Alright…fist off this was an awesome trip. The weather was perfect. The trail was top notch and I could not have ask for better traveling outlaws. I laughed so hard my sides still hurt. Top shelf stuff! (but you wouldn't know)
this trip came about when I sold the fire truck to Jeff Ismail and told him I could deliver it to the fall rallye. So I inlisted the help of dboy and monte.
we started Thursday morning with monte and dboy arriving at the ihcs and loading there junk into the suburban. The plan was for dboy and monte to drive the suburban towing uber Scout while I drove the fire truck. I arrived after dropping kids at school. We bs for a few minutes. Then we fire up the trucks and by the crack of 9:00 we were on the road.
our excitement was short lived though when the fire truck started running real rough. We pulled over just before salem and checked things over. We couldn’t see any obvious problems so we hit the road again. We get into salem and I radioed back to the guys and told them I was going to find a parking lot to pull over in. By now the truck was backfiring some. I pull into a lot and we get out and pop the hood. The truck is idling and we are looking under the hood when all of the sudden the distributer twists about 2 inches clockwise and the truck dies. We all look at each other and say…hmm that might be a problem. So we pull the distributer and the bottom gear is seized tight. So we unhook uber Scout and monte and I blast back to ihcs to get another distributer while dboy guards the fire truck and trailer. We come back with the “new” distributer and being the expert mechanics we are and with a few calls to mayben we have the fire truck up and running again. So now we hit the road for CA. Our second departure time is 12:30.
We hit I-5 the fire truck is no speed demon at all 6.77 gears and a 4 speed trans makes for a slow bumpy ride.
but at least we are moving. We stop a few times to make some adjustments to the timing but overall things are going pretty well. Right up until we start into some of the hills on hwy 58. It’s about here that the suburban burns through a couple of plug wires.
so we stop and tape them up and we are off and running again……….for a while. It seems as though electrical tape is not really meant to be under the hood of a truck that close to the exhaust manifolds.
So we limp it into k falls and find an auto parts store the is still open at 7:00. We buy some new plug wires and perform a little parking lot repair in the rapidly falling darkness. Soon we were on our way.
however the darkness poses another problem. The fire truck has never had taillights. It has brake/turn but no tail. So I tell the guys to just stick close to my bumper and we’ll be fine. Which isn’t too tough cause most of the time I’m only going 50mph. Now this amazing plan would have even worked better if when I looked into my rearview mirror I didn’t see that the suburban only had one headlight. Well being the outlaws that we are. We keep right on rolling. We make it all the way down to chico CA when monte comes on the radio and says they are being pulled over by johnny law. Well being the fearless leader of this expedition I promptly down shift and smash down on the gas and get the hell out of town. Leaving them the fend for themselves. After about 5 mins monte comes on the radio and says they are rolling again. It seems the dboy batted his eyes and was let go with a “get it fixed and get out of town” so we did.
The rest of the trip to dobbins was pretty smooth. We arrived at the lake francis resort at 2am dropped the fire truck in a parking lot throw the keys in the ashtray and I pile in the suburban and we head to cisco grove campground which is at the fordyce trail. We arrive at the campground at a little after 3:30am. We set the alarm for 7am and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow we run one of the top 10 trails in the country.
