire
(not the new spare) blew. Now I had a problem since I had no spare now.
I located a tire shop nearby with the help of the GPS and called to see
if they had my tire in stock, which they did. I dropped the trailer,
leaving it on the jack and headed for the tire shop (thank goodness for
the GPS). $40 and 1 hour later and we were back on the road with a new tire.

We also lost alot of time to traffic due to construction and what should
have been a 3 hour drive at most took a little over 5 hours.

Updates

I re-built the 2 ger door frame uprights that I broke last week (my own
fault). When I get access to a table saw, I'll trim them down a bit so
that the "U" is a bit shallower and that shouldn't happen again.

Today I also decided it was time to defrost the big freezer since the
frost builtup was like 4" thick on a few of the shelves. So right now
the contents are in the coolers. Thank goodness we have 2 decent sized 5
day coolers. :)

I started a batch of pumpkin melomel today. I found a bunch of frozen
pumpkin puree left over from Thanksgiving, so I figured I might as well
use it up. Maybe we'll have pumpkin melomel for Thanksgiving this year,
or next...

Katie is getting strong

This morning katie wanted to pick me up. She's always tried and lifts me
a hair but that is it. Well, today she actually picked me up off the
ground a few inches. That really says something. This is a 70 something
pound kid picking up a 138lb adult. She is capable of lifting nearly
double her body weight and she's only 8 (this coming saturday).

mobile ger?

Yesterday we set the ger up to use for the bbq today. After getting it
all setup, including the roof canvas, I realized I should have put it up
in a different spot. So 4 of us grabbed a piece of khana and lifted and
moved the fully assembled ger about 10 feet. Pretty cool. :) I just wish
we had a video camera to capture that in action.