billy & norm's pioneer day trek in the tracker

My original idea for celebrating this grand holiday on the 24th of July was to build handcarts and have a pioneer trek, but I found that wouldn't be necessary as Billy and I were faced with a trek of a different order.

On the eve of the 24th Billy invited me to go with him to Salt Lake to hang out with his brother-in-law's family as they camped out on the street for the parade. I agreed to go with him as long as I would make it back home in time for the soccer game I was to coach at 11 in the morning.

The street camp out was fun. For a while Billy and I just chilled with our laptops out. Later we played games with his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law's brothers, including Pit and Settlers. That was dope too.

Now I being a little under the weather (yeah somehow I was sick with a cold in the middle of summer—totally sucks nard) wanted to get home that night and get some sleep before my game the next day, so we left around 3am.

Earlier that evening, Billy was a little worried about the condition of his Tracker, which was getting close to overheating, so we stopped at a gas station and put some oil in the engine and some water in the radiator.

Now at 3 am we set off on the freeway to head home and his engine was getting really hot so we pulled off the freeway to get some coolant at a gas station. We put some coolant in and drove further, this time through town on State Street. The engine kept getting hotter so we pulled over to check things out. This time it was steaming like crazy and we found that down under the engine a hose was loose and all the water and coolant was spewing out of it. 

So there we were stranded on State Street in Salt Lake at 3:30 am. There was no way anyone was going to pick us up at that hour. Billy tried making some calls, but no one answered but Luis, who couldn't really help us at that time.

It was really up to us to get ourselves out of this situation. We saw there was a 7 eleven down the road, so we made our way down there to see if we could find something to jimmy rig the hose back together with. They didn't really have anything, but they gave us directions to a nearby Walmart. We ended up stopping at a Smiths on the way there, figuring they would also have something we could use. 

At Smith's I bought a roll of electrical tape, a pair of snips, and two permanent markers. I took one of the markers, cut off the ends and used the casing to bridge the two ends of the hose that were loose. We propped the tracker up on a curb, I crawled underneath and proceeded to tape that piece of marker casing to the two hose ends. It was pretty difficult because I could really only get one hand on it at a time, plus I had to be careful not to burn my hand on the engine. I did however get it all taped up and I hoped it would stay together. I knew it would still leak, but at least we slowed the leak down a great deal. My big concern was weather that casing would stay on there with the hot steam and all. 

We put more water in the radiator and coolant in the coolant tank. Then we said a little prayer and made our way down state street.

It actually ended up working out pretty well. The whole way the marker casing stayed fastened to the hose. It still leaked so we had to fill up on water and coolant several times along the way, but it got us home.

A funny thing that happened along the way is we ran into our friend Jake Glauser's father-in-law at the 7-Eleven at Orem center street. We showed him our little engineering feat and he was quite amused.

Well we got home at 7am and I was able to get about an hour of sleep before heading out to my soccer game. I thought it was quite appropriate that we were able to celebrate our pioneer day with a little trek of our own. I know exactly what it was like to cross the plains now.