09 July 08 - 15:59
Fix It Day
Yesterday was a fix it day here in
Rapid City, SD. It started when it rained heavily during the night
but did not wash the dirty side of the RV. Why are we always facing
the wrong way when the rain comes? I tried to talk Dave into turning us around but he wasn't too enthused by that idea. :)
Then T-Mobile called at 7:38 am to tell me I could view my bill on-line. That's not an hour of the day I need to know that. Dave thinks he has managed to turn off that notification feature but it took several tries to do so.
I spent the morning trying to resist doing my normal morning computer stuff because I knew I would need something to do this afternoon while our RV was in the shop.
When it came time to depart, Dave learned to screw the dump. This park requires you to actually fasten your hose to the dump outlet. Since our hose is permanently fastened at the RV end he had to wind the hose backwards before putting the end into the pipe so he could then wind it forward to connect it.
It was now about 11:30 am and our transmission repair appointment was for 1:00 pm so we went to the Journey Museum. This is a really cool place and I highly recommend going there if you find yourself anywhere in the Black Hills area. The museum is a joint effort of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, the South Dakota State Historical Society Archaeological Research Center, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Minnilusa Pioneer Historical Association, and the Rapid City Duhamel Collection of Historic Sioux Indian Art. The journey through the museum “takes you through 2.5 billion years of the history of the land, animals, and cultures of the Black Hills”. There are a lot of participatory exhibits including the option of climbing onto a lady's side saddle. Do yourself a favor and allow more than the hour we had available to see this place. You can learn more by clicking on http://www.journeymuseum.org/.
So, then we stopped and picked up lunch and headed over to Dodge Town to see why our transmission was misbehaving and why the engine started whining when we left camp this morning. We made ourselves at home in their customer lounge. We moved chairs and an end table close to an outlet, plugged in our wireless router, and set up both computers. I love this air card thing! (I need to get better about taking pictures of this stuff.) By the time we ate our lunch and did most of a day's computing, the report was ready on our RV. The report said they have no idea why the transmission is shifting hard but the whining came from a loss of power steering fluid. We need to replace a steering gear but the part is on back order so may not be available for a couple of weeks! We can't stay here for 2 weeks and still make the family reunion in Idaho so we will move on. The current plan is to find a place in Boise that will order the part for us so we can have it fixed there. In the meantime we need to keep an eye on our fluid level; it took it 2000 miles to drop far enough to need attention so we should make it to Boise okay.
Now we just need to find someone to look at our coach A/C to see why it stops blowing cool air after about 3 hours. The fan runs but it doesn't move the air.
With the need to call various repair shops we decided to head back to the Lazy J for another couple of nights. That will also give us time to do more computer stuff and household tasks like washing clothes.
TTYL,
Linda
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