I guess Murphy took the day off

It seemed like Murphy was visiting again. I had scheduled mail to be delivered to the Post Office in Savanna Illinois, expecting to pick it up on Monday. I continue to be stunned by how inconsistent the US Postal Service is. One time I will give 5 days to get our mail forwarded to a location, and it will arrive in 2. That means it sits for 3 days waiting for us to arrive, and I could have saved a few bucks by waiting a couple more days to have it sent, and scooped up more mail in the package. Next time, I will allow for 3 days and it will take 5. That is what happened in Savanna – I allowed for 4 days and the day we went to pick it up on the 4^th day, it wasn’t there!

That makes a mess of things. If you send mail to a Post Office branch to be picked up, it sits there for a few weeks waiting for you to get it. If you don’t pick it up in a few weeks, it gets returned to where it came from – in this case, our mail forwarding company in Pensacola FL. So, a few weeks in Savanna, then back to Pensacola, and then we have to mail it out again somewhere else – it might be a month and a half or more before we see the mail we should have had today. Murphy is on the job making sure what could happen does.

Well, next morning, mail or no mail, we headed out. Since we had the blowout near Salton City CA, we have been experiencing a pretty severe shaking in the front end of Colectiva, which is transmitted directly through the steering wheel – makes it a bit dicey keeping control of the coach at higher speeds. We found a Freightliner dealership with service bays about 40 miles from Savanna outside Davenport IA and made an appointment to have it checked out. We spent most of the day waiting for them to look at Colectiva and diagnose the issue, but around 4 PM they told us that the issue was a worn idler arm in the steering componentry – good news is it was fairly easy to diagnose and not and extensive repair list – bad news was that they had to order the part and didn’t know if it could get here tomorrow or not. He said they would try to have it overnighted, but this late in the day, there was no certainty that it would be here tomorrow.

The other issue diagnosed was that the bad idler arm had caused considerable damage to both front tires – not only the one with over 40,000 miles on it, but also the one that we had replaced 2 months ago with the blowout. I have read and researched enough about big rig tires to know that it is not recommended to just replace one tire at a time – it is always advised that when you replace one tire on an axel, you replace both. So, when we got the blowout tire replaced, I went with the cheapest tire available – a Chinese import that was about 40% the cost of a US made name brand. When I learned I needed to replace that tire, I was unconcerned – I knew I would be replacing it whenever I replaced the other one anyway.

The good news was that the Freightliner facility worked with a company that specialized in truck and RV tire replacement, and that they would come over to the Freightliner facility to replace the tires while Colectiva was not being worked on. The bad news was that they didn’t have any tires of our size in stock – 275/7OR22.5. There were some Goodyear tires of that size in their Chicago location, but there was no guarantee they could get them by tomorrow.

So – mail didn’t arrive – need a part that might be here, might not be here tomorrow – need tires to come from Chicago which might be here, might not be here tomorrow. Looked to me like Murphy was on the ball and in fine form.

Well, tomorrow came. Since we couldn’t get any information on if stuff arrived before 11 or noon, we called the Savanna Post Office – our mail had arrived. So we drove the hour to retrieve it. We then learned that the idler arm had in fact arrived, but they could not start working on it until after lunch. At about noon, we learned that the Goodyear tires had arrived from Chicago, so those guys went over and put them on Colectiva. The got done around 1 PM, and the Freightliner folk drove her into a bay and began working on the idler arm. It took several hours, but by about 4 PM they had her done. We had been thinking about stopping next in Keokuk Iowa, which was about 2 hours, so we just headed out – smooth riding along the way with both new idler arm and new rubber – and got set up in an RV park in Keokuk long before the sun began to set.

So, I guess either Murphy was asleep or he took the day off – either way, I don’t care!

 

Talk to you soon!