Welcomed Day Off

The lone open date on the Spring Training schedule was welcome and came at a good time. I took our truck to S & S Tire here in Surprise to get the tires rotated for the first time. I only have 28K miles on the truck, but wear was beginning to show on the outside edge of a couple of the tires and it was time. The original quote I had from them was for $150 for all six tires but when I arrived, we determined that there were only four tires that needed to be dismounted and remounted. The other two would be switched on their existing rims from the outside rear of the dually configuration. The new quote was for $225 for four tires and I explained that the previous quote was much less for all six tires. Evidently, the gentleman that gave the original quote was wrong and they compensated by taking $25 off the bill. As a result of not requiring new valve stems, the total came to $179. I talked to them about switching to nitrogen instead of air. We made that switch on our Jeep some time ago when we replaced those tires and are happy with the difference. The truck would run $15 per tire for nitrogen replacement, so I scheduled that for our next day off on Monday. The tires run a lot cooler, have less expansion in hot weather and wear more evenly with nitrogen. Also, we have not had any warning of low tire pressure since we switched to nitrogen in the Jeep. We used to put more air in those tires about once a month. We will also get a checkup performed on our Jeep at that time on Monday. We then should be ready to roll for the summer.

The other completed task yesterday was to finalize our trip arrangements to WA, beginning on April 1. We will stay in Laughlin, NV on the 1st, Ely, NV on the 2nd, Hagerman, ID on the 3rd, Hermiston, OR on the 4th and arrive in Chehalis WA at the Thousand Trails preserve on the 5th. The maximum distance is 350 miles on one day but otherwise we kept the travel under 300 miles per day which we like to do. We will stay in Chehalis until the 8th when we relocate to the Thousand Trails preserve in La Conner, WA for the rest of April until we fly to Chicago to Patty's at the end of the month. We will place the fifth wheel in the storage facility at the the La Conner preserve while we are gone and will return on May 8th and spend another couple days in La Conner before heading out to WY for the summer. It should be fun. We will travel route 93 through eastern NV which is a route we've never taken and will pick up I-84 in ID.

It's back to work today for the next three days. There are only two weeks left so we are counting down the time before we pull up stakes and move on once again. It was 99 degrees here yesterday and it looks like we went right through Spring and into Summer without a pause as it is going to be hot again today...