Made the trip

When a long trip starts with a minor accident before even leaving my home state, it doesn't bode well.

We did have a few minor problems, but nothing we couldn't deal with.

There was a bad smell and a loud hissing noise as we pulled off the highway for lunch. At first I thought it was my radiator. There was no coolant on the ground, so it could not be that. After pulling off the air filter I discovered a split air conditioner hose. My guess is that it was weakened in the crash and just let go when we tried to use it. While inconvenient, we can live without air conditioning.

During the last 8 miles to my dad's, my diesel fuel filter plugged up. We couldn't go faster than about 45 mph. Fortunately, it was a 50 mph road, so it wasn't too bad. We made it safely to our destination.

Tomorrow, I'll be busy fixing swapping out the filter and checking out the AC to see what it'll take to repair it.

We used to do this trip of 1700 miles in under 30 hours. That's moving right along and only taking the occasional cat nap. Then we started towing a boat with the truck. The trip took a good two days as we traveled a lot slower pulling the boat. Sometimes we'd even take a hotel room to get a night's sleep.

The van has a comfortable bed in the back. The trip takes at least three days now. It's easy to crawl in the back and get some good solid sleep. While the trip takes longer, at least we don't arrive looking like zombies. Instead of immediately falling into bed, we took showers and then went out to dinner with my dad.

-Sixbears