2011 WY/MT Trip – Day 1

Well we made it to our first stop on our journey north, Jackson WY.

I can’t say that the ride out here was completely trouble free, (and no, I’m not talking about the tire issues). I’ll get to our rough spot here in a moment.

I’m not always going to have the internet available, so you’ll have to wait for updates as I have access. And be forewarned, I’ve been away since 5 a.m. Friday morning, and have only had two half hour naps since then (one Friday on today when we got here). So I’ll probably be slightly more nonsensical than usually.

On to the photos! The main link can be found here (linky)

Loaded up and ready to head out:

Good thing we don’t have any kids, as my wife tends to pack heavy :

Photos of making our escape from the St. Louis area:

Things were smooth sailing, boy let me tell you!

Right until the key retainer for my front passenger caliper decided to abandon ship 😳

Wife: “What was that noise?”
Me: “I don’t know”
Me: (steps on brake, listen to nasty nasty noises). “That’s not good!”

A side of the road inspection revealed that the caliper was mostly being held in place with the wheel. Since we broke down near Odessa Mo, we started with the Oreily’s in town. and worked our way from there to an Advanced, Napa, and Finally a couple of Autozones.

All the folks were real helpful, and in the end, we got the part we needed, But after all the phone calls (and trips to places with sketchy brakes, (Note to self, fix emergency brake)) I thought we were going to be stuck.

All for this part:

It also took out one of the brake pads while it was at it:

I’m not sure exactly why this dude took flight, but I picked up a spare in case this one takes off too! Thankfully, after 1200 more miles, it doesn’t appear to have moved (though it still fits in there “looser” than I’d like.

Fun in the AZ parking lot:

This little ordeal put us about 3 hours back behind our schedule, but we survived. So we left the Kansas City area about dark, so no photos of that 😆

We had to head toward Denver to go north since MO 29 is still closed from the flooding in that area.

Some Sunrise Photos North of Denver:

Then we crossed into WY which gave us views of brown, brown, and more brown. Oh, and a lot of high winds as well which made the hills 3 gear pulls at 55 mph (at best). Let’s put it this way, even at highway speeds, the winds were strong enough to lay my CB antenna whip over on its side at a good 30° angle, and every wind sock we saw was taunt.

Finally some green showed up as we came closer to the Teton Nat’l forest:

Hey, mountains!

There’s some other random photos in that link. It took us 25 hours to make it to where we’re at now, and the truck is doing much better on the hills than I ever expected it would. To the point, where I’m considering not bothering to regearing. We’ll see if that thought holds true later on.

On to Day 2