Follow Our Progress
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January 14th 2004
It's after 11:00 and I'm pretty exhausted, so this will (hopefully)
be a short post to cover the past couple of days...
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In case any of you were wondering "how does
one pack for several weeks on the road with almost no time
left...
You pile everything in the bus and figure you will sort it
out once you get on the road right?
We ran into a lot of last minute problems trying to get the
bus buttoned up for the big trip, so a lot of things had to be
compromised and saved for some time along the way or after we
get to Quartzsite... |
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The important part is that we got things together
enough to caravan down with our good friend Alan.
He thought that we'd get bored waiting for him or tired of
holding back behind him... Turns out that this is one of
the rare photos we have of his truck and Airstream since he
could basically drive away from us on the hills. |
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We finally caught up with him (OK, OK, he really
stopped and waited take a picture of us) at the Siskiyou summit.
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The drive was beautiful... |
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We spent the night in a Wal-Mart Parking lot in
Yreka last night. It got really cold, but we managed to
keep the bus warm inside and everyone slept well. |
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Today was not as beautiful of a drive... It
was raining most of the day and the scenery is pretty well
represented by the photo to the left. |
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We stopped to get some diesel and get the propane
tanks filled up just before we hit Redding California.
It was a pretty quick stop. We burned 47 gallons of
fuel between Eugene and this stop... My rough estimate on
mileage is around 6 miles per gallon which gives us a max range
of 750 miles. We'll be fueling up every 500 or so at a
minimum to make sure that we don't run out. We don't have
a fuel gauge. |
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This was yet another stop we made, which resulted
in Becky and I having to disconnect the Jeep to get the bus
turned around and back on the Interstate... I'll go into
more detail on that one when I have more energy.
It was not very eventful. |
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About 45 minutes or so out of Redding we stopped
at a store to pick up some printer paper and other miscellaneous
items. When we left for the highway again, the bus would not
go faster than about 54 miles per hour.
The overdrive would try to kick in, fail and slow
us down to around 50 miles per hour and then we'd get tons of
power up to 54 miles per hour and repeat the process... We
knew when we left Eugene that the transmission was leaking fluid a
bit, but the transmission was working fine in all of the other
gears, so I wasn't sure if low fluid would cause the problem we
were having. I made a quick call to our new friend (and
super mechanic) Mike and he confirmed that low transmission fluid
would cause loss of gears (especially overdrive).
I pulled off at the next exit and checked the
fluid level in the transmission. Sure enough, we were really
low again. I added a gallon of fluid (which we packed with
us on Mike's advise) and after checking about 5-6 times (it's a
tricky thing to do...) we decided that we were in-between the add
and full marks.
When we got back on the highway, the overdrive
kicked right back in and we were able to cruise right along at 65
miles per hour with no problem.
Thanks Mike! |
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We got in to Sacramento just in time to hit the rush
hour traffic... Welcome to Sacramento... Crappy
weather and stop and go traffic for about 1/2 hour or so. |
We had planned to make it twice as far as we did today,
but decided to stop short of our goal about 1 hour or so outside of
Sacramento.
The "Generator No Charge" light came on when I
shut the bus down for the evening... It stays lit even when the bus
is running. I'm not entirely sure what that means. My
maintenance manual does not show the light, so there's nothing in the book
about how to troubleshoot it. It seems to be related to the
generator that runs the air conditioning fans (not the alternator for the
bus), but until it gets light out again in the morning I can't
really look into it. Hopefully it's nothing serious and we'll be
able to get back on the road again early tomorrow so we can get some miles
behind us.
Becky and the girls are already crashed out for the night
and I'm getting pretty tired myself, so I'm off to bed. If I have a
connection to the internet tomorrow I'll try to post another update. |
