Vintage View Vednesday Going West 2008

Today is Vintage View Vednesday and this one comes with great pictures and a great story that I have shared before.

A few days ago, the legacy dashboard showed up in Blogger. I do not know where it came from and I do not know how long it will stay, but I am glad to have it back. I immediately tried to load pictures from our archives and they loaded easily!

It is obvious, my computer and the new dashboard do not jive some way. I have not been able to easily add pictures in weeks. I hope the old dashboard hangs around.

This week's Vintage View is of our final trip west in our Chevy truck pulling our Kountry Star Fifth Wheel in January 2008. We were in Oklahoma and left on I-40 going west. Our first stop was one of our favorites, the Big Texan.

  

  

I think the weather was warm enough for us to sleep in a truck stop around Amarillo and we got an early start the next morning. We love driving in wide open spaces!

We fueled at a brand new Flying J in Tucumcari, New Mexico and about 40 miles later, we lost power in the truck. The engine would run, but it did not have much power. I stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and started calling friends with diesel knowledge for advice.

The overwhelming theory was trashy fuel or water in the fuel, especially since I had put in fuel about an hour before. It was Saturday morning so my options for finding help were very limited.

This was before we had smart phones, but a guy inside the station told me there was a parts place in a small town about 15-20 miles back the way we came. I had no idea if I could get back to the parts place, change the filter and then return to the middle of nowhere station, so I did not unhook the trailer and leave it.

The truck could barely move the trailer, but we drove on the shoulder and eventually got up to about 20 MPH. We pulled into the parts place about 11:45 and they told me a garage was open around the corner until noon. I bought three filters (not cheap) and pulled up in the parking lot of the garage.

They took off the filter and it was full of gunk. He put on a new one, primed it and had me drive around a few minutes. He removed the new filter and it was full of gunk. He put on a second new one, primed it and had me drive around again. 

He removed the filter again and the fuel in the filter was clear. He told me I might need to put on the third new filter later in the day, but that was the end of the trouble. Hallelujah!

He charged me like I was an out of towner with a pocket full of cash, but I was glad he was open, knowledgable and willing to work past closing time.

We lost a few hours due to the fuel trouble and that put us into our destination, a campground in Flagstaff, way after dark. When we traveled in the truck and trailer, we could not stop in the winter without electricity because we had no generator. We always called ahead to make a reservation in a campground and our reservation was right off I-40 in Flagstaff.

There was a few inches of snow on the ground and it was way below freezing when we arrived after dark. They assigned me a pull-through spot, but we had trouble getting into the RV spot because of the ice.

Once we had the Kountry Star parked and mostly level, we had a terrible time getting Odie from the truck into the trailer. I always traveled with a snow shovel then and I had to move a bunch of snow to get level AND to get Odie in.

In the process, another truck and trailer pulled into the space above us and I shoveled a bunch of snow to make way for his wheels and helped him get level on boards. 

Once they were settled and we had Odie inside, I told KJo that we were out of fresh water and I was too cold and tired to mess with filling it up and then draining the hose and putting it away. I told her I would get up early and fill it in the morning.

She was fine with that and we went inside, cranked the heat and went to bed.

The next morning I hooked up the water hose and started filling the tank. The water immediately began to overflow. It took me a minute to figure it out, but the tank was completely full. Evidently the guy I helped get in the night before, filled up my tank before he went to bed or before he left early in the morning.

How cool is that? We have always tried to be a good neighbor and it certainly came back to us pressed down, shaken together and running over! 

That guy had no idea how stressful my day had been on the road. He did not know we had broken down, backtracked, lost hours and then drove way too many miles so we would not lose money on the campground reservation. He had no idea, but he filled the tank with water and his kindness still makes me smile.

We were not beginning revival in Phoenix until Monday night so we stayed in the campground Sunday night too. Sunday was cold, but the sun was shining and that felt glorious. We were supposed to visit a church plant we had heard about in Flagstaff, but we could not get in touch with the Pastor that day and we did not know where it was.

Monday we drove down to the valley of the sun and into the warm beautiful weather that Phoenix winters are famous for.

Thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed Vintage View Vednesday.

Davy