Bad luckOct 22, 2007
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We pulled into the home of our trailer trash friends, Beth and Larry on Friday afternoon. Jeff routinely checks the hubs of the wheels and this time when he did, he almost burnt the flesh off his hand on one wheel. We immediately figured that it was the bearings although we had just had them done in December. We started looking at places to get the bearings worked on close to our friends' house (Quinlan, TX - about an hour east of Dallas.) No one wanted to work on Saturday.
We called the Airstream service that we usually use and talked to the mechanic who had done the bearings, he said it might be the brakes instead. He would work on it on Saturday for us, but he was in Carrollton, about 60 miles away. How do we get the trailer to him? He suggested taking the wheel off since an Airstream can be pulled on three wheels. We started looking at the route though - 60 miles of Dallas freeways going 30 MPH on 3 wheels, and it didn't look good. So we called the road service. They told us they would get someone out on Saturday and would give us a call.
Saturday morning, hadn't heard anything by 9:30 a.m., so called the road service. They had just started working on getting someone with a flatbed to carry the trailer. They finally called back about 45 minutes later and said they had someone coming from 80 miles away, and it would take them 2-3 hours. Unfortunately, the Airstream place closed at noon, so we told them we would just have to have it all done on Monday. We loaded up all our personal stuff and drove in to Amanda's house to spend the weekend. It was really great seeing all of them once more.
Monday morning, we left Amanda's about 8 a.m. heading for Quinlan. The front had blown in with lots of rain, so it was slow going. We hadn't heard anything from the road service place, so at 8:40, we called them again. Talked to a new person, they said they would contact the tow service and get back. They called back about 15 minutes later and said their contact person wasn't going to be available for about 45 minutes, so they would call us back then.
About this time, Jeff and I are thinking, this is going to take all day. They certainly hadn't seemed to have planned anything in advance, and it would be hours before we finally got the Airstream to the mechanic. We started thinking about Plan B. There was an RV service center about 5 miles away from where the Airstream was. It had been closed on Saturday, but we thought we stop by and check if they could do the work. They said they could, so we decided to hitch up and pull the Airstream slowly to the other service center. About this time, the road service called and said they could have someone there in two hours; we told them to forget it.
We hitched up and I walked outside and listened to the wheel as Jeff drove very slowly. About this time, it became clear even to me that it wasn't the bearings, but the brakes. However, the hub wasn't too warm, and we figured that whatever damage had been done to the brakes had already been done; we couldn't make it too much worse, so we continued. About 2 miles from the service center though, we reached critical mass when smoke started pouring out from the wheel well. At that point, we did take the wheel off, (which we will remember in the future to do at the beginning), and limped in to the service center.
So, here we are at Amanda's house waiting to hear the worst on the repair bill. We may have to stay in Texas a while and work in order to pay all our repairs since we just had a $1600 car repair and also had to replace the microwave/convection oven.
Could be worse - it could be winter in Minnesota.
