5C's Que Pasa

We woke up to 26F/-3.3 C and back home it was -4C so we were doing okay.  All except for sitting on an ice cold toilet seat each  time 😯   Once again Colin went out to prepare the Jeep to be towed and again was gone a very long time.  I never anticipated the new problem.  First the good news – the braking device was working perfectly.  Perhaps it was because we had brought it inside to thaw overnight.  Now for the bad news, the Jeep has a very serious problem.  We are not sure what it is.  The car is in neutral to be towed but as per the instruction manual the last thing you do is put the Jeep in reverse to verify that the transmission is in neutral.  The car makes a grinding noise each time Colin does that and today there was a strong burning smell.  He was only able to stop the grinding noise by turning off the car.

There was no grinding noise the first two test tows nor when we hooked up on Monday.  Only yesterday morning the noise stopped on its own and today a huge amount continued until he shut the car off.  The instructions to prepare to tow are being followed to the letter.  It is still okay to tow as we are, so we continued on and were driving by 7:10AM.  Once it was 8AM I started a multitude of phone calls.  Long story short we have a Jeep dealership ( the other was very rude ) who will see us once we drive in tomorrow morning.  We plan to come in towing ( besides we have no idea it we can still drive the vehicle ) so they can see the problem themselves.  We also have an appointment with Las Vegas Freightliner to check out the A/C issue.  Because it is a chassis issue ( dash air ) we have to deal with them.  Thanks Carol for putting us in touch with Johnny Walker RV as they steered us to the right people to help us.

It was a very good thing that we decided to travel further today as we need to be arriving at 8AM tomorrow.  We spent hours discussing the right sequence of events but logic tells us that we need to start at the Jeep dealership because if the car can’t be driven we are already there.  Why have to have it towed?  Also it is likely that the Jeep repair will take longer than the RV repair.  Perhaps we can check into the RV park and rent a car or ???

We finally got to Nevada today. Let’s hope that we are not here longer than we planned.

We got a good deal for diesel in Wells @ 3.239 cash, the cheapest in town.  Still can’t get my head around the increased fuel prices this season.  I have to make this post short as we have been dealing with issues all day and are short on time.  I have so many little things that I know you like to read but I just can’t incorporate them into this post.

We have never seen snow so close to the highway before.

Our usual overnight in this area is Ely but two years ago we awoke to frost on the inside of our windows and -13.9C/6.9F.  Ely is at 6437′ elevation and tonight we are at 3449′.  Much better with a low of 40F/4.5C expected.  A quick note, I travel wearing a fleece sweatshirt or whatever you call it, covered with a fleece jacket and then a fleece shawl.  Then there are my fleece pants, cashmere ( for warmth ) socks and fleece slippers.  Oh and then I am covered by a very thick and heavy fleece blanket.  Colin travels in short sleeves and shorts.  The shawl comes off on and off during the day but I have only had the jacket off twice  in the last three days.  Tonight I am warm, I even had the socks and slippers off for a bit.  Now back to the slippers.  We only have the one heater running and are toasty at 72F.  Oops at proof reading, 74F  🙂

The light was wrong for photos as we went through the pass but I managed to catch the sun on this bit of rock.

We are actually about 4 or 5 miles south of Hiko in an area that over the past years we have said would be a great area to boondock and so here we are.  Sadly we got here just as the sun was setting and will be leaving before sunrise.  I have no photos of the RV being here.  Colin just told me that there are now 2 other RV’s beside us. We drove 474.2 miles today.  It took us 9.5 hours.  No stops other than fuel and BR breaks.  My Fitbit says I only moved 650 steps today.  But my bum is not sore.  Great airbags !!

It has been a long day and I do believe that tomorrow is going to be even longer and likely extremely stressful given the Vegas traffic which we are dealing with back and forth.  I will admit to not looking at how empty the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is tonight.  There may a second bottle involved.  Thank goodness I have an easy dinner planed for about 9:30PM.  We won’t be hungry in the early morning as we are driving about as we ate so late.

Yup I know this is a short post and I did have some goodies to share but life has interfered  :-(. I take notes as we travel and that is how my blog is constructed along with the photos of which there were few today.  I made a lot of to do lists as we drove today and we have been knocking them down.  We plan on 6.5 hours of sleep and want to be driving  by 6:00AM.  What a whirl the past three days have been but at least I am no longer freezing.

I am going thru data like lighting.  3 GB in 3 days.  Something must be running behind the scenes.  Steve???, any ideas on how to check.  I have 5GB ( cost 50.00 USD per month ) to last me until next Wednesday but this is what I consider an emergency.  For all I know I may use up the rest tomorrow.  Not sure I want to spend another $50.00 to post over the next few days.  I get free wifi once I get into Mexico 😛  Fingers crossed that the Jeep warranty will cover the repairs.

Full disclosure, that second bottle has been opened.  Ahh that first sip of Pinot Grigio  😆

The good thing about tomorrow is that the fleece comes off and the sandals come out.  Oh gosh I really hope that I can keep it together.  However we are both aware that these glitches are nothing  compared to what many other RVers go through.  Everyone has their turn at dealing with issues and many are worse than what we have to endure.  It is just that it has been a very long and very difficult year for us.

Stayed tuned for the rest of the story.

But to start at the beginning.  It was 36F inside the RV at 6:30AM and 25F/-4C outside.  Back home in Kelowna it was -8C so I guess that we were better off but it was still cold.  I even slept with socks on for the first time.  Perhaps it is because we don’t have the girls to cuddle that makes it seem extra frigid.  We were ready to leave and Colin went to prepare the Jeep for travel.  He was gone a long time and I knew that something was wrong.  Finally he came in and told me that bad news, the $1,800.00 Blue Ox Patriot Braking System was not working.  It has been used a total of 10 hours.  He went out to try again while I started to gather phone numbers off the internet and began making calls.  We were on the phone with a tech guy ( and you all know how much I love them  🙄 ) for over 30 minutes.  His solution was for us to ship the unit back to them and that they would look at it and send it back.  Umm, today we were driving Pendleton Pass and we needed this braking device by law and then we are off to Mexico.  Finally after a bit he decided to have us manually override the system.  The pedal engaged less than an inch but the tech said that is should be fine.  So we decided to go with it and will decide what to do once we get to Vegas.  We wonder if the cold has also affected this brake system.  So tonight we have it inside the RV.  Tomorrow may show us something else.  We got off to a very late start at 8:25AM. But we were underway.  For a while I had visions of us staying put.

We crossed the Columbia River twice before leaving Washington state. The old bridge on the right is being repaired so it was one lane each direction on the newer one.

Our second state of the day.

First time we have ever seen the foothills just entering Oregon covered in snow.  The cold and snow are going to be with us until we aren’t too far north of Las Vegas.

As we started our steep ascent we saw this RV in front of us.  It was a 5th wheel and they were towing a homemade trailer for their ATV.  Look at the two tiny and narrow tires keeping it rolling.

I would have to say that this fellow had a much worse day that we could even imagine.  As we drove we talked about our options with the brake assembly and what we might or might not do.  We no longer felt as badly as we had earlier in the morning.

We made it to the top with no issues. Colin was able to pull the heavy Jeep in 4th gear with no more effort than he had the HHR.  He also felt that the down hill portion was controlled with no feeling of the Jeep pushing the RV.  We only had to use the brakes twice and the device did kick in or so it said on the remote display.  Unless you are in the Jeep you have no idea what is actually happening.  FYI Colin is very light on his brakes and uses the engine brake as much as possible.  This is a 2001 RV with just over 130,000 miles and we have 70% left on the original brake shoes.

I missed getting a photo of the 49th parallel sign stating that we were halfway between the equator and the North Pole 😀   We stopped in Baker for fuel and lucked out at 2.999per gallon.  But even there Colin tried over and over to get the pump to work but he finally had to ask to the manager to come out and work some magic.  Once back on the interstate I kept hearing a strange noise.  Colin pulled over and discovered that the fuel access panel was open.  We think that because it was so cold and windy while fueling that he simply overlooked closing the panel.  He does remember replacing the gas cap and turning it.  Sadly it was missing.  The wind was very strong as we drove.  He came up with the brilliant idea of Gorilla taping the hole so that nothing would get into the fuel tank.  We stopped at Love’s in Ontario but they don’t sell gas caps.  We will have to add that to our Vegas to do list which is growing by leaps and bounds.

An oldie but a goodie to the owner. We chuckled as we know that in about 20 years others will be pointing to our old rig and snickering.  But look at those tiny tires, they are less than the width of the white line.

Finally our third and last state of the day.

Our car was filthy and almost black from all the snow and wet roads back home and the RV needed a bath as well.  We saw a sign advertising a hand wash truck and RV service about 36 miles into Idaho so we took that exit and sure enough it was legit.  I had been on the phone yesterday calling around Las Vegas to get someone to come to the RV park to wash our vehicles.  First off the park will only allow RV’s to be washed, you have to take your car or truck to a car wash.  Secondly you can only use the services that they allow to come into the park.  Two wanted $120.00 to wash the RV and the third one wanted $145.00.  No gracias.  These fellows did both vehicles for $75.00 and they look great.  Apparently they do on average of 30 RV’s or semis per day.  Good business.

We thought we got a great deal and were very happy.  At one point Colin was going to wash the RV himself but the RV park in Vegas wants $25.00 to use the water.  And he still would not be able to wash our very dirty car.  As there was no precipitation expected until we reach the Isla we decided that it was a well deserved treat.  These guys were done in 30 minutes!

Besides in addition to our already planned errands in Las Vegas we now have to deal with the A/C situation and the braking issue.  Tonight we are in Mountain Home, Idaho guests of Chez Walmart.  However I was able to lighten my wallet and get several things crossed off my shopping list, my favorite being 15 boxes of white fairy lights to decorate with on the Isla.  I think that 1500 lights will look just lovely 😎  Idaho is on MST but we are in PST so as we will be back to PST in Nevada tomorrow we are staying with PST.  We arrived here about 5:50PM and now it is getting close to 10:30 PM and we need to get to bed.  A wee change of plans for tomorrow has us on the road for a longer time.

A long day today at just over 400 miles, wait till you see what we are doing tomorrow.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and to comment.  I appreciate you all so much.  Hope that you are warm where ever you are.

The cold weather truly affected our departure routine.  It took much longer to do everything that needed doing.  We ended up having to use the engine block heater before we left and the heated mirrors.  We didn’t leave the house until 10AM.  Colin drove the RV to Kal Tire while I took the Jeep to an RV parts store to pick up replacements for some mysteriously missing locking clips for the tow shield.  When I got to Kal Tire he was waiting for me but it turns out that they were unable to deal with the tire pressures and sensors  ( too many clients ) for at least a few hours which we did not have.  So he decided we would press on and deal with the sensor issue later.  We eventually got hooked up at Home Depot, the only place large enough for us to do so.  It took a while to prepare to leave as it was only the second time towing the Jeep.  We were finally on the road shortly after 11AM.

Taken thru the RV window, adios snowy Kelowna, see you next April.

It is always a lovely drive to the US border and the time passed quickly.  We got to the border by 1:20PM.

A very easy crossing and even though I declared my 50 bottles of wine they did not ask me to pay duty for which I was expecting to.  Perhaps it was because we said that we were headed to Mexico and that we likely would not be consuming the wine in the US.  The agriculture agent took away our tomatoes but left our eggs, a lone potato and pea pods.  You just never know what is or isn’t allowed from one month to the other.  We had to get fuel in Oroville and ended up with the slowest pump in the world.  It took 25 minutes to pump 50 gallons of diesel which by the way we lucked out at getting @ 3.08 per gallon.  Every other station was charging 3.18.  I checked tonight and Vegas is charging 3.28/gallon.  I know that fuel went up at home, before we left it was 139.9 per liter ( up from 1.18 per liter ) and in Vancouver they are paying among the highest prices on the continent at 1.459 per liter.  We then had to stop at our U Ship It place to pick up several items that I had ordered in the last month.  It was over an hour before we left Oroville but then we just hit the road and kept driving and driving.  As we drove the tire sensors came on one at time over several hours.  We assume that they were very very cold as were the tires and took a long while to thaw.  We appear to have a problem with the auxiliary fan to the AC.  We heard noises as we drove with the heat on and when Colin checked it out, that is the area he narrowed the issue down to.  So he pulled the fuse but thinks the fan may have seized up.  So we at least have heat but we don’t have A/C.  We will have that looked at in Vegas as we certainly will need it as we get closer to the Mexican border.

Always a lovely drive and the time seemed to pass quickly.  Please forgive the dirty windshield.  We think that we may be lucky and have no precipitation at all this trip.

Just caught the sun as it was about to go down, yes that is snow in the foreground.

We got here at the Moses Lake Walmart at 5:40PM.  257 miles which took us just over 7.5 hours.

We are tired and cold.  It isn’t as cold as it was at home but for us sitting in an RV with only single pane windows, we are chilled.  Fortunately we have the furnace running as well as the generator which allows us two electric heaters which makes it comfortable enough if you have two fleece sweaters on 😕

Forgive any errors but I really need to hit the cold 😯 bed ( no wieners to keep us warm ) as tomorrow is a much longer day on the road.

This is how I feel.  Beyond tired but true.  I so wish we had our girls with us.   Carmeh was always closest to me.  Caeli was always happy to be nearby. But that is how felt yesterday, worn out.

Yesterday while packing Colin cleaned out a drawer and at the bottom was a thin booklet of poems written by Mommio.  She certainly is a talented lady and yet so very sad even back then.  She signed each poem by her name and then again with Mommio,  So glad that she loves her special name.

So the plumber has done his thing and there is nothing more for us to do but start the engines and drive off.  It is the coldest it has been all week, -16C/3F.  The lake has frozen much more than it was yesterday.  This is no longer our home.  Our home on wheels is calling us.  Adios until I turn on the computer somewhere in the USA.

November calendar girls.  Taken last year in Pichacho Peak State Park.

Quite the crazy week weather wise.   In spite of the cold and even colder temps tonight Colin is now only speaking Spanish 🙄   I thinks he is beyond ready to get out of here.  I know that I am.  We have however had our challenges.  It has been so very cold for this time of year. There is is ice everywhere, you have to be so very careful with every step.  We know that one misstep and our entire winter would be ruined.

Meanwhile due to the snow, cold and ice,we have been unable to open our slide outs in the RV.  The main concern is the bedroom slide as when closed it blocks the access to our storage areas in the bedroom.  Based on the fore casted temps for the next three days it appears that we will not be able to open our slides until we get to Las Vegas on Thursday.  So meanwhile we have bags and clothes spread everywhere including in the Jeep and all about the RV until they can be properly put away.

This distant hillside of cows of wandering in the snow, taken from here at X 36 zoom.

Tonight is supposed to be the coldest night since the blizzard whipped through.  Colin is getting up early in the morning to turn on the engine block heater so that we know that the RV will even start.  We can’t run it tonight as we need our 15 AMP plug  to keep the one heater running in the water area basement.  Meanwhile we also have the hot water heater turned on to propane.  Whenever Colin needs to get into a basement compartment he has to pour hot water over the latch in order to open the door.

I think that I am safe in saying that this will be the very very last time we leave so late in the season.  I think that our future is about to change, thank goodness for early semi retirement.  We plan on spending the next 5 months in Mexico.  We will only be home long enough in the spring for me to do complete our company year end as well as our personal taxes.  Then we are off to Europe for a month.  A new article came out today by Conde Naste, of the top 20 cites in Europe to visit, we will be visiting 3 of them 😀  We now are speculating on new plans for next fall which just might have us leaving here the end of September.

We currently have a small problem with the tire sensors, they are not working at all 😯   Is it because of the extreme cold, we don’t know?  Therefor we will be traveling in separate vehicles until we get to Kal Tire, just a few miles from here, we want to get the tire pressures on the RV checked out officially.

Last night I made a pot of very tasty lentil soup.

I made the soup and was able to save two more meals for our journey by sealing the jars while hot. The lentil soup was delicious and is perfect for this time of year.  We enjoyed a wonderful; Pinot Noir with dinner, thanks to a client. For certain we will be buying this once we return.  I really don’t like a red wine but if it is expensive ( $20.00 minimum per bottle ) I enjoy it.

We are somewhat concerned with the temperatures over the next three days.  Tomorrow appears to be the worst. We were planning to overnight in the Walmart in Moses Lake, WA  but if someone has an idea of a good place ( RV Park ) to stay in that area where we can hook up (heat in the RV )please let us know.  I think it is going to be too cold for us to boondock.

So once the plumber we hired for tomorrow morning blows out all the water lines to the house we will be ready to leave. Then once we pass through Kal Tire and  sort out the tire pressures we should be good to go.  We are just a bit concerned about towing a new much larger tow car and can only hope that we are truly ready to hook up and head out.

So fingers crossed that we are good to go in the morning.

This was taken this morning and as you can see the lake is starting to  freeze.