Driving off road really does require a vehicle designed to do it. Where I live in central Nevada, almost all of the roads are dirt, and I drive a diesel 4x4. Sometimes I'm 50 miles from the nearest paved road and a lot farther from the nearest human. There are huge areas out here in the wild wild west where there is no cell phone service, so I carry about 50 pounds of tools and a lot of spare parts, including replacements for every hose in the vehicle - which has saved my tail on more than one occasion.

thanks for the info
and yikes aboout diesal truck gas is pricey

One of the nice things about diesel engines is that they are more efficient than gasoline engines, especially at partial throttle. At 35 mph on a dirt road I get about 35 MPG with my 6,600 pound vehicle.

i glad u actually read this most people dint

I tried to read the other story but couldn't open the file, perhaps because I have a Mac running BSD UNIX rather than Windows.

If you save the story as a .TXT file, and upload the .TXT file, all viewers can read it in their browser without having to download it. This gives you a much greater chance that your story will be read. Work especially hard to make the first sentence suck the reader in. Try to make the first paragraph really intriguing. DOC files have to be downloaded before they can be read, and most stories on FA aren't well written, so few get read even if they are good.