(Sorry for the back posting. Wifi is infrequent and not always the most reliable!)
I got up early to walk to a coffee shop with Ralph, and at 6:45 a.m., after a mile, I had soaked my dress completely. By the time I walked back, the heat felt oppressive, and it was barely 7:30 in the morning. Matt went to AutoZone to buy some adhesive heat shield we found online the night before to place on the trailer shelf to try and protect the box on that side. We debated going to buy a new box to replace the melted one, but decided that if the heat shield didn’t work, we didn’t want to be out two boxes, so we just turned it around instead.
We loaded up, completely drenched in sweat. I don’t know that I have ever felt heat like that, and it was only going to get warmer that day.
The hotel offered a free breakfast at a restaurant across the street. I was assuming a small continental-type offering with some bland bagels and muffins. Turns out it was a full sit-down affair. You had two menu options to choose from, but our whole table went for Option A, which included a beverage, two eggs any style, toast, hash browns, and a choice of meat. I mean, really. Two thumbs up, Historic Coronado Motor Hotel.
We headed back east on the 8, and then turned north toward Phoenix. Soon after we turned north, the car started with a really irritating vibration. I thought it might have just been the ruts in the road from the semi truck traffic combined with the distance between our tires. There’s one section of freeway in San Diego that always rattled the Passat but never bothered the Golf — maybe the same thing.
But it continued. Relentlessly.
We stopped after an hour to check on the box. No melting! Great sign. Being outside was like standing in front of a hair dryer on high heat.
The rumbling vibration continued.
We got to Phoenix and had lunch. Box still OK! The heat was still blazing. We ate outside at a restaurant because we had Ralph with us and went through three glasses of water each. I’m pretty sure everyone inside the restaurant and everyone who walked by were thinking, “why in God’s name would you be outside in this weather?” DOGS. DOGS AND CHILDREN REQUIRE YOU TO SACRIFICE A LOT OF THINGS.
We took off north again. The rumbling was just insane. I was starting to think it couldn’t possibly be the road’s fault, and that I couldn’t tolerate another 2,500 miles of this. We stopped again and I had Matt combine the boxes thinking maybe the trailer was off balance and causing the issue. We got started again and it didn’t seem to have made any sort of difference (but the good news is that the heat shield was working exactly as designed).
Up and up and up
We pulled into Flagstaff to get gas and a Starbucks for me. I chose the wrong one off the freeway and we went on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to find it. Matt dropped me off and left to get gas. When he pulled back up to get me he said, “we are going to Discount Tire across the street. Something’s wrong.”
I'm not sure how long he was inside, but soon there was a guy outside looking at the tires and not even thirty seconds later someone announced that we needed new tires. Apparently the tread was starting to separate, which is what was causing all of that vibration, and we are so extremely extremely EXTREMELY lucky that we did not blow any of them (three of them were bad) on the road. I shudder to think about what would have happened.
Discount Tire did not have the tires we needed in stock. It was already past 5:45, and they closed at 6:00. The tires for the van are a pretty rare size, so finding them was going to be a pain, and we were for sure stuck in Flagstaff for a night if not two.
Flagstaff is apparently really popular in the summer. Camping was out of the question because all of the campsites around Flagstaff, while I'm sure devastatingly beautiful and also economically friendly, required a freeway. Tutu and her broken heels could not exceed 30 mph. The first two hotels I called that allowed dogs were completely booked (this was a Tuesday, too!). The LaQuinta had rooms available (LaQuinta's always allow dogs) and although the price made me gag because we got one of the last three rooms, we decided to stay there.
We were both pretty frustrated that night to say the least. Our original plan for the evening was to camp at the Grand Canyon, and staring at the parking lot of the LaQuinta seemed add insult to injury. We still cooked outside because I couldn't stomach spending even more money to eat out, we couldn't drive very far anyway, and when things get shitty, there's not much a Pancho Villa's tortilla or four can't fix.
I kept reminding myself (and saying out loud) that there were much, much worse places to get stuck in, and we were still so lucky that we didn't have any on-road disasters. Flagstaff is actually really beautiful, and I wish we could have been there under better circumstances.
We spent the entire night sitting on the floor of the hotel room near the bathroom (the only light source that would not disturb the sleeping child) searching for tires. HOURS. (Big thanks to my parents in Minneapolis for answering all of my incessant late night telephone calls and texts!) No one had them. You could barely even find them online. Our biggest restriction is the load rating that we needed. You could find lots of tires out there in our size, but most were only rated a 97 or 98. The van is really, really heavy - we needed a load rating of 102. We kept finding the same three, but they were all winter tires, which would not work at all (the rubber is actually different in a winter tire than in an all-season or summer tire, and one of the three was even studded, which, no). We found one option but it would take 4-5 business days to ship, and they didn't do expedited shipping. Four to five additional days was just not going to work. We eventually went to bed.
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