Jennifer & Daryl

We headed excitedly out of Seattle. Snoqualmie Pass and on into Idaho, the feeling didn’t dissipate. Sleeping our first night near Coeur d’Alene, Jennifer and I were reminded why we loved the open road – and why a cozy 17-ft travel trailer is the perfect home for two people touring America.

Ahead lay Montana and a corner of Wyoming before we reached South Dakota and Mount Rushmore. We had never visited Mount Rushmore, and we wanted to badly. We’d arrive a day or two before July 4, which added to the anticipation.

We’d retired from our jobs in Seattle only days before, and were relocating to Tampa. Our belongings had gone ahead by truck. Now we had time for a long-planned coast-to-coast vacation. Mount Rushmore would be the highlight of the trip.

The borrowed travel trailer glided smoothly behind the SUV. On the interstates, even the mountain crossings are an easy pull. I checked the tire pressures twice daily, and felt the wheel bearings for excessive heat. The hitch seemed rock-solid, and the lights worked. I had done my share of trailering, and I don’t take safety lightly.

I thought I’d covered the bases. But I should have taken a better mental note that I’d been able to tighten the wheel nuts just slightly before we left Seattle. By no means loose, they should have been tighter. I may have thought I was just torquing them right. Probably I congratulated myself on making everything snug and safe. Actually, I had overlooked that wheel nuts could be a problem with these, the not-original wheels. They, too, needed checking twice daily. It didn’t help that we were taking a long trip with a trailer we hardly knew.

Devils Monument
On the third day, tiring of I-90, we exited the interstate and headed to Custer National Cemetery somewhat east of Billings, Mont.. It represented a slice of our national history, just as we were coming up to Independence Day. From there, Highway 212 would take us southeast across Indian reservations and cattle country. It was a change of pace - and a shortcut that saved about fifty miles even when detouring to nearby Devils Tower. Visiting there would also be a patriotic moment, since it’s the first of our national monuments. We had seen it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the movie and in photographs, the rocky fortress is breathtaking.

Highway 212 is one of our more remote highways from about forty miles east of Billings, Montana to the farming town of Belle Fourche, South Dakota. That’s two hundred miles in which you may not see a single car – and we didn’t. We reached pretty well the middle of this stretch of road late on a Friday afternoon, and planned to continue on to Belle Fourche to find a motel with a nice bath and a restaurant. But just there, in the remotest possible place, a clattering thumping noise from behind caused me to pull over.

A trailer wheel was hanging on just one, very loose wheel nut, the other nuts having altogether departed. But, worse, all but two of the studs had sheared.

I jacked up the trailer to relieve the load on the remaining studs. We unhitched, and took enough of our belongings for a motel night, and drove into Belle Fourche, arriving there on Friday evening. There, we licked our mental wounds and ate glumly, thinking how to handle a repair a hundred miles away.

Tiffin Motorhomes
By the time Saturday arrived, I had figured out what to do. But I didn’t know the borrowed trailer well enough to know exactly what parts were needed. So we drove the hundred miles back to the trailer, where I removed the wheel bearing, took off the broken parts so that I could match them in the store, and left the axle-end covered with a plastic bag as protection against dust.

We arrived back in Belle Fourche just when the town went to sleep for the weekend.  Luckily there was a trailer store in town, serving mainly the farming community. But it was closed then, and it would be closed Sunday – not to mention Monday, which was July 4. We were at their gates on Tuesday morning when they opened. Relieved to find the parts we needed, and careful not to overlook even a five-cent cotter pin, we headed back to the travel trailer for the second time. I repaired it with more pride than my earlier neglect justified. We got back to Belle Fourche, this time with the trailer, late on Tuesday afternoon.

Neglecting to check the wheel nuts had cost us four days, and an extra four hundred miles.

But, sadly, it had also cost us Mount Rushmore - and Devils Monument, too. We really needed to be in Tampa when our furniture was delivered. Now we had used up the slack in our schedule.

“We could reach Mount Rushmore tomorrow, and then drive all night and the day after,” I said to Jennifer.

Jennifer knew what she thought of that. “Been there, done that,” she said, adding “Must we?”

The appealing way she asks always melts my heart. But I argued for old time’s sake.

“It’s a fabulous sight,” I said. “It’s important to see it.” Secretly I hoped she’d prevail.

“The important thing is to get to our new home safely - and before our furniture,” said Jennifer.

And with that we chanted an old family mantra: “The important thing is to make the important thing the important thing”.

We’ve driven across the country seven times now, and we’ve never seen Mount Rushmore.


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