POP

Randy was driving across 40 this week, while I was cooking Gumbriot, when we both heard a really loud POP!  He pulled off at the upcoming exit so we could take a look at the tires.  It was so loud that we both thought we had blown a tire off a rim or something.  We crawled over and under the truck and trailer.  We couldn't find anything wrong, so we chalked it up to another passing truck as the source of the pop.

You can sorta see in this photo we weren't stopped in the best spot.  We were twisted on a sharp right lean pointed uphill.

Of course when you are in a hurry to find a place to stop you can't be choosy, but when we stopped looking at the truck and looked at where we were at, oops.  The pot holes in front of us were plentiful, deep and of course going to be hard to miss when we left.  The pot hole Randy is standing in is about 8-10" deep by 6' across and you can kinda see how sharply slopped the area is.

While looking at the pot holes I spotted this vertical windmill in the back ground.  I was so excited at seeing it up close, because I have been reading a lot about them recently.

What a WHEEL HOG.  While I was sidetracked by the windmill, he thought he would jump back behind the wheel.  He had already done 700 miles on the nose at this point.  Even though he could technically (as he was arguing) drive for a while longer, I put my foot down.  Supper was ready for him to eat and this was as good a place to switch as any.  He only had 30 minutes left on his log for that day anyway.  Then he tried arguing that it was going to be hard to get out of the spot we were in and the next fuel stop was only a little ways away.  I won.  Of course I made it back on the highway with no problems AND managed to miss ALL of those nasty pot holes to boot!!! :-P

The culprit is found!  We have a small basket next to the driver's seat where we keep the essentials (ie: pliers, screw driver, tape measure, gloves, etc).  We had a small plastic bottle of aluminum polish here that the seat apparently came down on.  HARD.

Hard enough to smash the top down and blow a hole in the side of the bottle! That's where the pop came from.  We found this when we were getting the truck polished the next day and wanted to rub down the CB antennae while standing around waiting.  From now on we will keep the touch up polish with the rest of the detail products in one of the trailer boxes.