A Good Day Until It Went A Little Flat

Oh, my goodness—what happened to summer!  Yesterday was coooool and rainy with a high temp of maybe 54 degrees!!  Breezy, rainy and cold!  Today dawned with a brisk temp of 44 degrees and lots of clouds.

In spite of the weather we were still determined to take an ATV ride with Sarge and Sarah.  We knew Larry and Geri would enjoy seeing the Mill Creek area—so Larry and Michael loaded all the machines into our long cargo trailer and off we went toward Livingston this morning—dressed as if for winter!  Coats, coveralls, ear flap caps, gloves, etc.!!!

Fresh snow on the mountains!

The trip started off great—lots of beautiful fresh snow capped mountains, good smelling evergreen trees, wildflowers, waterfalls—what more could we ask for!

And then it happened—the strangest thing!  Larry rode up behind us and said, “I’ve got a problem!”

Oh my!—I would say so!!  How in the world that stick got into Larry’s tire is anyone’s guess—a freak accident—the stick was over an inch in diameter and here we were miles from anything!  The guys worked hard (really hard) to patch the tire removing the tire from the rim, using a patch on the inside and re-inflating the tire with a compressor and hand pump.  But—no go, the patch wouldn’t hold, the hole was too big.  So, Larry rode the ATV with the partially inflated tire down the mountain and the tire never came off the rim—amazing!  We loaded up and headed toward home stopping in Livingston for burgers and milkshakes.

On the freeway between Livingston and Big Timber the truck began to shudder as if we had a flat tire—nope, the truck wasn’t running well—oh, wait—it wasn’t running at all!!  Older trucks such as the cowboy’s pride and joy 1997 have two fuel tanks.  There is a switch on the dash to switch between the two tanks.  The usual method is to switch tanks before you run out of diesel! And, if you know diesels, when you run the engine out of fuel they are a bugger to get started again.  We had enough speed to coast off the freeway and into a gravel pit.  For some reason this truck happens to have a priming bulb—and with just a few squeezes of that bulb we were running again.

OK, quick, let’s head for home before the gremlins rear their heads again!!  We are home, unloaded and settled in for the night—tomorrow some of us are heading to Billings for new ATV tires and some of us are remaining at home to wait for our new guests.