Blue Ridge Parkway

August 14, 2009

Got up this morning and hit the road at 7:00am. We drove to Winston Salem, NC to have the truck worked on at a Ford Shop. We were sure the A/C was the problem yesterday but today we were proven to be wrong. I guess the A/C was a trick because it sucked up the bad air in the vents and circulated it throughout the truck. We spent all day troubleshooting the problem and I think we found the real problem...a bad isolator. There was redish brown ooze on the top of the isolator by one of the posts (photo posted) and the smell was still very strong by the ooze. It seems to always be our luck that we need to order parts at the last minute on a Friday. We spent 3 hours driving around town and calling places to find an isolator. Most people in this town said "what is an isolator" and we knew that was a bad sign. We called the distributor in Texas and put in the order and the lady called us about 20 minutes after we put in the order to tell us she just missed the UPS guy. That was a huge disappointment. This led to another hour of frantic phone calling and we finally found a place in California that had one is stock and could still ship it to us overnight!!! Wow, we just made it! We didn't get any collection done today but it was a full day of troubleshooting. Tomorrow we will install the isolator (which is not a fun/easy job) and hopefully be back on the parkway.