Home on the Range

After a long weekend on the road house-hunting and horse-hauling, we are back home in Yelm with 2 of our 3 horses in the pasture. It is so wonderful to have them home again, even though I'm not going to be able to ride them for awhile. Still, there's lots of brushing and loving to do between now and then! Pictures coming soon.
We also had a successful trip in terms of our land hunt, and we found the spot that we want to call home. Now it's a matter of crossing fingers while we go through the whole negotiation, financing, inspections, etc. Whew!
We also had an incident that turned out better than we ever could have hoped... as we were starting up Snoqualmie pass, a car frantically pulled us over to inform us that "your tire just flew off and almost hit us!". Envisioning a blown-out tire on the horse trailer (which we didn't hear or feel thanks to the tandem axle), we turned on the flashers and drove slowly up to the next exit to put on the spare (the road shoulder wasn't wide enough for changing tires on the traffic side of a horse trailer). To our horror, when we got off the road we discovered NOTHING where the tire should have been. No wheel, no lug bolts, nothing but a flat hub. That meant nothing to attach a spare tire to either. Now what to do on a Sunday evening with two horses??? We took a back-road back into Cle-Elum (the nearest town of any size, luckily only about 4 miles back), and as we were limping through town looking for a place where we could park while trying to find a boarding place to lodge the horses until the trailer was fixed, AdventureDad just happened to notice that the local gas station had a service center. We pulled in, and to our sheer delight, not only were they still open, but they said they could repair it right then, on the spot, with the horses still in the trailer!!!! So, what had happened??? Apparently at some point the lug nuts had been seriously over-tightened, to the point where they weakend the bolts, which then sheered off level with the hub. Luckily the shop was able to drill out the stubs, put new bolts on (they just happened to have the right size), and they also had a wheel and tire in the right size... talk about lucky! The rest of the lug nuts on the other 3 tires were also over-tightened, so we'll have to replace all of the bolts, and I'm having rotten luck finding anyone local who can do it, illustrating just how lucky we were. It's almost worth a trip back to Cle Elum! We were also super lucky that our giant tire bouncing down I-90 didn't hit another car and injure someone or cause a big wreck. We went back and looked for it, but it was nowhere to be seen... probably bounced off into the woods somewhere. The lesson; NEVER over-tighten your lug nuts!!!
So, after a more-Adventuresome-than-usual weekend, we're happy to be home even though it's in the 90's.