MURPHY JOINS US AT LEBONON, TN

“Life happens”  I cannot begin to tell you how often in our travels I have said this.  If you have been following my blog since we set out on our journey of a lifetime you know we had already had many visits from Murphy of Murphy’s Law, so we weren’t really all that surprised when he jumped in the back seat of the truck as we left Seven Points COE Campground near Nashville, TN.

We hadn’t gotten very far on down the road to get to Williamsburg, VA when Gary noticed a wheel, yes a wheel not a tire but a wheel, bouncing down the other side of the road.

He said “Wow, that was close someone just lost a wheel.  Luckily it has missed every one,”  Then “It’s OURS!”

Sure enough, we had lost an entire wheel off the fifth wheel.  Apparently when we had the tire work done on the trailer at the same service center that did our bad rear end repair on our truck they had partially broken our lug nuts off.  The travel on I 40 and other roads had added stress to those lug nuts and now our new tire, with the even newer brass valve stems, and new tire monitoring system on it was traveling down the highway without us.

Thus began a six hour wait in the heat for a proper sized tow truck sent by AAA to show up.  Five hours into the wait it dawned on one of the various tow truck drivers AAA had contacted trying to get us trailered to a place that could take care of our problem for us that the bridges between where we were and where we could go for help in any direction were too low for the fifth wheel to be trailered, as it needed to be due to the missing wheel.

Further complicating the matter was the fact it was a driver’s side wheel that was missing and we were on a very busy highway.  Any onsite work would be dangerous for the person doing said work.

Research on Gary’s part discovered just a few miles down the road was a former weigh station.  It was then decided we would creep down the shoulder to that parking area where repair work could be done safely.

I must admit that was the longest five miles in history, especially when we had to pull back out into traffic on the various bridges on our route.

Once we finally got to the rest area it was another hour before a wrecker showed up.  However, he had brought the equipment and parts needed to do a safe repair that would get us to where we could get a new wheel the next morning.

After he got us put back together the wrecker driver volunteered to help us look for the missing wheel and to see that we got to a place to sleep overnight safely.  

We all walked the woods where we had seen the wheel go, we even tried locating it with the tire minder, but it was not to be found.

I know that six hours sounds like a long time, but considering where we were and all the specialty wreckers they tried to send us, we really couldn’t complain.

After all we had food, drink and a toilet while we waited.  We even had air conditioning in the truck we could turn on during the heat of the day.

Most of all we are thankful that our runaway tire didn't cause any wrecks or harm anyone.

We knew this wouldn’t be our last visit with Murphy but that day we left him sitting in a truck parking area on the side of the highway.  Just wish he hadn’t found away to find us again, and again, and again the next few months.