Down by the Riverside

We are on a street in a light industrial neighborhood in Riverside, California (map). After spending all morning again on the phone yesterday, I finally located a set of tires here, and we decided it was worth the 40 or so mile drive to come get them.

After having mostly convinced myself to retread the casings we already had on the bus, I talked myself right back out of it for two reasons. First, we'd have to spend a full three days (two nights) up on blocks at the re-tread shop. More importantly, I checked the DOT codes and the casings are already a full five years old. Put them on almost exactly four years ago, but they must have been a full year old already at the time. Even though we figured to get two or three years out of a new tread, we would not want to go to seven or eight years on the age of the casing.

The guy here in Riverside, at Eagle Tire just a few blocks from here, said he could get a set of four Bridgestone M711's, the same tires we've had on that axle, by this morning, so here we are. We also asked him to pick up a pair of Firestone FS560's for the steer axle. I prefer the Bridgestone R250, but it was another $150 or so per tire, and I don't want to spend any more money than I have to up front until we convince ourselves that we have cured whatever is eatin the tires there. We've barely gotten 40,000 miles out of the very expensive Goodyear 315's we put up there.

It was 4:00 by the time we knew the tires would be here for sure, and so we slogged our way over here in the brutal LA traffic, arriving well past 6. The area of the street near the tire shop, where I had planned to park for the night, did not feel right (lots of trash, and too close to a residential area), and so we drove around for another half hour or so until we found this spot. Right after getting completely set up, we discovered we were out of water, and I had to hunt down a spigot and jockey Odyssey around the neighborhood -- it was past 8 by the time we finally settled in for the night.

We hoofed it down to local eatery Ciao Bella, a white tablecloth affair that turned out to be quite good, walking in the door just before closing time. After dinner over a friendly bottle of Chianti, we both crashed fairly early.

In a few minutes, we will drive over to Eagle Tire for our new shoes. This evening, we'll head right back to Whittier and down to Pedco in Santa Fe Springs, where we are hoping they can squeeze us in tomorrow to look at our oil leaks. When I called the San Diego Yacht Club yesterday, they told me the FUBAR kickoff dinner was sold out, so that nixed heading down there tonight.

In other news, we had a visitor yesterday afternoon -- LiveWorkDream's dad Raul, who lives just a couple miles from the Freightliner dealership, and worked there as a mechanic for many years.



Raul was kind enough to agree to let us have our parts shipped to him from Europe, and he wanted to come by and introduce himself. We find it sort of ironic that we've never met Rene and Jim -- we keep missing each other by mere miles (or days), even though we read each other's blog religiously -- but at least we've met Rene's dad!