The week wore on. We played a game of tap-dance with the moving; after renting a U-haul to bring our stuff to the Dome, we unloaded our belongings at the end of the driveway and returned to Novato to pick up the trailer hitch at the Advance. We’d hook it up there, then drive to Woodland and pick up the trailer. The hitch hadn’t arrived, so we wandered around and brainstormed alternate plans. The office manager, Chris, offered up her husband’s Blazer, which had a trailer hitch, so we could go get the trailer and at least bring it to the Dome. I said thank you, we couldn’t do that, but then the UPS guy dropped off the hitch I’d ordered, and it was the wrong size. To attach it would require massive drilling and work. So we took Chris up on her offer and half an hour later her husband (also named Tim) handed over the keys to his beloved Blazer, despite the fact that we’d never met him in our lives.
We raced off to Woodland, arriving at the Tractor Supply Company just before closing. As the sun was setting, Colleen and I filled out registration paperwork in back while Tim gathered up armloads of gear, grease and tools. After some fandangos with the paperwork, we paid and hooked the trailer up, speeding off to Sebastopol and the dome. I returned the Blazer the next morning (Thursday) and we set to work on hitching and packing.
After two days of drilling, tapping, packing, yelling, cursing, splicing, laughing and sweating, we had the hitch on and the trailer wired. Tim showed me how to drizzle motor oil on the drill bit as you cut through the bumper, to keep it from getting too hot. I kept track of where he’d left the tools and which wire was the one he’d just attached.
We used telephone cord for part of the wiring – courtesy of Uncle David – and fixed a short in the right turn signal for the trailer that delayed us for a day as we disconnected and reconnected every wire in the rear half of the Mercedes. The trailer was piled high with a couch, two bikes, a dozen boxes and my beloved easy chair, among other things.
We tied a tarp over it all, then the trampoline cover, which proved handy because it let the wind through and thus wouldn’t flap itself to pieces like part of the tarp did 1,500 miles later. With Elmo’s rear shocks groaning, we pulled out of Sebastopol, waving goodbye to the Dome, where I had arrived almost seven years ago in the pouring rain.
“I wish I had that grease,” Tim said. “We don’t want that axle to weld together.”
He’d put the grease down in the parking lot and forgotten it in Woodland, and we remained on watch for grease until well into Wyoming.
First, we sold the Hyundai in Rancho Cordova for $350 (after a brief negotiation with some of my former co-workers). It had been salvaged by Tim, fixed up, driven to California by Colleen, and then used and abused by us for four years and 60,000 miles. It was battered, beaten, rusting, but it got us there. We said goodbye and turned east into the Sierras.
The country slid by and we settled into a rhythm of rising around 9 a.m., eating breakfast, then driving for 10 to 12 hours, with numerous bathroom breaks and searches for grease.
We spent an hour in Salt Lake City searching for diesel fuel and grease. We found the fuel, but we headed into the canyons beyond SLC with Tim grumbling about the lack of grease.
“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with that goddamned city,” he said. “Can’t find grease anywhere!”
Finally, in Green River, Wyoming, we found a store that sold high-temperature axle grease, and he slathered it onto the trailer axles while I fashioned a new dust cap out of duct tape (the original had come off somewhere in Nevada). Then we moved on.
We drove 400 miles the first day, 536 the second, and 499 the third. The fourth and fifth days, we hit 619 and 657. Elmo got 20 miles to the gallon, even towing the trailer, which I began to think of as Elmira Good Barge, for no reason at all. We reached Buffalo, NY, checked into a Tally-Ho-tel, and it began to rain. The next day, July 4, we pulled into Montpelier, 3,170 miles and 167 gallons of diesel later.
We jumped out of the car and dug a trench around the turtle eggs buried in the driveway, because the pouring rain was threatening to wash them away.
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