jrnl: started story of going up north

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 ## Fixing brakes video
 
+## Drive north 
+
+Eight days of travel. Six days driving. 1508 miles from St George Island to the shores of Lake Superior. 
+
+It was too fast. I knew it was too fast, but we wanted to get out of the heat. I was ready for the toll it takes on us, but I was not prepared for the toll it would take on the vehicles. If you do the math there, we were doing over 250 miles a day. Often considerably more since one of those days was mostly spent by the side of the road.
+
+The first day started smooth. It was hot and we left early so we wouldn't be driving in the heat. Everything was fine until the last 100 miles when the engine sudden got real loud. I pulled over and popped the doghouse to make sure an exhaust manifold hadn't cracked. Nothing that bad fortunately, so I crawled underneath and sure enough there was the tailpipe, snapped off a hair past the t-joint on the passenger's side.
+
+I limped into the nearest town and stopped at Napa. Which was closed. I limped back to O'Reilly and went in to see what I could find to try to rejoin those two pieces. After some debate with myself I went with a thinner piece that would fit inside. I borrowed a spreader tool and tried the widen the rear section, which would have allowed a wider diameter piece to fit, but I backed off, it just seemed to brittle to possibly stretch, more likely I'd crack it. I went with the next smaller diameter piece. It fit, the problem was that I couldn't just shove it in because that would block the flow of exhaust from the passenger's side. 
+
+I fitted it as best I could and figured I could drill a hole and then widen that with a metal blade on my jigsaw. That would have worked, but one of the O'Reilly employees saved me a ton of time by announcing that he had a vice and a reciprocating saw in his truck. As we all should. He had welded up his own vice stand that fit in the two hitch. It was genius and I may have to copy it if I can get someone to weld it for me.
+
+With the vent hole cut, I inserted the pipe into the other and anchored it with a machine screw. Then I fitted on the back half of the tailpipe and anchored it with another machine screw. I bought some putty and shoved an entire container of it into the cracks and wrapped a patch to seal it up.
+
+But this time it was hot and miserable and Corrinne and kids had done everything there was to do in this little Alabama town so after I bought some baling wire, we hit the road. The Jeep did not like the heat though, and the wind had drained from our day, so we ended up calling it a day and getting hotel. We stopped about fifty miles short of goal, but we figured the hotel would let us get an early start the next day.
+
+We did indeed start early, we were on the road at 6 AM, trying to beat the heat up to Tupelo. We ended up drive over 300 miles, which I think is maybe the longest day we've ever done. Both vehicles ran great, though by the end of the day when we pulled into Tombigbee State Park for the night the supposedly heat-resistant wrap on the exhaust was pretty well shot. We pulled into the first site that looked appealing and took cold showers and whiled away the evening playing baseball and grilling burgers. After the sun set that night, and it cooled down, I got underneath and re-wrapped it with some header tape I had lying around and then anchored that with baling wire.
+
+The next morning we hit the road again early and pulled off another long day up to Metropolis IL, to the same campground [we stayed in last year](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/prairie-notes). We took a day off the next day to get some work done, but even here we hadn't truly escaped the heat so after a day of rest we hit the road again.
+
+I should back up a bit. The last few miles to Metropolis the bus had been making a horrible scraping noise that sounded like it was coming from the left front wheel. I suspected either the brakes or the wheel bearings, the latter of which would be especially bad. Leaving Metropolis I didn't hear a thing, so I pushed on. After about 100 miles I stopped to get gas and again, once I dropped below highway speeds, there was the scrapping again. I got gas and got back on the highway, scraping until I was up to about 35 MPH and then it went away. Curious. 
+
+Then I hit a particularly large bump and heard it again. Hmm. Then something in my head screamed wheel bearings. I know I have a piece about safety third, but I don't mess around with wheel bearings so I pulled over. Corrinne and kids joined me at a gas station. I told her I needed to get the wheel off and apart and take a look. They headed off to explore an antique store while I went off to convince a diesel mechanic to help me get the wheel off. He agreed, he even spun the bolts off for me, but then he had to go run an errand. But he left his tools for me, so I got the wheel apart and... the brakes looked okay. One of the wheel cylinder pins was slightly off kilter and the cylinder was leaking, but neither of those were making the scraping noise. I dug deeper and the bearings all looked okay to me.
+
+Eventually the mechanic came back and he agreed with my assessment. Then he looked at me funny and said, "weird thing is, back down the road from here a car just blew out its wheel bearings, sheared off the whole wheel and it hit a motorcyclist. They're all down in a ditch, they're trying to get them out." We talked for a while after that. He told me some sad, sad stories about his town, his family. It was a strange stop that left me feeling like things in this country are more painfully broken than I thought. 
+
+Eventually he helped me repack the bearings and put the wheel back together. I paid him for his time and tools and hit the road again. The scraping went away when I got above 35 and I figured I'd just drive and try to puzzle it out. Which is what I did for about another 50 miles and then I hit a bump and that was the end, the scraping became a grinding and I pulled to the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. 
+
+
+American roads are falling apart. I remember when we first started we'd notice bad roads. Louisiana's roads were terrible. Corrinne's grandfather built roads in Louisiana most of his life, we'd joke that the roads were probably the same surfaces he'd help lay. I also remember thinking that highway 101 in California, just north of and down through San Francisco, was one of the worst roads in the country. The point is we noticed bad roads. 
+
+Today, we notice good roads. And there are very few of them.
+
+It wasn't until I sat back and thought about it that it occurred to me that everything that went wrong on our drive -- the broke tailpipe, the cracked rear transmission mount, the broken alternator bolt, the lose steering wheel bolts in the Jeep -- all those things ultimately met their end because of excessive vibration. Bad roads. I hate to be a downer, but they're mostly getting worse. And in the then, you and I end up paying for them either way. Either we pay with tax dollar for new roads, or we pay with more and higher repair bills from driving bad roads. Something to think about next time you're voting.
+
+
 
 ## Q and A Bus article
 ## Fire, cooking with fire