Getting ready for the garage

Most of our work has been inside the house so far. But now that spring is here, we're both chomping at the bit to build a garage. I'm especially looking forward to it because right now we have a "garage room" in the basement that's slated to be another guest room and a place I can sew and scrapbook. So while I'm engaged in my creative pursuits in the old garage room, Bill can pursue his in the garage - namely the Tempest and the Cruiser (plane).

You can see the temporary home of the plane in one of the images. Boy, Bill can't wait to get that plane into the garage and get this shiny silver box out of our yard. It was quite an ordeal to get the plane to Ohio from Colorado. And then from Ohio to Virginia. One we won't ever forget, so we don't need the reminder. What we do need is a flat-bed trailer for when we buy our next fixer upper - a '65 Mustang!

If you haven't heard the story of our trip from Colorado, here's the overview: The trailer is taller than we thought, so it's essentially like pulling a parachute. And it was shorter than we thought, so we had to take the engine off the plane. But we got everything nicely loaded and hit the road just as a storm was rolling in. So it was slow-going getting out of Colorado. Then we get to Kansas, where there's a wind advisory, gusting winds of up to 40 mph or something crazy like that. Bill was struggling to keep the truck and trailer on the road and we could barely get over 40 mph. And it was working the truck pretty hard - it kept wanting to overheat. So I suggest to Bill that we rest out the storm and drive through the night when it's cooler.

So we pull into a rest area and try to sleep through the storm as we're bounced in the wind. Then we start our overnight drive. And I think that would have been a good plan, but when we stopped for gas, Bill did a walk-around the trailer and noticed the tires were beginning to shred. Luckily we'd stopped at one of the most populated exits in Kansas and the Wal-Mart tire center would open at 7am. We pulled our truck into their parking lot and got a couple hours rest. Got new tires and were on our way.

The truck is working very hard pulling that "parachute" against the wind and is running hot. So we've got the windows down and the heater on full blast to keep the engine cool. And we stopped at EVERY SINGLE rest area in Kansas to let the truck cool down. We also made an unexpected stop along I-70 as we were pushing to make it to St. Louis for the night. Something flew out of the back of someone's truck and the truck in front of us hit it and it blew out his tire. We also ran over the offending mystery object. We pull over to check all our tires (eight of them) and we luckily were spared. However, the fellow in front of us was struggling to get his tire changed.

So Bill did an Indy-style tire swap as traffic was flying by at 80 and 90 miles an hour and I was poised to pull him into the ditch should anyone hit our truck. That was the fastest tire change I've ever seen in person. We rolled into St. Louis just before midnight and got back on the road around 4 or 4:30 am. It was just enough sleep to make us want more, but we needed to get in as much driving in cool conditions as we could.

We weren't on the highway very long after we crossed into Illinois when it suddenly got loud. So we pull off I-70 and have the truck looked at. Something had worked its way loose in the exhaust system. We needed to get on the road, so they used a hanger (true, I swear) to temporarily keep things in place.

Picture this: windows down, heater on high, 90 degrees outside. We can't hear the stereo over the engine. We've gotten very little sleep in the last two days. And we still love each other. And we laugh about it!

Illinois and Indiana were a bit smoother driving, but we didn't really start making good time until we got past Indianapolis. And we made it back to Columbus before the storage area closed. What a relief it was to park that thing and know we didn't have to look at it again for months!