The Gate

This is a 1994 Land Rover Range Rover County LWB:


I love this car.  It hauls my dogs and dog stuff and sunscreen and all types of lumber and 10,000 empty diet coke cans.  It has leather interior so when I'm muddy and wet the seats don't soak it up and get smelly.  It used to drive like a cadillac through the deepest mudholes and the ruttiest ruts.  We were all getting along quite fine, when the Rover decided to give up on the relationship.  It just stopped.  Everyone warned me not to get involved with a British Automobile, but I thought that we had something special and Rover wouldn't quit on me.  I was wrong.  The thing stopped dead and wouldn't move out of the driveway.  

We called the tow truck to come and I explained to the driver that we (he and I) would just push the 3 ton behemoth down my narrow driveway and onto the street in order to load it on the flatbed.  He looked at me like I had two heads, so I felt a little self conscious about sitting in the truck to steer it between the house and the fence post.  I left the door open so I could hear his directions and also so I could stick my feet out to help push.  Apparently I also left the door open so it could get caught in the fence and knock the fence post over and tear the door off the truck.  

Instead of hitting the break when the door first got stuck, I tried to wrench the door closed while yelling expletives and of course the door wouldn't close because the heavy truck was rolling fast down our steep driveway and expletives never actually help anything.  The car continued to roll until the fence post bent over far enough to stop it.  Very tragic.  The tow truck guy had to take the whole door apart in order to close the door again and I had to hook 4 zip ties together to lash the door in place because it now hung 3 inches too low to latch shut.  The guys at the repair shop are never going to forget this. 

The truck still isn't fixed and it's been towed back to it's original spot, but this is how the gate looks after the tragedy:

That orange tie down keeps the whole situation together.  Otherwise, the fence post on the left sticks toward the white house at a 30 degree angle.  The tie down makes it look like it might work, but the dogs know that there is a weakness and they've been escaping every chance they get.  I've decided to build a solid cedar gate to fix all of our gate related problems.  Does anybody want to buy a truck?