Whew! We made it!

We arrived in Snoqualmie, Washington on Thursday afternoon. Although we had less than 250 miles to drive that morning, it was a long day.

Everything started out fine enough. We saw plenty of orchards.



We were in wine country and saw vineyards, too.

Of course, I had to put a funny sign in here. Nothing like old fruit.



We passed some freshly shorn sheep. They look a little cold, don't they? If you enlarge the photo, it looks like the one sheep is complaining to the other one.



Then we passed miles and miles of these strange looking things.





Do you know what they are? We found out later from our son that they are for growing hops. Yep. It turns out that Yakima, Washington is the largest hop producer in the U.S. In fact, the United States is the SECOND largest producer of hops - Germany is first. Gosh the things you learn from me! Here is a picture from Wikipedia that shows the hops growing up the wires. The poles are supporting the wires.



We were driving west on 90 on the Snoqualmie Pass when IT happened.

We both heard a loud noise.

"What was that?" I asked.

Jim looked in his side mirror. "Blow out!" He quickly, but carefully pulled over to the side of the road.

We both got out and looked at the damage. It was not good folks. It wasn't just a blown tire.



Pink arrow - This is all dented up. The pink line is where is should be. This is the bottom of our slide out.

Blue arrow - This piece broke off. I picked it up off the road.

Green arrow - There is a crack in this area. Needs replacing



Where's the tread?



It was scary standing on the side of the road while Jim changed the tire. Although we were a good 8 feet from the moving traffic, when the semis came charging by at 65-70 mph, our whole trailer shook, as did I.

Jim got the spare tire put on, but it was only at 60 psi instead of the 90 that it required, so we had to drive slow for cautionary measures. We finally found a gas station a few miles up the road. After several attempts with the air pump, Jim discovered that it wasn't working properly. He finally asked the guy if he could just plug in our air compressor to fill up the tire. The guy agreed. So while Jim was running around doing this, I sat in the truck looking at the scenery.

Here's a ski lift right to the left of the gas station.



Finally we were on our way.

You can tell we are in Washington by the abundance of fir trees.



And finally, the road into our campground.



We've been very lucky on our travels over these five years. We've had a few flat tires on the trailer, but never a blow out. At least it didn't cause us to get in an accident. Things can be fixed.

Coincidentally, we replaced all our trailer tires two years ago while we were out here in the Seattle area. So Jim called up the the place and they gave us a new tire; we just had to pay the difference in price of a new one. We are awaiting a call from an insurance adjuster to look at our trailer; we won't get anything fixed till we get to Illinois.

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