Friday, October 11th

It took me until 2am to get to sleep. Then the dogs woke me up to let them out around 8:00. We have to check out at 11:00, which should be enough time. I was watching a video last night showing how to install the safety cables for this base plate. It didn't make a lot of sense to me last night, but now it seems a little clearer. The passenger side safety cable wasn't too bad. It required feeding it up through the frame behind the headlight and around some soft radiator tubing. I don't know that that's really the best choice for a safety cable, but that's the way they did it in the video. For the driver's side cable, the video said it was super easy and told me to feed it up through a big hole in the frame and around and behind the headlight, but there was no hole I could get it through, so I just wrapped it around a solid crossbar below the radiator, where it isn't going around any cables or hoses and is attached to something very solid. There was a lot of extra slack, but I attached some zip ties to hold it in place.

The video showed them cutting off some triangular tabs on the back of the bumper, cause they were getting in the way with the base plate installed, but it wasn't that hard to slip them behind it. What was a problem was that the bumper needed to mount flush against the crossbar I had wrapped the safety cable around. There were a couple of notches in the bumper though, and I was able to cut off the zip ties and line the cable up with one of those notches. I'm kind of amazed by how flimsy the bumper actually is. It's just a big piece of plastic held up by a couple of plastic tabs. It's back on though. And the grill just snaps into place. That just leaves the tire well rivets to put back on. That'll just be a few minutes. It's getting close to 11:00, but I don't think we have that much left to move out. I called the front desk and told them we'd be another half hour, which should be way more time than we actually need; we'll probably be out by 11:15.

So we finally finished checking out around 12:30. I got all the stuff loaded up by 1:00, then realized the nylon rivets the base plate came with to replace the ones I'd removed were too big for my riveting tool, and the rivets I got were way to small for the big mounting holes in the wheel well. I managed to hand-pull a couple of them, but some of the others absolutely refused to be pulled. I decided it was secure enough that I could make the drive across the street to Fleet Farm, and after looking everywhere for a proper automotive riveting tool, I was ready to give up, when I was walking through the screw section and saw a drawer of automotive plastic rivets, including pushpins that don't need a tool, so I got a bunch of them. Then I got outside with them and discovered that the pins barely pushed out at all. I really didn't feel like standing in line at Fleet Farm again to get something else that might or might not work, and I managed to get enough of the attachment points secured that the wheel wells seem pretty solid, so we finally got on the road.

The drive to Des Moines was pretty uneventful, except for a couple of assholes that seemed to think it was their duty to prevent me from getting over to the exit lane to I-35, which meant I missed the exit and had to loop back a couple times. Also our power inverter kept beeping loudly whenever Leo plugged his laptop into it. We stopped and looked at it and couldn't figure out why, so we just did our best to live with it. We listened to I'm Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, which is a great book that seemed to have been written to describe us. It was a 2 hour drive to Des Moines, so we got there about 5:30. We found out that the Staybridge only allows one pet, but we convinced to bend the rules a little to allow 2. I didn't tell them about Spider because he's a service animal, so I shouldn't have to, and I don't think that will cause any problems. They seemed a bit hesitant to allow 2 dogs, so I thought 3 would be pushing it even if he was a service animal, and I really just wanted to get checked in and not have to go find another hotel. After getting settled in, the rest of the evening was pretty quiet.

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