June 27, Day One of the Out West Odyssey

 

 

Woke up in Madison, WI around 5, 5:30 a.m. Got dressed, fed, walked the dogs, put a bunch more crap in the trailer we probably don’t need, and got hitched up. Wheels up at 6:45 a.m. Not terrible!

 

Had a rather uneventful day of travel. Saw one hilarious typo on the back of a semi trailer, something like “100 milion safe miles.” How do you misspell "million"?! Ah well. We got a laugh.

 

Oh, and ran into the oddest grocery in Tomah. Looking for a basic coffee drink in this weird combo of grocery, liquor store, and restaurant. All I could find initially were TRIPLE SHOT ENERGY nonsense drinks from Starbucks. Finally found a couple of “iced” coffee situations from Dunkin’ and we were happy for the coffee-flavored caffeine. First-world problems.

 

Then on the drive through Minnesota, Jim replayed (and I highly recommend) Ten-cent Beer Night from The Dollop podcast. There were a couple of spots I had to pause and giggle and get re-composed. Can’t drive nicely with tears in your eyes from laughing about bad decisions on the part of the Cleveland Indians.-9

 

Drove I-90 with no trouble, and saw lots of evidence of flooding over the past days or weeks, in fields and creeks. Finally made our turn toward our campsite in Garretson, SD. A skinny, bumpy little road with ZERO freaking shoulder. I wasn’t panicked at all, ha ha. Took it at about 40 mph into the little burg of Garretson. The campground where we’re staying is little more than a county park, Split Rock Campground. But we have electric and a nice cluster of bushes to hide our camper. Got in around 4:30, we think.

 

But. We got the camper backed in, rolled up on leveling wedges and chocked the wheels. Then we went to the back compartment where the electrical cables are stored, along with some other tools. Jim wanted to be sure those tools were safe when we left the truck, so he locked that compartment before we left Madison.

 

We’d not really ever used that lock mechanism before. He said that when he’d put the key in and turned it, the lock turned just fine, and all seemed well.

 

But. When we got to camp today, after however many miles and lumpy-bumps along the road, that lock would not open for love or money.

 

So. There’s a tiny access hole under the bed where you might be able to switch a little water petcock on or off to drain the trailer after a trip. No way you can reach around the back side of that storage area door to muck about with a lock that won’t open.

 

Luckily, there’s a platform the bed rests on, and it’s screwed down with about 8 screws. The worst part was that the drill he might have used to unscrew those screws was locked in that storage area. No matter, though, Jim’s got ROLLS of tools in the back seat of the truck. Yay, Jamie! Oh, and, that wonky mattress was in the way, so that had to come up and get leaned across the galley while he removed the bed platform. Luckily, the dog tie-outs were in the bumper of the camper, which is not lockable, so we could give them a breath of fresh air and some water while we effed around with this storage area. They got to bark at some dogs who were passing by, and Mom got to feed them treats to distract them from the little dogs.

 

Long story short, TL;DR, we got into the compartment by removing that bed platform and completely undoing the latch and removing the lock mechanism from the compartment door. Jim said he broke some part of it so that now it won’t lock, but it will latch. Gaffer tape may be our other safeguard to keep the latch shut. We imagine the part is highly replaceable (and probably moderately expensive). Maybe we can find one in our travels, or order one when we find the interwebs.

 

I’m most proud that even though we were both disappointed about the stupid broken lock, that I managed to say something to the effect of “don’t use that lock” without hopefully making him feel like an idiot for having done so. He was rightfully trying to protect expensive tools, and there’s no reason for him to have assumed that the lock wouldn’t work. Except for the fact that it has an Airstream trailer and name attached to it. This is a little older trailer, not the newer ones where the locks are installed upside down and rattle closed without so much as a by-your-leave. But who knows what evil lurks in the heart of that lock, or what bumps might have dislodged a tumbler to the point that no key would work. Would that we’d brought the Lockpicking Lawyer lock picks; that might have been something.

 

But he got it all taken apart and fixed and put back together. He had a jillion tools to help fix it. Need to pick up a set of imperial sockets, but he had wrenches that were sufficient to get the job done. I was only a tiny bit of a jerk and we are not at war; I think the marriage is safe and there was no ugly fight about it.

 

This Split Rock campground is lovely, has a river next to us that is above its normal flow by a lot. We can see lots of evidence that it’s been way higher up the banks lately, like maybe 10 or 15 feet up the bank, if the debris lines tell us anything. The dam is flowing like a beast, with a neverending water source north of here. And of course, it’s raining some more, with thunder, which makes the dogs SO happy (not). Another inch of rain, Jim reports, if our 8” Dutch oven is to be believed.

 

We took a walk with the dogs before it started raining, and saw some yokels in bicycle helmets with short, straight rec kayaks trying to get into that river to paddle. We couldn’t tell whether they had skirts for these ill-chosen craft. I wouldn’t paddle it with a real helmet and a whitewater boat. It’s flowing fast and furious over that spillway. We didn’t stay to watch the drama. Though Jim reports, after a trip over that way, that he saw them loaded back up and driving away. I guess they lived, or maybe they just skipped the trip. Would be a fun place to surf, but you’d have to know what you were doing and probably in better-suited boats.

 

We had a delicious dinner – Cincinnati Chili that we’d made a while back and frozen. Boiled up some pasta and had some sliced red peppers along with it. Dishes, dog walk, maybe a little movie on the DVD, and bed.

 

We take off again tomorrow, a little later than this morning, thank goodness, and head west another 5 hours or so to the western edge of South Dakota. There we will spend two nights, a nice time to recuperate from a couple of hard days on the road. And some crappy sleep – Jim didn’t sleep well last night in anticipation of the trip, and we both will probably lose sleep to the trains that will go through tonight, as well as more rain. Yay! All in all, though, we are happy that this first day has gone relatively well. One stupid lock and more stupid rain, but the rest is pretty peachy.