Is This Character-Building?

The journey begins. We get towed from the Walmart parking lot.

I know that everyone likes a disaster story. How about a double-disaster story? Even better. Well, friends, that’s the story I bring to you this day.

Let me start at the first sign of trouble. That occurred last Saturday morning. We’d just driven our motorhome over the mountains of northeast Utah, into the southwest corner of Wyoming. A beautiful drive. But things didn’t sound right when we drove off the highway to get some groceries at Walmart in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

I stopped at a light and noticed the rig was searching for fuel. It was heaving and chugging, something we’d never ever experienced before. We knew there was trouble lurking in the heart of the beast and determined to get parked on the outer perimeter of the Walmart parking lot. After I shut off the engine, I thought I should try to re-start it. Nothing. It cranked and cranked. But there was no sense the diesel fuel would ignite.

My heart was racing as my mind went through all the permutations that might cause this condition. I had plenty of fuel in the tank. I thought it was possible the fuel filter was clogged. I decided to call our roadside support system. They promised to send a mechanic as quickly as possible. He showed up four hours later and changed my fuel filter. That didn’t solve anything. The mechanic said he needed to get his computer so he could plug into the engine to diagnose what was happening. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought it with him. He left with promises to return in a couple of hours. He called after two hours and said he wouldn’t make it back until the following morning.

When he showed up on Sunday, it took about 10 minutes for his computer to issue a diagnose that the engine would not start because an oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. (Please remember this piece of information. It will come into play in another week.) He said the motorhome would have to be towed to a repair shop where something so serious could be handled.

Not going to happen on a Sunday, of course! I called back my roadside assistance company to relay the news and to ask that they organize a tow truck for me. They took eight hours to get back to me – and that was after I made three phone calls to them, asking if I had been forgotten.

Monday at noon, however, a tow truck arrived on the scene and, after two hours of preparation, including the disassembling of the drive shaft so the rear wheels could rotate freely, we were on our way to the authorized Caterpillar engine dealer in town.

When we got there, we were told no one could look at the motor until Wednesday. We asked if we could live aboard in the parking lot. The owner said we were welcome. We would not be able to live aboard the rig once it was pulled inside the shop, however.

We set up house on a hill overlooking the town. I checked our propane tank and noticed that we were between a quarter full and empty. We knew we needed to get a refill but, of course, we were unable to drive to a propane filling station. We drove the car over and were told the company had a policy that forbids using their trucks to fill motorhome propane tanks.

Now I began to whimper and whine about how I would make a note of that on the letter that I planned to write for the sheriff to find when he opened up our motorhome and found two old people who had frozen to death. My dry humor seemed to work and the young woman asked her boss if there was a way we could have fuel delivered to our home which was about 200 yards away. The boss was kind and said she would make an exception for us. She could not figure out, however, how to bill us because they had no mechanism for billing a mobile customer.

We had a full propane tank within the hour. And the women were still trying to figure out how to bill me two hours later. I came up with the simple solution of asking them how much the propane was. They said it would amount to $57.68. I handed the cash to them and said they could find a place to put it.

Tuesday afternoon, we were visited by the in-house tow driver. He wanted to move our rig inside the building a day early. We would have to pack up and move to a motel. We scrambled onto the internet and found a relatively cheap motel that was 10 minutes away. We gathered up the two cats, the litter box, food, our clothes and headed out.

Wednesday morning dawned bleak, with hail and sleet. We rounded up the cats in their cages and, after breakfast, arrived at the repair shop to find nothing had been done on our rig. The boss told me a commercial trucker had come in on an emergency and they take precedence over motorhome retirees.

By Wednesday night, however, he had plugged in the computer and determined our high pressure fuel and oil pump was bad. This meant, he said, that pieces of metal from the disintegrating pump most likely had entered the fuel rail and we should plan on replacing all six injectors. He had neither the pump nor the injectors in-house and would have to ship them in overnight from as far away as Lansing, Michigan. Do it, I told him.

We returned to our motel and asked to stay another night. The cats were not amused.

Thursday came and went and we were derailed again by a commercial trucker. But the boss promised that he would have us fixed by Friday at 10 a.m. Come then and be prepared to test drive the rig, he said.

We went back to the motel and paid for another night.

Friday came and there was a torrential hailstorm. The hail was like a million Styrofoam beads. We sat in the waiting room until 12:15 p.m. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked through the door where customers are not permitted. The sign on the door says all work will stop on the shop floor if customers enter the work area. I found the boss standing beside my great white beast of a motorhome. He asked me for a key to open the fuel filler door. When I opened it, he took a compressed air hose and rammed it into the tank and plugged the remaining space with a cloth. He explained that there is no priming pump on the Caterpillar motor. He said he couldn’t get her primed. And this was his work-around.

While he was doing this, one of the mechanics was spraying ether into the air intake of the engine and another mechanic was cranking the engine. It caught, coughed, and then died.

They went back to the computer and the computer was saying: remember the oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. Well, you have to change that sensor when you install a new fuel pump. Thank God they actually had a sensor in stock. The moment they installed it, the computer sensed all was well and permitted the engine to start.

I test drove the rig and everything seemed to check out. I paid the bill with that magic plastic card – a mere $4,300. And we loaded all the stuff of life from our car and headed out into the gloomy afternoon.

Oh, but remember, I promised you a double disaster? Well. It’s waiting for us 92 miles down the road.

All was well for 91.8 miles. Then all hell broke loose. Red lights, orange lights, buzzers and bells went off on the dash. As luck would have it, however, we were 100 yards away from an exit on the expressway. I pulled off and drove the rig 150 yards into a Flying J truck stop.  Bells were still clanging when I stopped the rig. A trucker ran up to my window and said, “Do you know you’re spraying oil out the back of your rig, sir?”

I walked back there and found our Honda Fit coated in black oil. The entire rear cap of the motorhome was blackened with sprayed oil.

I called the truck repair place that had obviously messed up the repair. I reach the owner and he said he would make it good if it was caused by his people. He also gave me the phone number of a diesel repair shop in the town where we stopped. I called there at 5:40 p.m., expecting to be told I was out of luck because the Memorial Day holiday weekend had started and no one would be able to help us until Tuesday. But no. They said they’d send someone out in an hour or so.

And this brought Sheldon into our lives. Sheldon arrived in his truck and, within an hour, he uncovered the cause of our second disaster: an O-ring on the connection of the new oil pump had been installed improperly and had disintegrated. 

Before he started the engine, Sheldon poured three gallons of oil into the engine. Even then, the oil was low by about two quarts. But it permitted him to crank the engine and check for the leaking oil.

He returned to his shop, located another O-ring, and a spare, happily. For, when he took the pump assembly apart he discovered a second O-ring also was badly installed and was crushed. He reinstalled the pump. I called the owner of the original truck repair and he said to fax him the bills and he would make me whole.

We set out on Saturday morning with fear and trepidation in our hearts. But Sheldon seemed to have fixed the problem. No more red flashing lights and bells going off. We took the car to a car wash and emulsified the oil coating. Then, when we got to Cheyenne, Wyoming, we found a truck washing place for the cleaning up of our rear. Unfortunately, the residual oil on the radiator and other parts of the engine found its way back and re-coated the rear so that part of the nightmare remains.

Now, of course, I question the entire week of madness. Did the pump break down and send metal into the fuel rail? Did the injectors need to be replaced? Yes, the sensor definitely needed to be replaced. But that was a $134.10 part. We'll never know, of course, because the mechanical wizards do their work in secret, behind that closed door. What the customer can't see, he can't really question. 

This Land Is Our Land

The view through our windshield while camping in Canyonlands National Park.

We left Moab, Utah, after lunch on Saturday. We crossed the Colorado River and marveled about being alongside the Colorado River more than a week ago while we stayed at the Grand Canyon. Big, big river.

North of Moab, we found a two-lane road that took off to the left. Down that road we went, looking for a campsite for the next few days. A free campsite, of course. Thanks to the federal government – and the American people - there are millions of acres of land in the west that are owned by the United States. But these are not national parks. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for taking care of these lands.

If you live in the eastern half of the U.S., chances are you rarely come in contact with BLM land. But this is a national treasure. The BLM leases a few million acres to cattlemen and their cows roam at will on the unfenced land. There are lots of cattle grids on the roads. And then, thank you America, there are designated areas for camping. You’re only allowed to stay at a site for 14 days. Then you must move along. No squatting!  I have learned about this national treasure through being a member of the Escapees Club, a group of full-time live-aboard people who have built an enormous compendium of knowledge about these – and other - camping lands. As a member, I was able to buy and download an 840-plus page file that is devoted to free camping sites in the U.S. and Canada.

And so we have come down the little two-lane road about 12 miles and we saw an area designated for camping. We drove down a dirt road, found a group camping site that was taken over by VW buses – maybe 15 of them. No room for us. So we retraced our steps and then took another dirt road down to another area. We saw a honking great motorhome on a rise and there was a fifth-wheel trailer alongside it. It looked promising but we dared not go down the dirt road without knowing what we faced in case there was no place to turn and leave. So we stopped our rig on the main dirt road and walked into the bush to reconnoiter. 

We came upon gold: a gorgeous site on the edge of an escarpment. We look out to the north and to the west.  We have nothing but mountains all around us. Mt. Tomasaki, 12,271 feet, and its brother Mt. Peale, 12,721 feet, are on our eastern horizon. Both are cloaked in thick snow. But we’re in gorgeous weather – 59 degrees as the sun sets on our left.

We’ve set up house on the escarpment with only cattle in view, no people. Up the hill behind us, a couple has been wrestling with a tent. It took about an hour but they seem to have mastered it and it no longer is flying like a green flag. I wandered over to greet another couple who is parked about 100 yards away behind our rig. They came in from Eagle, Colorado, today. After we chatted for a while, they told us their goal is live aboard fulltime and do what we do.

Life is not without its stresses, of course. Earlier this week, we were playing out this exact scenario, camping in Canyonlands National Park. We’d driven in there on a whim after Jo spotted a tiny note on our atlas which simply said “Newspaper Rock”. We had no idea what that meant, but we were up for a little side trip so we veered off the main road and bumped along a two-lane “open range” road, which means, “Be careful. There are live cattle wandering and which might bolt onto the roadway.” And they did. At least, one did a couple of days earlier. Its bloated body lay with legs in the air beside the road. As good a warning as any motorist needs.

Some of the hundreds of petroglyphs at the rock.

We took our time and wound our way downhill, via hairpin bends that would be great for a sports car, but not so much fun for a 38-foot motorhome with a Honda Fit tagging along behind it.

Newspaper Rock was worth the trip, though. It was a spectacular petroglyph site of the ancient peoples who lived in this area between 550-1300 A.D. The rock is maybe 35 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Its dark red face had been stained almost black and the early peoples had used the smooth surface as a “newspaper” or blackboard on which they made all manner of drawings. There were turtles, rabbits, hunters with spears and arrows, even a horseman with a mounted Indian. The site’s explanatory plaque did not even try to offer explanations of “why” this was here. It just is. And it’s a treasure.

I stopped by and chatted with a National Parks worker who was cleaning out the bathrooms at the rock. I asked him where we might be able to find a campsite for a few nights. He looked at the size of our rig and suggested there really were only two places in Canyonlands that could cope with a rig our size. He suggested we try about 18 miles further into the park but warned the slots fill up quickly.

We drove the Honda in so we wouldn’t waste diesel fuel on a wild goose chase. We found one camping area but Jo was unhappy it had no gravel on the road in and she feared we might bog down. So on we went and came to Indian Creek. We circled the area and found most of the sites were occupied by tenters, with cars or vans. But we found there was a group camping site, occupied by two rigs with lots of room for us at the far end of the area.

We scooted back to our motorhome and drove back out, hoping no one would grab our space before we got there. We were successful. So we set up shop under a sheltering cliff. We had a million-dollar view of the distant mountains. And we had rabbits wandering at will in front of our windshield – thus providing night and day entertainment for Ian and Fiona.

But the best laid plans often go awry. And they did just that when the sun went down and our solar panels stopped pumping energy into our six house batteries. Within an hour of sunset, our battery meter began to warn us that our voltage was slipping fast. And our refrigerator door panel began to flash a warning of low voltage.

We turned everything off and began a worrying night. We went to bed early but sleep was impossible. I schemed about remedies. We were too far off the beaten path to have any cellphone service and that made it impossible to use the internet to find replacement batteries. 

We slept intermittently and I told Jo I wanted to get up before the dawn and go through each cell of each battery in our bank to find out which cells were bad. So we were up in the pre-dawn blackness at 5:30 a.m., with my hydrometer, measuring the specific gravity of all 18 cells. Four of the six batteries had cells that gave me readings that indicated there was no life left in those cells.

We knew this was almost inevitable after I installed the solar panels on our roof. The fellow who did the installation warned me that the weak link in the chain was the battery bank. Because we have no idea how old the batteries were when we bought the motorhome three years ago, we thought it was just barely possible that these are original batteries which would place them at 10 years old. 

I had asked my Alfa Owners group online for an opinion, and one of the best helpers came back to me with the opinion that 10 years on batteries is not impossible, particularly if the batteries have never been stressed. His opinion was that the way people use their motorhomes usually means they keep them plugged into shore power almost 100 percent of the time. So the batteries never get depleted. Batteries have a lifespan that is measured by the number of times they are discharged and recharged. If they mostly are sitting plugged in they never get discharged, he said.

Anyway, we decided we should start the diesel engine at get on the road as soon as we could see the cows on the roadway. How did I do that with dead batteries, you ask? Happily, we have two 12-volt batteries back with the engine and their job is to be there to start the diesel engine and not much else. We were back at the main road to Moab by 8 a.m. That allowed us to stop and be back in communication through the internet. I searched for a store that would carry 6-volt wet cell batteries and phoned the store. 

Derrick, the manager, told me he could get us fixed up if we could get to him. We got to him in another 90 minutes but Derrick said he only had four batteries but would be happy to order six fresh one and get them to Moab by 8 a.m. the next day.

Now we had to find a place where we could plug into shore power for the day and/or night. Not so easy to do in this humming little town of 5,000 people. Everyone had pre-booked their camping site at all 15 campgrounds in town. I was getting depressed and a little bewildered about our options when one campground owner suggested we try a new campground that had recently opened in town. We did and they had a single site available for a single night only. We grabbed it.

And Derrick, true to his word, had the new batteries for us when we arrived at his store at 11 a.m. Saturday. It took a couple of hours to label every cable and connection and Derrick was decent enough to pull the old batteries from my rig and insert the new units into their place. He left me to do the wiring and cleaning.

Now, we sit parked in majestic and splendid isolation on the edge of our escarpment. Sunday morning broke cold and bleak. Temperatures were in the low 40s and rain swept through. As soon as the dawn broke, however, the solar energy began to move from the panels into the new batteries. I sit, mesmerized, not even understanding how that is possible on such a dark and dreary day. Yet we are receiving energy from a hidden sun. Magical!

Canyonlands National Park is an place of overwhelming majesty and peacefulness.