Alex is gone??

Welcome to botches off road and it's just going to be a little me and mark action today.

Alex has.

Yep.

I don't know.

What has he got going on?

He's just, I think he just wanted to play something helping his mother.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like that.

He hung it for a day to record and then he backed out on us so dang it.

So I guess we're going to do a little rap.

What would we do this weekend?

I had a pretty interesting weekend.

How about you, Mark?

I went car shopping with Alex.

Yeah, how'd that go?

Or truck shopping.

Pretty good.

All the trucks that he originally looked at were all fucking lemons.

Yeah.

Not surprising.

Yeah.

No.

A lot of them had some form of an issue dealing with exhaust or had a major blowback issue.

I lost.

I think we looked at one, two, three, four, five trucks.

Yeah.

That all on the six truck, no, the fifth truck we looked at.

Man.

And what is that?

A 2014?

Yeah.

2017.

2017.

2014.

F250.

I believe the 6.7.

Yeah, I think there was a 6.7 or 6.5.

It was a 6.7.

Yeah.

Black, right?

Yep.

Black.

It's pretty clean look at truck.

He set one picture, but that's all I've seen of it so far.

And then I think he went and picked it up yesterday, towed it home, and then towed the

car that he drove down there on the trailer with it.

So it was a good break in to see if he would actually get back home and everything.

So from what he said, it needs a couple of things, but it's drivable and good to go.

Yeah.

I think the front needs the alignment done, it needs to do the headlight, the one headlight

has a crack in it, and then when you're working on the body mounts this weekend.

Yeah.

So, yeah, a few things, but at least he's got to run and vehicle right now.

Only cause two arms and a leg.

So, yeah.

That was a, and you do anything during the week, anything with your truck or anything?

No, trucks still held up in the shop.

They, apparently, pinched the wire when I rerouted the Nax sensor wire.

Yeah.

Because I couldn't get the Nax sensor old harness out of the valley fully.

So we rerouted it, thinking it might be an okay area where we routed it, but I guess

we pinched or broke a wire doing that.

They called, I think it was Monday, they called Alex, so they know they got it done, but

then all my few injectors I put in are all bad now.

Oh my God.

I wonder if it, like, shorted a mile.

Last I knew they're having that bad wire.

I don't know.

Something happened.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something happened, so they're all getting replaced.

We're waiting for it to be shipped in, so I probably won't see the truck next week

at this point.

Wow.

Well, at least you'll be getting that back soon.

Yeah.

Yeah, for me, I had a, a U-joint go to toast for me.

This last, was it last week?

And I wanted to go to Riggs and Coffee Sunday, so we found out on Friday, seeing it came

home from work, and it's like, there's a new sound, and I'm like, oh, fucking fantastic.

Love here and that, so I took it on drive didn't hear anything, and I was like, she's like,

no, I'm not fucking crazy.

I know there's a sound.

I know it, so we took it down prairie, and all of a sudden the sound started, and it

was loud.

It sounded like, I don't know, like a pipe hitting a metal fan blade.

And I was just, I was freaking out.

I'm like, dude, I can, I had my head out the window, I could hear it, only happening

in low speeds, and I was like, that's my, I bet you, that's my diff, my diff's finally

leaving the chat.

So I, I got out, let her drive around a little bit, I got under the truck, put my hand

on it while she threw it in gear and everything, and it felt like it was still the diff.

So I, you know, we held our heads very low, and went home, and I called Alex up, and told

him that what's going on, and he's like, are you sure?

I'm like, yeah, I'm, as far as I know I am, and he, I explained the sound, and he goes,

you know, that sounds like a lot like a you joint, I'm like, really, yeah, so, I'm like,

I went and checked, look at my you joint, and sure, shit, that you joint was shot, which

was great.

So we looked around everywhere to try to get it fixed that night, so that we could,

you know, have it for Sunday, Alex is going to check out that truck, so he wasn't going

to be there till, on Saturday, so, we waited, waited, tried to find a, you joint, and apparently

nobody had a you joint, and had to be shipped in from GR, and they got their Saturday at

about 3 p.m. or something like that, so I went, refilled my diff, because I was checking

my diff earlier when I thought it was that, refilled that, and we got out there, picked

it up, came back, and waited a couple hours till Alex is supposed to be home, and I pulled

out to his house to use the press he had, and we spent the next couple hours, Mark helped

a lot, and Alex helped a lot, just trying to get the press and everything to pop that

you joint out, and it was kind of a bitch, that you joint was dust, it was rusty, dusty,

at one point it was pressing so hard that it flew across the shed, like like three different

pieces, it was like ricocheted, but yeah, finally we got that out, got that, got the

new one in, took it up and on the road, I'm holy crap, it felt like I just added, you

know, 50 horse to the car, you know, it did, it was like a significant increase in acceleration

and everything, it felt easier, shaking that I didn't know necessarily was the cause

of that, went away, steering wheel shape kind of went away a little, just everything, everything

felt better, and so yeah, it went on my merry way, and Sunday we got everything packed

in the tent, I'm sorry, packed in the tent, we got the tent packed down the truck, and

we did rigs and coffee, but I did skip some stuff, you know, we spent most of the day Saturday

pulling stuff out of the truck, and putting stuff into the truck, you know, pulling the

winter gear out, cleaning it out, putting the camp gear in for the summer of the season,

and seeing an eye while we were waiting, we were both, she had a day off on Saturday finally,

and so we just started plugging away at it, I knew that I had to get the tent on the

roof, it was not going to fit in the truck, so we started trying to pull gear and, you know,

what would you consolidate, could solidate gear into one box and get rid of doubles of tools

that I didn't need, so we ended up getting rid of all the boxes on the right side of the truck

that was holding recovery gear and tools and all that, and we mounted one of them on the back

wheel at a spare tire tray, so we mounted one box with a recovery gear in the back tire,

then we got everything else consolidated into a box, and I have that inside the truck, and then we

took the, it's a 6040 split in the rear seat, and I took the 60 out and put that inside,

so we have that whole flat area now, and then we put a couple tools in there, we got more space,

I lifted up my shelf platform that I had some of my drawers and stuff on in the back,

just a couple inches, so that it stopped rubbing against the fridge,

so yeah, we did a bunch of that stuff, and then we then we went to Rixing Coffee,

we got to Rixing Coffee, and it was a different location than last time, it was a,

basically like a park pavilion area, it was, yeah, that's what, it's like a little park there in Hopkins,

yeah, and it was right there next to the fire department, it was basically just,

like it was very weird, like it'd be like parking in the front of Grant High School,

just right in the, right there in the lawn, it was weird, and we had a really good turnout,

lots of cars there, it filled up the little, it's a smaller area than the parking lot,

and yeah, it's kind of wondering about that, yeah, I would say it's probably about half the size,

or close to it, of usable, like area, and it was super soft, dude,

yeah, I kind of saw one of them, I think the Lexus is like the Lexus head,

so it was next to you, I'm fucking tore up the grass, and I actually pointed that out too,

but you know how Alex's ground is kind of spongy there, next to his shed, you step on it,

you could feel it, yeah, foot smush, yeah, that's pretty much how it was, and so we all got

parked out there though, it got really nice out, and I set up the tent in the front,

so we had a little lounge area, and people could look at the tent, asked about it, and yeah,

we got to see some people we haven't seen in a year, or you know, or since new year anyway,

but we saw Derek, we saw a couple other other guys that always come up, and then we saw

an Azuzu via cross, that showed up, that was pretty cool to see, yeah, that was dope,

we had Volkswagen guy with his, what was it, what do they call that, Torrig, something like that,

it's the all wheel drive version, but it was that silver Torrig, and he has another car

cut in half, another Volkswagen cut in half, and it says like camp trailer, oh you're talking

about that one, he has a giant basket on there, yeah, so that guy showed up, like I said, the normal,

the normal people, and yeah, they had some good cookies, and my kid ate about a thousand of them,

and then Derek's kids brought out their 3D printed rot crawling, of course,

and that was sick, Mark, I think you would have loved that, like you, Shane,

that was sick, they had their little land cruisers on there, and they were crawling throughout

that course, and it all comes together, it's all 3D printed, and it comes together like a puzzle,

like the interlocking pieces, so you can kind of mix them and match them to get like a different

course, that was cool, and so everybody kind of huddled around that and watched them play with

that for a while, and I made hot dogs on the back of a truck, and it was just a good time,

and lots of people there they haven't seen, lots of talking, there was even people coming from,

you know, just in town, just trying to see what's going on, and so we were all kind of talking to

them, and you know, sharing what's the very small town there, so I'm not surprised you have

everything, people come up and join, yeah we had one guy, he had a jeep compass, or no, not compass,

what's the commander, big old fucked up jeep commander, and he was talking about coming out,

and doing some of this, and he's like, when he got a card, I'm like, no, no, this isn't my

group, or any, I'm just, you know, just telling them about it, and Derek comes up, and so this

is the boss man, and he goes, you got a card, and he goes, no, it's all online, the guy kind of

gave him a stink eye from that, and I was like, dude, everything is now, like you're not going to

get like a magazine or anything out of it, like so, that's pretty cool, and Midwest 4x4 had

some patches and stuff for sale, stickers, patches, some t-shirts, some hats, they actually had

some merch, I think I've used to seeing them with like shirts and stuff, but not like patches and

stickers, like decals, I don't know that I've ever seen that, I've seen stickers a couple of times,

I don't know if I've seen patches, yeah, I probably get a patch because, yeah, might as well,

since I bought from them. Yeah, they should just give that to you,

when you buy it, they should just go on your truck. Oh, I know, true. You should tell them that,

he's the least you could do, so, yeah, and then Brian showed up from Midwest, and he brought

the FJ that they're working on, so they just picked up an FJ a little while ago that they're

going to turn into like their, it's not a show truck, but it's the truck that they're bringing

around two shows to have all their products and stuff in and to advertise, but the truck itself

isn't going to be the show, I guess, so, yeah, yeah, so that was pretty cool, it was just nice to see

everyone, so we did that, it started to trickle right as we were all getting ready to leave,

we stayed for a couple hours, it was just nice enough that, you know, the kids were playing,

it wasn't really raining or nothing, it was getting chilly, but we just went inside the tent,

we had that tent popped up in front of the truck, I have some pictures on my Instagram for anybody who

wants to like see how rigs and coffee was set up and all that, but we had all that set up and

we went in there when we wanted to get away from the wind a little bit, and I tell you what,

the wind was blowing pretty decently, I'd say like 10 mile an hour, enough to like move the

awnings and stuff and it makes stuff kind of flap around a little, you wouldn't even know it was

moving inside that tent from the outside, like from the inside, you couldn't even tell, so I hope

that's a good omen, we're going to find out, I'm going to, I agreed to do the East Side Camp trip

that Zack's doing, so that's going to be early April I think, let me double check here, because I

don't think we have anything going on, so, and see, and I had the weekend, I think, because Alex

has the turkey run thing that he's part of, like late April, so I don't think he was planning

anything big for April. Yeah, no, I have, I think the next, it's April 18th is the East Side Trip,

so we're going to go do that, and I'm going to bring the diesel here and stuff, just a case of

still cold, and we're going to test out the tent, but I set it up on my own, this is the first time

I set up a six person, eight person tent by myself, and put it away by myself, but you know, it's

it's not that it's hard or anything, but like two people just make it way easier, and but that

was a, that was really nice, we just sat in there, we just threw the chairs in there, like you

guys do with your gazebo, and relaxed in there to take a break, so, yeah, we got home from that,

talked with Benji from, ooh, that's something in my face, Newfound Overland,

and we talked to Benji, and what? Oh, I was going to say something, but it's not biggie,

I was going to say also Midwest Outfitters, yeah, Midwest Adventure Outfitters, yeah,

but we talked a little bit because I saw something on his page, and I said, oh, I'd love to,

you know, I'd love to do a podcast with you if you were, you know, open to it, and so,

we ended up doing an episode, I think it's going to come out tomorrow, so for the people who

are listening to this, it should be already out, so check that out, if you want, I mentioned

botches a couple of times, but really, we're just talking about all sorts of other shit too,

just about the Overlanding climate, and like what's going on with it, and what we see trends

this and that, so yeah, we were supposed to only talk for like 40 minutes, and Benji likes to talk,

and I love to talk, so yeah, I mean, that's why without me here, Alex says that sometimes it gets

a little quiet, but no, we ended up talking for probably two hours, so interesting to see how

much of that actually stays in the podcast. We started to, we got off rail a couple times,

and I tried to circle back and make it a part of it, but I haven't talked to Benji since,

Benji was one of our first interviews, I think, with botches, right? Yeah, I think he was one

the first. Yeah, and I hadn't talked to him in person since we had that phone interview with him,

because he was in his truck getting ready to go somewhere, do something.

I hadn't talked to him in person since then, chatted over Instagram a few times, and on Facebook

a few times, but yeah, no, it was a great time, really enjoyed it. He's a great dude, as always,

we knew that, and hopefully we're going to get something figured out to do a couple more in

the future, and then I also made the plans to go down to Friendsgiving, because I wanted to go and

see those guys, so instead of Jasper's birthdays on the 18th, and I think Friendsgiving's on the 20th,

so I think we're just going to spend Jasper's birthday down there. Yeah, it's the weekend before

Thanksgiving, so I think we're just going to spend the birthday down there, maybe we'll

maybe we'll take a couple trails around the Ozarks, or maybe something around there just to say

that we saw some stuff, and we'll see. We'll see how everything plays out. It's a lot warmer down

there that time of year, so hopefully I won't need my heater or anything. He said the last year,

everybody was around in their t-shirts pretty much.

Yeah, I think it was, it was got kind of cool at night, because it was very

misty and stuff in the mountains, where we were at, so it was kind of chill for the most part,

but you could probably run around t-shirts almost all day. Yeah, at night though, it'd be good with

just a sleeping bag. He won't need like a diesel heater, right?

No, me and Alan surviving our sleeping bags in our tents. We had the winter kid on, but other

than that, you could have probably survived about it. Yeah, I just wonder what it was. I think

I think a couple of them bought their diesel heaters out just to have though. Yeah, yeah, maybe

we'll do that too. It's looking like I might have the space to be able to throw that extra stuff

in there now, and just keep it around, but I don't see a point in having the diesel heater in the

truck unless I'm using it, so I won't have it in there unless I actually plan to use it while camping,

and once summer comes around, it's just going to get tossed back in the house, so.

Yeah, and yeah, Benji was our first interview. Yeah, I was going to say,

yeah, we started it off big. We started off with big with Benji and just went downhill from there.

No, we had a lot of cool interviews. It's a little bit more

amateur than what we are now. Our interviews, the style, we were just getting used to doing it,

the recording equipment and our techniques that were kind of new, so it's a lot less refined

than it is now, but they were still really good quality reviews. We had Cindy Pope and

we had a radio chatter and I forget the one guy. There's a couple, I mean, there's a few of them,

and this is what now going on to our third year of doing this. Season. Yeah, third season.

Second and a half year, though, right? Like it's been about two and a half years,

almost, I just round up to three.

Oh, we, I would say two and a third because, thankfully, we started in October, so it was like

tail into the two and a third. Yeah, okay. That's good. That's still a good amount of time. We

have a lot of episodes. If you're hearing all these now, we talk about a lot of stuff that we

try not to talk about it again, but we might be bringing up some stuff from our older episodes to

update. So kind of, you know, this is where we were two years ago. Now, let's see where we're at,

because as we talked about in our last podcast, we've changed a lot in those two years. So we might

be bringing a couple of those topics back to see if anything in our minds have changed. I know

my mind has changed quite a bit from then and my experience has gone up. I'm a lot more daring

than I was. And it's probably marking it as a fault for making me go and making me do these trails

and then me realizing that, you know, I can do them and it's not so bad. It's just I have, I have

horrible mechanical sympathy for Barry and I just do not want to see him hurt. I talked about that

a little bit with me about how, you know, when we when we do our trip, I berries the name of my truck

for anybody who might just be listening, but I always will pat Barry on the steering wheel and be like,

good boy, good job, man. You made it. You got us through it, man. I swear to God, he listens.

Like he's all about it. I always apologize to him after we do something hard. I'm like, good job,

man. He didn't break down right in the middle of it. I'm proud of you. I promise I'll be nice

sir. I promise I'm going to give you a really good car wash. I'm going to give you some premium fuel,

get you some, you know, fuel additive. I'll change your oil like, you know, you're going to be

spanked spanned, buddy. Like we're going to get you taken care of. And now other than a few little

incidents, he's never let us, he's never let us down. We've never had that problem. So I mean,

like I said, little instances that we could fix right there. But I'm a firm believer that he

is, he's a living thing. So I'm not, I won't ever treat him that poorly on purpose.

So did have you named your car? Did we name her?

I don't think I have. I'm trying to remember like Sylvia. Sylvia has popped up. Yeah, like Sylvia.

Beatrice. I think that's popped up in my head. I was thinking more just a silver. Yeah.

Beatrice just sounds like a stubborn stubborn old 80. That's right now. That's kind of what your

trucks reminded me of as a stubborn old 80. Yeah. We call her like her husband Kathleen or

something like that. Give her a stubborn Helga. I don't know. I mean, she might as well. She's

spent a good amount of my money in the last couple months. Yeah. Call her Goldie. She's a gold

digger. Just taking all your money. Yeah. Which would be kind of funny because she has sold her

so her color Goldie would be interesting. But well, all right. Well, this is our rap. We're going to

head off and try to figure something out for an hour. And you know what? Maybe we'll bring back

one of our old episode topics and rehash it out and see. But until then we will see you on the next one.

Catch you guys later.