Headstone Hunting
The day started in near Keystone SD with frost on our picnic table. I took my walk on an improved dirt road through protected forest lands. Large chunks of quartz were laying around as part of the road bed. One of the things we noticed about the highways was the reddish cast created by using local rock in the road bed.
The goal of the day was to find the cemetery where my Grandparents and Aunt were buried. We drove a total of forty four miles, talked to five different people and in the end found the headstones. The place looked well kept for a small rural cemetery. It was outside of the village of Whitney.
We headed out of Chadron, after hitting Safeway for yogurt and organic blue corn chips, passing fields of sunflowers and corn. Going down the road John noticed the trailer wasn't tracking correctly. The highways here don't have any pullouts to speak of so we had to drive to the next town. When he crawled underneath to look he found a broken rear spring hanger (the thing that holds the axle to the trailer.) The weld had failed. He got it back in place and held it with vice-grips. I looked the Garmin for nearby repair shops to find a welding shop. The man who answered the phone at Jay's Tire and Lube in Gordon, didn't know the name of the shop but gave me enough landmarks we could find it in the next town.
We are parked in the Rushville Service Centers driveway to spend the night. Not the quietest place in town...the trucks are downshifting coming into town and gaining speed headed in the other direction. (Someone has since stopped to check us out and said they will be back to work on it at 7:30am. Easy enough to fix. Whew!) Dinner was eating watching distant thunderheads pass by seeing faraway lightening.
(editorial comment about mechanical failures: both times now the item to fix the problem was added to his bag of tricks at the last minute based solely on a feeling of 'just in case'.)
---
De Williams
all that I could ever want, I already have
http://followjoy.blogspot.com/
The goal of the day was to find the cemetery where my Grandparents and Aunt were buried. We drove a total of forty four miles, talked to five different people and in the end found the headstones. The place looked well kept for a small rural cemetery. It was outside of the village of Whitney.
We headed out of Chadron, after hitting Safeway for yogurt and organic blue corn chips, passing fields of sunflowers and corn. Going down the road John noticed the trailer wasn't tracking correctly. The highways here don't have any pullouts to speak of so we had to drive to the next town. When he crawled underneath to look he found a broken rear spring hanger (the thing that holds the axle to the trailer.) The weld had failed. He got it back in place and held it with vice-grips. I looked the Garmin for nearby repair shops to find a welding shop. The man who answered the phone at Jay's Tire and Lube in Gordon, didn't know the name of the shop but gave me enough landmarks we could find it in the next town.
We are parked in the Rushville Service Centers driveway to spend the night. Not the quietest place in town...the trucks are downshifting coming into town and gaining speed headed in the other direction. (Someone has since stopped to check us out and said they will be back to work on it at 7:30am. Easy enough to fix. Whew!) Dinner was eating watching distant thunderheads pass by seeing faraway lightening.
(editorial comment about mechanical failures: both times now the item to fix the problem was added to his bag of tricks at the last minute based solely on a feeling of 'just in case'.)
---
De Williams
all that I could ever want, I already have
http://followjoy.blogspot.com/
