Travel Day, Heading Towards Home and My Spare Tire Falls Off

Monday October 17, 2022 Pillars of Rome Oregon

Pillars of Rome

We drove on  out this road from our camp this morning. The road looks worse than it is.

We continued on out this road to get to the gravel road that would take us back to highway 95 where we needed to gas up at Rome, Oregon.

This stuff is why they call this area the Pillars of Rome as it’s by Rome Oregon.

We drove by this old dump area from an old ranch near by that is still being worked. Marty called the stuff junk and I called it history.

Gassing up

We made it to highway 95 and went to Rome to fuel our rigs as we needed full tanks to get across the next part of the trip. We had trouble getting the old gas pumps and our cards working at the Rome station which took a lot of time but we needed that gas and were happy to get it.

After gassing up, we headed down highway 95 a bit then turned right onto White Horse Rd, which was rocked and had a fair amount of wash board.

Spare falls off

That’s what happened all right. The wash board got to the lug nuts  holding the spare on. And this happened just a short distance from where I got the flat tire on the way up.

I was going along the gravel road in a small canyon with some turns when the back of the van jumped into the air and I thought I’d run over a 24 inch boulder on the road that I didn’t see. Or maybe I got another flat. At any rate, I slammed on the brakes and came to a stop thinking maybe the bump broke and axial or something.

I got out and looked behind the van thinking there was a big rock there, but there wasn’t.

But there was one of my tires laying on the road. Which one? I looked and they were all on the road, so that had to be the spare.

Seems the lug nuts came loose and the tire fell off and I ran over it.

All this was really my fault as I forgot to tighten those nuts up after I got the new tires a number of days back.

Here’s the spare tire after I got it back on the van.

I had to rob a lug  nut from one of the front tires to keep the spare on. The front tire had 6, so it should be ok with only five. I’ll keep an eye on it and the spare tire just in case.

The lug nut I robbed to get this mounted back up. As it was, I was able to find one of them looking on the road near where it fell off, but not the other one.

Paved road

This was the end of that gravel road. We stopped here to check the map then hopped on a paved road headed south to highway 140 west..

Sheldon Wildlife Refuge

140 west is a good road and we made good time and entered the Sheldon Wildlife Refuge as the road goes through it.

We turned off 140 back onto 8A, a graveled road headed mostly south and west. The sun was bad blinding us as we drove right into it and the mess on our windshields didn’t help either. There was one spot where we  had to slow to a crawl to see the road.

Camp spot

We spotted a side road on the map in the Sheldon refuge so turned onto it when we came to it. We drove by some people that like to camp closer to the main road and we settled into this spot as there weren’t a lot of pullout spots. The van’s don’t  need much for a camp spot and this one was just fine.

We are camped out in the open here in a meadow with sage brush.

Getting some dinner and settling in for the night.

Tomorrow’s plans

We need to continue west and then south to get back to one of our earlier camp spots at Last Chance Creek where we hope to camp tomorrow night for a couple of days with no cell phone coverage, of course. We are working our way towards home.

Nice day.