Going to Utah.

After spending a nice week and two days on the ranch with Anore, Keith, Cynthia and Vanessa, we were ready to keep on going. This time we were going southeast. We were going to Utah.

But before we could take off, a problem with replacing break pads on the trailer had to be resolved. A day before our departure Mirek drove to Manteka (3 hours north) to try to purchase the break pads. He took off the rear wheel and the worn out break pads so that they could be matched up in the store. Our captain came back at 3 in the afternoon and got busy customizing the break pads. They had to be thinned down and the square corners had to be turned into round ones. Luckily, there was a garage with some tools for Mirek to use and a few hours later, with a lot of effort and a number of trips up and down the driveway to the trailer he managed to make one pair of breaks (the most worn out) to fit our trailer. We'll have to look into locating the proper breaks on our next farm, but for now it will have to do it.

So, in the morning we had our breakfast together, took a few pictures of our fantastic hosts, got some peach jam and apple butter that we had made as our wwoofing job, got some white peaches and apples to munch on while driving and took off around noon.
We are 8,051 miles into our trip, heading to Utah. It took us some time to decide which way to go to cross Sierras, which was not an easy task. The choices were either to go north and and cross over the range way up past Sacramento, or go south and make it through Mohave Dessert. Going north would be like going back, in a way. The elevations were high all around, so it didn't really matter which way we choose. So, dessert it is!

And the mountain elevations were plentiful, and engine overheating was numerous. We had to figure out what was the cause of the overheating problem (besides the truck pulling over 5,000 lb up the mountains!), because there was no way we could make it far with that kind of speed and constant pulling aside. Mirek examined the radiator and we suspected that the dust, dead crickets and other bugs stuck there were the probable reason to impaired cooling that was causing us abnormal heart rates.
The good news was that the day was almost over, the sun was setting and we were ready to retire for the night. It was enough worries for one day, and tomorrow we'll have different worries.