Jeeps are for girls?

We may still be stuck in California but that doesn't mean we can't get ready for Oklahoma. 

In May of of this year we decided to take a couple of weeks off work and visit the property we bought in Oklahoma. We decided we were going to take Ashley's Jeep because the property is easier to get to with a 4x4. We were going to be camping on one of the two lots we brought  so we had all the gear and food we would need for the two weeks and then some.  It was the "and then some" that was the real problem. 

Ashley's Cherokee is a 96 and the stock suspension was getting a little weak after 15 years. It also had stock size tires on it that were pretty well worn down. The roof rack is missing the cross bars and at the time she didn't have the money to buy a full basket and I didn't have the time to build one before we left so we ended up buying a hitch mounted cargo rack that Harbor Freight had on sale. As you can see though that made everything shift towards the back and we were riding on the rear bump stops. We stopped at my parents house as we left and picked up my 4x8 mini trailer and that solved the problem, although it did force us to drive slower in places. 

Now we tried to time this trip to fit in the time space between Ashley's school ending for the semester and the busy summer season at work. It's just our luck that this is the time of the year when Dustin, OK has it's wettest time of the year and it rained pretty much every day we were there although not all day so we did have time to check things out and in the end expand our 10 acre purchase to a total of 30 acres. All of it on a hill that will give us plenty of space to play in. The problem is while Jeeps are pretty tough vehicles from the start, Oklahoma Mud© is tougher. What you see to the right is the road that leads into our property after a couple weeks of rain and thirty minutes of us trying to get ourselves unstuck from the drive out of the property. Things were going fine and just as I said we're fine to Deb, I hit a rut that threw us over onto the embankment leaving us with this problem. 

For a properly equipped off-road vehicle this would be no problem, but remember I said this was pretty much a stock vehicle. Not only that, the few items I did have to help in a situation like this had been left at camp which is not the place for them to be. I ended up walking about a mile away until I found a house that while nobody was home, had a come along and some straps that I was able to get enough pull on the front of the jeep with to get it pulled out. That's the thing about Oklahoma as compared to Los Angeles. I hopped the fence and went through their unlocked shed and borrowed the tools I needed and on our way out, they had returned home and when I stopped to take back the stuff, they said no problem, just glad you were able to get yourself unstuck. You try that here and you'll get shot before you can even tell them you're returning stuff that's theirs. We stood there and talked for another half an hour and they welcomed us to the neighborhood and told us if we ever needed anything else, just to help ourselves.