Category: Trips

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Annual Birthday Wheeling Trip 2020


Celebrating some birthdays this week with a trip to Anthracite Outdoor Adventure Area. Matt, Chris and I have birthday’s within a week of each other. TJ’s is about a month away. Even though Mike’s isn’t close, we let him come along anyway. 🙂

Spent the better part of two days wheeling the trails at AOAA. This is an awesome off road park for all kinds of enthusiasts. They allow motorcycles, ATVs, UTVs and full size vehicles, like Jeeps. Some trails are restricted to Jeeps only.

Even after two solid days of wheeling, there are more parts to this park we didn’t see than we did. Will definitely be making a trip back some time in the not too distant future.

P.S. Some of this video was from my iPhone in a dash mount and it sucks. Working on getting some upgrades.

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Birthday Wheeling Trip ’19

It has seemingly become a tradition that a number of us with October birthdays plan a weekend trip to go off road. This year, we continued that tradition. 🙂

Mike, Chris and I rented a lake house via AirBnb that was near Windrock Off Road Park. Windrock is close to Oakridge, Tennessee, a key piece of the Manhattan Project.

Windrock has 73,000 acres and over 300 miles of trails. I’ve been there a couple times before. We covered 50 miles in two days.

We also took a side trip Saturday night to Nemo Tunnel, a since abandoned railroad tunnel. It’s a little less than a half mile long. When you’re in the middle of it, and you turn off all the lights in the Jeep, you can’t see anything. It is pitch black. There’s no light at all for your eyes to even adjust to. Worth the 30 minute trip to get there.

Nemo Tunnel 24 Entrance

According to the GPS, we spent 16 hours, over 2 days, covering 50 miles of trails. Nothing was overly difficult. Trail 16 was a lot harder when I did this 2 years ago. It’s been dug out a bit and the ledges don’t seem as steep.

The only issue we had was Mike’s passenger side front shock started making noise. We figure out what the problem was and took care of it. One of the things for which a Hi-Lift jack is useful! We needed to relieve the pressure the Jeep was putting on the shock. By jacking up the body and letting the axle droop, it was a simple fix.

Looking forward to wherever our birthdays take us next year! Although I am not looking forward to cleaning my Jeep.

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Moab stays with you

You can take the Jeep out of Moab, but it’s really, really hard to get all this Moab dust out of your Jeep. It’s good to be home, but I am not looking forward to cleaning this.

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SV Seeker

Once of the things I really wanted to do on the way home was to pass through Tulsa, OK and stop and see the SV Seeker. SV Seeker is a 74′ steel hulled sailing vessel being scratch built by Doug Jackson in the front yard of his house. Yes from scratch, from flat steel, folded into a hull.

The thing is huge! And Doug was nice enough to let me stop by and get a tour. His cameras were running while he was trying to fix an air compressor, so who knows, maybe I’ll end up in one of this YouTube videos.

We could be twins!
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Cadillac Ranch

After traveling through Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, I entered north Texas.

I-40 follows along the same route as the famed Route 66. One of the things to see along this route is Cadillac Ranch. People stop from all over and add their own paint to any of the cars. It had to be an inch thick in places.

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Four corners. And puppies!

On the way home from Utah, instead of taking the direct route back via I-70, I decided to head south. I wanted to see a little bit more of this great country.

First stop was the Four Corners monument. This is the spot where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona all meet. It lies within the Navajo Nation.

Here I am, in all four states. Hahaha!

When I headed back to my truck, I saw a family traveling with a couple American Bulldogs and their pups. I love puppies. 🙂

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The big raffle is here!

I missed the raffle last year because of a break down. Wasn’t going to miss it again. I can’t believe the volume and value of what is being given away. Over $200,000 worth of prizes including a complete Dynatrac 44 front axle and no less than 10 sets of tires.

We didn’t win squat. HAHAHAHAHA!