On The Road Again

KJ — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:10:15 +0000

So we eventually we had to leave Glacier National Park. A reader of our blog had suggested that we travel to Bozeman hot spring and Butte. I was pretty psyched about taking the advice of a complete stranger, and I was surprised that CM seemed to be going for it as well. About 200 miles later our RV broke down.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it did break. We lost our turbo. So we’re on the highway, it’s just us and two other cars and we couldn’t go faster than 40 mph! The only way we could get some speed was to pull over to the shoulder and restart the car. I happened to be driving that day and it didn’t really bother me so much. I was more excited about Bozeman/Butte. I agreed to just drive through Bozeman thinking we could catch the hot springs at Yosemite instead, but I had Googled Butte and they had some awesome museums I wanted to go to. However, CM insisted that we should go get the turbo fixed ASAP. I was pretty furious at the time, but in hindsight he was definitely right.

Our RV is built on a Dodge Sprinter van chassis. As it happened, in the ENTIRE state of Montana, there was only one Dodge Sprinter dealer…ONE!! The good news was that we weren’t too far away from it. The bad news was that it was in the opposite direction of Butte. I was sooo disappointed. So naturally that day I didn’t feel like blogging that day either because I had planned to say, “Thanks for the suggestion, we had a great time! We did this, this, and this, etc.”

So we park at Wal-Mart and drive the last 20 miles or so to the dealer. The owner was a really nice guy. Unfortunately, he tells us that it’s going to 4 days to get the broken part in. There was no way we could camp in his parking lot in that small town for 4 days. We called the Winnebago factory (since that was our next big stop) and they suggested another Dodge dealer for us in Iowa. This guy told us that we might be able to make it Iowa if we didn’t have to go through any more hills, so CM and I decided to take our chances.

We made it to Yosemite the next day and we only had to restart the car a handful of times. There’s only one word to describe our time there: Crazy!

Okay, We’re Idiots

KJ — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:26:10 +0000

Sooo… in an effort to make it to the camp ground before the office closed, I told CM to put the pedal to the metal. We kept an eye on the gas tank and we appeared to be hemorrhaging diesel. We thought we’d be okay because surely there’s a gas station that sells diesel nearby — WRONG!!!

So here we are at a little gas station WITHOUT DIESEL!! CM is freaking out because he thinks the car will run out of diesel any minute. There is a rental car place close by, but they would charge a minimum of $40 for the day and they weren’t budging on the price even though I told them we only needed it for 1 hour.

CM just pulled up in the passenger of a stranger’s car!! They have agreed to take him to the nearest gas station that sells diesel so that he can fill up one of those gas cans. AAAgggghhhhh!!! Was that poor planning or what??

New rule: Never ever let the gas get below one quarter of a tank!!

Oh man! Oh man! Oh man! What if they kidnap CM and use him as a sex slave?

To be continued…..

2 Adults 2 Kids » RV Maintainence

On The Road Again

Okay, We’re Idiots