Staging Stop

We are in Fort Stockton, our last stop before entering Big Bend National Park.  We are using this stop as a staging place to get all the supplies we can take on board to get us through as much time as possible before we have to make a shopping trip.  In fact, the folks at Big Bend call this place Fort Stock-up.

This is Paisano Pete, the worlds largest Road Runner.

These guys are on top of the hill adjacent to our RV Park.  Travelers on I-10 welcomed to Fort Stockton by them when approaching from the west.

The greeters west of town are not the only silhouette art in town.  They have a whole park full of them.

    

Today promises to be pretty warm so I get out early to manually check the air pressure on the tire that has been plaguing us with pressure loss for the last week.  The last diagnosis was that the tire pressure monitor (TPM) was the culprit, so I had removed it and it is now a couple of days since that time and should be checked to verify that it did indeed solve the problem.  No such luck, the inside dual is flat again!  Time to find another truck tire shop.

Being in oil field and ranching country made the job of finding a tire shop pretty easy.  Big trucks outnumber cars and SUVs around here.

I got on over there and they were able to get to me right away.  However, finding the problem was not such quick work.  Like the three previous tire shops, after going over the tire with a fine-tooth comb they could not find any sign of a leak.  But they did not think I was nuts because the tire lost 8 pounds of pressure just in the time between them filling it and the frustration of not being able to find a leak set in.

It was just after lunch time now, we were going to leave for Big Bend early the next morning.  It was important to get there on a weekday so that the people that we would need to get our "housing" arranged would be there.  And tomorrow is a Friday, the last weekday we had to do all of this because on Monday we would be in National Park School for 9 hours a day for the next week.  It was decision making time.

The rear duals have quite a few miles on them and while not all the way down to the wear indicators yet, they are so close they might as well be.  It is not a good idea to replace one tire in a dual tire system.  You might get by with putting two new tires on one side but it would still be problematic.  The difference in diameter between new and almost worn out is more than you would think.  The difference would be enough that one side would rotate at a different speed than the other side even when going straight down a road at high speed.  Not good.  Then there is the thought of getting 200 miles away from someplace that has the tire I will need and not be able to get to it because the tire has completely failed.

Okay, four new tires it is.  Today just got very expensive.  No tire shop in Fort Stockton carried the brand of tire I run.  After a couple of phone calls we found a shop in Odessa that had them in stock and could put them on today, if we could get there before they closed.  Odessa is 98 miles from Fort Stockton, time to get move on.  Luckily most of the roads we would use getting there had a speed limit of at least 75mph.  We punch in the coordinates for Forest Tire Service and reach maximum velocity on TX-18 post haste.

Holding our breath that the malfeasant tire would keep it together for this one last road trip, we pulled into the tire shop with a little more than an hour left before they closed.  The guys at Forest Tire were great, they went out to pull the truck into the shop before Cyndee could get her purse and travel bag together and get out.  She rode into the truck bay with the mechanic.  About 50 minutes and almost $2,000 later we are done worrying about tires and are getting back to the business of preparing for being in a remote setting for the next five months.

Our shopping day in Fort Stock-up is now a shopping trip to Odessa.  As it turns out, this was a better deal since Odessa had a Sam's Club.  We can now get a number of items that we thought we were going to have to do without for awhile.  So we load up on grub, get a load of fuel at about the best price I have seen this year and head back to Fort Stockton.

After an uneventful 100 mile drive home we find someplace to cram all the stuff we bought and start preparing/configuring the camper for travel mode.  We'll get a start once the sun comes up in the morning.  Which with it being near the end of October and still daylight savings time, that is not all that early.