In Route To Great Basin Naitonal Park

September 28, 2009
After what felt like a very, very short week at home I'm back on the road. The day started with a full 9 hours in Denver and ended with driving across I-70. Needless to say we didn't make it the 10.5 hours to our destination but only made it 4.5 hours to Grand Junction, CO. Our troubles started last week. Early last week the truck was at an electrical shop to fix the bad regulator. The guy said we needed a new regulator but it would take 4 to 6 weeks to get one in...yeah right. We made a few phone calls and had one overnighted to them. After we got the truck back on Wednesday we decided to do some testing and soon found out that our rutting sensors were not working. We thought we figured out what part we needed so we took the truck to Ford for an oil change on Thursday. Friday morning I hadn't heard back from Ford so I called them to check on the status and the guy said "I haven't been able to get a hold of anyone to approve the work" I said "what we took it in for an oil change". I can't even remember what they fixed at this point but it had something to do with the tie rod(s)...are there more than one, who knows. Anyway, we went to pick it up at 4pm Friday so we could do some work on our broken smartbar (rutting sensors) and the cashier said "no work has been done on your truck, you can just take it"...really, was she trying to be funny? The manager said their phone lines were down and the parts didn't show up...our typical luck kicking right in. We worked on the truck for 2 hours in the Ford parking lot (a great 12 hour day for me) and at 6pm we had to call it a day without fixing the sensor problem. We left the truck there so it could be fixed on Saturday. We picked the truck up this morning and spent the next 8 hours figuring out why our rutting sensors were still not working. Some how 9 controller boards got fried! Don't ask me. We only had 4 spares to we had to order more and we should have them tomorrow. After that we had to head over to an auto parts store to get a yellow top battery, another $200.00 down the drain. One that we had under our computer rack kept smelling up the truck (yes, they really do smell) and that took us about 1/2 hour to swap out. At 9:00pm we finally pulled into the hotel. If I calculate right that would be a 14 hour day....and it is only Monday!

A couple of people stories for today...
While we were working on the truck some FHWA guy came over to look at the truck and chat a bit. There was little conversation because we were pretty busy but he said something like we had an "easy" job getting to see the country. I looked at him and said "uh, not really". Easy...what part of my job is easy? Is it the long 12 to 14 hour days or fixing the truck every day???

When we walked into dinner a guy said "well, that is a different van, is it a sleeper van?" I left most of the explaining up to Jeff so I could go into get something to eat :). I'll take the next one :)