Hub-bub

I am not sure as I type this if I will get it all out before my face hits the keyboard in exhaustion. If this post ends with a word like dhvadandevuionaeprnvu8ae, you'll know I have fallen asleep at the computer. We've just returned--and I couldn't mean that any more literally--from a 5-day camping trip. Suffice it to say that that holds the record, I think, for Longest Camping Trip Taken By Me. More significantly, it was Judah's first trip, at the tender age of--gasp!--very very nearly 5 months old. Charis' first camping trip was to this same campground for the same event almost precisely two years ago...my, how things change.

This was the first time we weren't tenting it. The last time we camped, last summer, we decided that we would NOT camp in a tent again until our kids were much, much older. Fortunately, some friends of ours from church wanted to unload a HUGE (26' long) travel trailer, and we were in a position to be unloaded upon. After a bit of TLC, we declared her roadworthy, and last Wednesday morning, we set out for The Badlands in Attica, IN, and the (I'm not going to get this right) Real Truck Club Challenge. Camping and a spectator off-roading event. Right up my alley.

We'd been driving for a couple of hours when we began to hear strange sorts of fwapping noises coming from the engine area. After a close listen, Abe decided it was the fan shroud hitting the fan (of course, I said), which apparently isn't a big deal, so we drove on. Then, for some reason or another, Abe stuck his head out of the window. The sound he heard out there was more than a fan shroud--it was a really horrible, I don't know, wubbaskeetch sound, and seemed to merit our attention. Our caravan pulled off at a truck stop, and our guys, every last one of them a grease monkey to some degree,jumped out of the trucks to see what was the matter. It looked like the brakes were shot. This, of course, is a big deal, so my husband and his brother-in-law went to get parts to fix it. While they were gone, the other guy, who we'll call Tim, tinkered with the wheel and determined that the hub needed to be replaced. This is a much, much bigger deal than brakes. Apparently hubs don't often just break, so that part had to be ordered, and would arrive in a nearby town the next day, so we attached our camper to one of the other trucks and proceeded, after a several-hour delay, to our campsite. We set up in the dark and went to bed.

The next morning, Abe and Brother-in-Law (BIL) went back up to the site of the breakdown (about a 2-hour drive), retreived the new hub, and fixed the wheel. While they were at it, they figured they'd put new brake pads on both of the tires. This is when it all went horribly wrong.

MORE TO COME... dfhaudhsfuidhnvduiaowhieuhauiofhvao