We arranged for a house sit in Tacoma for a few days, which allowed us to relax, get some things done, and hang out with some fun dogs and cats.

When you travel full time, it’s harder to schedule maintenance, especially since I prefer to do all of it myself. Another advantage to house-sitting is it gives us a place to ship stuff in advance, so we can either carry it with us or do the work there. In this case, we needed rear brake pads, and the only source turned out to be Amazon. But for one reason or another, Amazon wouldn’t ship them to one of their drop-box locations. So we asked the homeowner if we could ship to her house.

Once there, we met two fun dogs, and two young kittens. They were all great fun.

The dogs wanted attention. The kittens just wanted shoe laces to play with.

I was able to find a local dealer and purchase oil and an oil filter, and I purchased a three dollar plastic drain pan at a local Auto Zone. I changed the oil, took the waste oil back to Auto Zone, and gave the homeowner the drain pan (which, if nothing else, could make a handy litter box). In all, this saved me nearly sixty dollars over having a dealer change the oil. I also replaced the brake pads. We could have gone another thousand miles or so on the original pads, but this was a good time to change them out. I put the original pads in the pannier as back-ups in case we need them later in the middle of nowhere.

It was now time to leave the Seattle-Tacoma area and begin heading east. The traffic in the Seattle area, particularly I-5 and I-405 has been as bad as I’ve encountered in much of the US, and we’re glad to not be sitting in it any longer.