As much as one prepares for a 13,000 mile road trip of this
nature, and builds in all the redundancies one can think of to assure a
failure-free trip, how does one account for a collision with a bear? After the collision I did notice how many
semis and pickup trucks have a “cattle guards” or “brush guards” mounted onto the
front of their truck. We obviously
didn’t.
Amazingly the air bags did not explode. We still don’t know why.
If the bear had been a couple of inches taller than the
front bumper of the truck, vital parts of our truck would have been demolished and we would have been stranded. Upon inspection we discovered that our truck has four radiators – one
each for cooling the engine, the transmission, the power steering, and I can’t
recall the fourth one. Damage to any of
these radiators would have stopped us in our tracks.
The next morning when I fired up the truck at six in the
morning I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs
watching the heat gauge rise on the radiator.
If we had even so much as a minor leak, we would have lost fluid while
parked overnight. It was with a great sense
of relief that I watched the heat gauge settle in at the same spot and stay
there.
Before purchasing our 2007 Dodge 2500 Cummins 5.0
turbo-diesel, we did a lot of research on the ideal pickup truck for this
trip. It has performed for us
flawlessly. It has not missed a beat,
knock on wood – not even a flat tire.
OK, no flat tire, but one dead bear. Hmmm. Is there some rational in play here? JKL
ReplyDelete13,000 miles -- about half the circumference of the earth! Well done!
ReplyDeleteI'll take that beat up old truck off your hands for cheap...
ReplyDeletewell...hate to play "I told ya so" but did you get full coverage for the trip? (scratch that...I like to play I told ya so)
ReplyDelete