The Alaska Highway - The drive that almost broke us

we got a second opinion on the tires for the trailer it seems that we should be okay we just need to replace some parts and we should be able to be able to find we're still going to lower some of the weight by getting rid of the garage but we're going to replace the drums and repack the bearings and then we should be good to go get a little stronger tires one month of packing just to drive 50 miles and have to repack it all with the garage kit gone this whole front of the trailer right here is now going to be empty so we can kind of reassess how that's being done which ends up being pretty good because inside of the camper we still have a decent amount in the aisle here so if we're able to take all of this and put it onto the trailer that means that we can actually sleep in our camper again and we did find out that we can open up the door and squeeze in enough with it still hooked up to the jack so the tailgate can come down enough against this so we can kind of like squeeze through the door to get in there to sleep Cody's spreading out our gigantic tart which I'm super excited to see all fully spread out because we never actually did that in our yard this was just way too big but it is 30 feet by 50 feet well our goal was to leave by 10 o'clock and we're still in Rice Lake and our car soon though it is 10 55 and we are just starting to move forward so my parents are going to follow us for about four miles and then they're gonna leave she seems happy so this is what our situation looks like so far got a fake plant to try to make it feel like home because it is home our water bottles food papers some candy that I got from one of my girls at the gym we have a battery Bank a dog that takes up a lot more space than she should and then up here we are jam packed with clothes food and emergency supplies we made it to North Dakota on day one of driving and first things first I would just like to proudly announce that we have all eight of our tires accounted for none of them pull off which is awesome we stopped about every 50 miles for basically the first 300 miles and checked all the lug nuts [Music] could be nice to me and someone's a little crazy from being cooped up in the vehicle all day but what do you think of the drive oh my goodness why don't you eat some food please we're trying to get her to eat she hasn't eaten anything yet which is kind of weird about that so who knows if she's going to day one what are your thoughts uh trailer is pulling a lot easier than I expected it to be um we've stopped a lot to check on the lug nuts on the tires uh but this last time seems we don't need to tighten them anymore so we should be good from here on out I would think also our gas consumption is a lot better than we expected in the first place so we've been doing all right on that and I think we're making some pretty good day yeah it's good I feel like we're ahead of schedule but we're actually just kind of right on schedule so but we're making it which is good so I don't know Cody's doing all of the driving so it's been decided I didn't want to so far there's only been one thing that we forgot to bring with us and accidentally left at my parents house in Rice Lake and those were my work boots but hopefully we will get those shipped up to me as soon as we get a mailing address oh bottomed out a little bit there we are getting super close to turning off to go to the border and our brand new shiny windshield a new okay it's a chip but still it's a little frustrating we're only on day two um this drive has been terrible it's super boring fields at least the weather has been super nice but stopping on pavement no double parking pre-packet which is talk to people and then we left no yep our plan was originally originally on the third day and turn into Canada and it is the night of the second day so we are ahead of schedule which feels super nice but we are gonna have to deal with something that's kind of serious someone is getting very car sick she hasn't thrown up yet but she keeps putting her head down there and we're assuming that that means that she's not feeling very good that's gonna be on tonight slash tomorrow morning's task but hopefully we have that figured out before we start driving again tomorrow because we want to keep kind of cruising but we don't want to make her feel worse we're in Canada right now in Alberta and pretty sure there's some forest fires because it is so smoky and super super windy which is a bad combination however we just stopped for gas the front of our camper is kind of ripped open so we're going to add a bunch more straps to this I'm not quite sure how many more we need to add but we got to assess that evacuated the entire town due to fires thank you see that is some fire happening well there's wildfires and that is the direction we are heading we are trying to beat all of the road closures so right now there's a lot of wildfires happening around Canada in Alberta and we've passed now two towns that have been evacuated I guess so there's no gas you can't get anything there's no services at all we still have half a tank of gas and I think there's just one more fire that we need to get past right now and Hope do that before that town that's near it gets evacuated let's see we're not really sure what's happening hopefully my dad's not right and we shouldn't have gotten a second good gas [Music] we'll see if he can say I told you so where we're going right now actually looks pretty clear the smoke is kind of arching up over the road but over in that direction we can actually see the smoke still like billowing up further past the trees it looks like when there's a forest fire they take out equipment and they just start digging up the dirt to try to draw a line so the Fire doesn't cross it so it looks like we're going to the side and around it which is good you can really see the difference between the smoke that's coming up and the clear sky oh it's crazy see that but power line poles some of them have actually burnt completely down in the line exit the roundabout onto Highway too it is continuing for 49 kilometers that Road is closed jug of water ready to use it if they need to through the Rockies on a gravel road I think it's time for a swim foreign we found the best candidate to take a bath the colds are still ice yeah so there's still ice right up there but this water is crystal clear and real quick really cold and we're really sweaty and dirty oh it's so cold oh my feet are numb it's so cold [Music] there's no way [Music] hey it's okay wow that was really cool so good oh I feel so good worth it my feet are still numb so worth it someone is extremely jealous she didn't get to you but next time once we're in Alaska all right back on the road oh my gosh it is so pretty ah wow that was cold so yesterday we were racing against some wildfires trying to get ahead of them today we might be having a transmission failure on the truck we're currently uh in fifth gear going downhill with a bunch of weight behind us and I still have to push the pedal in pretty good rattling happening and I'll stop to ask some other guys probably a transmission hgo situation isn't great because we are in the Rocky Mountain British Columbia there's no cell phone service we don't have a SAT phone we have no way to contact anybody and we're just barely limping along a lot of what ifs go going on right now basically the worst case scenario that we're imagining right now is that the transition go well it goes out right now and then we're kind of just stuck here and if that happens we have to rely on someone who drives by that wants to stop and talk to us and beg them for help trailer and truck on the side of the road go with with town and find somebody but the clock the clock Helm that might even have a nap yeah I'm not really sure again because we don't have cell service I'm kind of just estimating how long it's going to be I don't think it'll be more than two hours but it um it's a long ways yeah I mean if you're going to talk worst case scenario about this trip this is where it's gonna happen and this is what's gonna happen so we're just gonna go really slow we're gonna try to get as far as we can every little bit further we go it just means we're that much closer to help when something does go wrong but when something gets worse then how about that that's our update just to keep everyone in the loop a little ways back on this road we just hit a gigantic bump and we didn't see it and we were going way too fast so we popped one tire on this side which is fine whatever manageable but in doing so the frame of our trailer is actually bent now so it bent right here on both sides and the back is hanging a little bit low a lot a bit low um oh we're gonna try to limp it into town which we were told is an hour away we still don't have any cell service so this is the best we've got this top board is broken so we're holding it up with a ratchet strap because that's all we have also it seems that this tire is starting to rub on the inside which would cut back hoping it wouldn't but it seems there's a little bit of scuffing and I think that's what caused that one to pop other than that I think I'm on the brink of just calling it for the night yeah but we have an hour drive so we gotta get into town preferably before it gets too dark oh I want to cry our truck all of a sudden looks different we just got done driving five hours from Watson Lake to White Horse where we picked up a 10 foot U-Haul truck and 12 foot U-Haul trailer so what we have to do now is drive that five hours back so we drove our truck with the pop-up camper in the White Horse and then we left it at the U-Haul place where we're taking this truck and trailer back to Watson Lake where our current trailer full of stuff is sitting um so we have to drive back there and then we have to try to transfer as much of the stuff as we can that weight allows from our trailer into the U-Haul trailer and then um and then we have to drive back to White Horse pick up our camper and truck and then Cody and I are going to be splitting up one of us is going to drive our truck and then the other one's gonna be driving the U-Haul and then we can finally start making our way back to Alaska and actually get some progress on this road trip so today was pretty much a wash sucked starting it's 11 o'clock at night right now we pretty much wasted today but I mean at least we have a plan now it's better than where we started this morning we didn't have a single plan we had no clue um I don't know we're still learning things with the trailer and the tire s in we went over that that hole in the ground I don't know yeah so when we hit that drop um to the frame of our trailer which caused the axle to be shifted over which caused the tire to start rubbing on the trailer and then that's what caused the tire to pop brought we brought it to a few different people and had them look at it and pretty much everyone said it was it would take a while to kind of figure out what our next game plan was going to be which option would be the best um no matter what option it was we knew we were going to be spending a good amount of money we also learned kind of why the transmission is going bad and that really is on us neither of us knew that when you're checking the transmission fluid the vehicle can't be off because when the vehicle's off it'll look like it's full and it's fine but you have to check it when it's running so when we checked it when it was running we were pretty much on empty so we were empty so we just drove 2 000 plus miles with our transmission fluid on empty through the Rocky Mountains liters of transmission fluid look forward even so three liters of transmission fluid later uh at least the truck isn't driving any worse than what it was it's not going to fix the problem but hopefully we can limp it along a little bit further and yeah um I guess the biggest lesson that we learned is if you're going to go through the Rocky Mountains you have to go slow you have to be super cautious and um if you're hauling a lot of weight don't do it with just one vehicle because if something goes wrong there's no cell service anywhere and you're pretty much stranded yeah which we learned lesson learned but we're fine we're making it we have a plan Cody's getting sick of me I like driving the hills and seeing the scenery and pointing out the mountains I point out them out and then I glance over at Lori and I just see tears streaming down her face and she's gripping onto the door handle that only happened once I don't know about that right there I'm not gonna lie there have been a lot of Tears today but I am blaming it on a very unfortunate circumstances and basically no sleep what do you do I mean tonight 's gonna be another rough one and then honestly the rest of our drive is going to be pretty rough too but we have after that today we have four days in order to load up all of our stuff finish this drive and then get to our property unload all of our stuff and then we have to bring the U-Haul stuff and we actually get to drop it off in Anchorage so we have four days to do all of that which means nothing can go wrong anymore we're on a timeline and we'll see how that goes because our record isn't very good when it comes to stuff like that the driving for tonight we are officially on our property and it's a good thing we have our snow boots because there's still snow everywhere and this whoa is what we just drove through and that's what our entire Drive looks like that was a nicer part I'm starting to regret everything about this decision right now Cody's super excited [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Remote Life Alaska

Views: 33,425

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Id: 5JAjT8X1L1o

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023