ODO: 360,205
The very final piece of our Southern journey…Picking up the truck from the importers down in L.A.!
We are at work in The Bay when it arrives, which is very convenient. On Sunday, we pick up a trailer and truck from Shaffer’s Offroad and head south! Shaffer’s discovered a batch of very new kittens in a truck in the yard, so it was incredibly hard to leave. Trailering the truck back seems like the better option for a couple of reasons:
- We had at least 2 leaking tires when it went into the container, and all of them are extremely bald
- All of our shocks are wrecked
- The rear end is going to blow up (not literally, “eat itself” is probably a better description) literally any time now
Breaking down somewhere between L.A. and San Francisco just didn’t sound like an adventure we want to have.
Our drive down is very uneventful, no weather, no wind, no crazy drivers! At pick up, a very helpful Russian guy gets us started up and out the door very quickly. And that’s it. After all the drama to get the truck into a container, getting it out is….easy.
Back in our possession, we cross our fingers and open all the doors in the cab, and all the doors in the camper. Every time we leave the truck closed up for too long we have mold. Even in the USA, because the roof has a leak. We had pretty serious mold after the Panama crossing, and that was only two weeks. Forty five days later, we find zero mold anywhere! Not one little bit of it! We did set up five desiccant containers to help (we only used two crossing Panama), and they did the trick! This was KoKo’s biggest worry with shipping the truck back, the mess at the end.
Feeling a lot of relief, we get the truck strapped to the trailer, and head back north. We hit the road before traffic starts, and have smooth sailing back to The Bay. We even get back at a reasonable time of night!
In the morning, we drop the truck off at the spa, aka Shaffer’s. As we are parking it in the yard, the rear end makes its (probably) final, loud, horrific, metal crunching noise. Good thing we chose trailer. The truck will live here for the foreseeable future while we pick away at all of the repairs needed to get it back on the road safely. We still need to make a run up to Alaska in it to officially complete the PanAmerica Highway.
But in the mean time, we have a new, larger, tiny home to get set up…
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