Information Echo

Despite a good effort to get up early, I slept in. I had slept like a log, but still didn’t feel well rested when I got up - this altitude thing is getting to me more then I expected. At least I hadn’t fallen prey to the head-splitting headaches that many with even less altitude tolerance fall prey to - I can at least deal with lethargy.

After a good breakfast I walked back to the shop to check on the truck.

The good news: It was ready.
The bad news: The bill was horrendous.
The worse news: It only partially fixed the problem.

As I drove the truck back to the campsite it was clear to me that something was still awry - there was still a serious lack of turbocharger boost with a corresponding lack of power.

With few other ideas of exactly what could be wrong, I decided we’d set off down the road and see if the problem cleared up - perhaps a sensor wasn’t registering the high altitude of Yellowstone correctly and it was incorrectly metering fuel, or wasn’t adjusting the turbocharger waste-gate properly. I was grasping at straws, but with few options for mechanical repairs in West Yellowstone and no indications that driving the truck as-is would lead to impending doom, we departed.

Unfortunately we weren’t 20 feet out of our campsite when another gremlin took hold - we had no trailer brakes. No amount of tweaking the brake controller of checking the electrical connections would remedy the situation. WTF?

To keep a long story short, we happened upon a mobile RV repair as we cruised towards the exit. With zero interest in descending the (notoriously steep) mountain roads exiting Yellowstone to the east without functioning trailer brakes, I commandeered their assistance to troubleshoot the problem. The story got even longer, but it ended up being a bad brake magnet, the problem which was solved by methods I won’t discuss here.

The good news: We had functional brakes on the trailer again.
The bad news: It took an hour to diagnose and repair what turned out to be a stupidly simple problem.
The worse news: It cost us another $100.00 for the hour worth of labor.

What the hell else could go wrong?

Todays plan took us about an hours drive away to Bay Bridge campground, which was actually a state park within Yellowstone National Park itself. We wanted to spent at least one night inside Yellowstone, and having made these changes very last minute we were lucky to get a reservation at any campground at this side of the park, so despite being one of the lesser-preferred locations, we took it.

Once again the drive through Yellowstone resulted in a number of animal sightings (Bison and deer) but not in the numbers we had expected, and to my daughters dismay we didn’t see a single mountain goat, moose, or grizzly/black bear.

We stopped at a few scenic lookouts (most of which I simply pondered what was going on under the hood of the truck while Christie and the kids took pictures and enjoyed the sights) and then arrived at Bay Bridge. We checked in, listened to the same “there are bears in this campground, stow your food inside, etc etc” speech that we had heard many times before in Banff and other campgrounds, and then headed for our site. We had problems actually getting the trailer to fit since this campground was clearly designed in the days of much smaller trailers. I’m quite adept at maneuvering our trailer around, but given the locations of berms, trees, signs, and the narrow bits of asphalt that they actually give you to work with (with warnings that you must stay on them) it was tough. Eventually, with much wiggling and several blocks of wood on one side to get us level, I managed to get it situated so that we could unhitch.

We enjoyed the evening and met another couple from Pennsylvania who’s children enjoyed the company of ours. They came over after dinner and we enjoyed the campfire together at our site - the social aspect of camping is one thing that I greatly enjoy, and we’ve met some great people while RV’ing.

The weather threatened as the evening wore on - the winds came up, the skies blackened, and lightening was visible. I was sure that we were going to be dealt our first real downpour of our vacation, but as has been the trend it seemed to simply skirt past us once again, dropping only a handful of rain-drops on us.

With the temperatures dropping and the evening wearing on, our neighbors headed back to their RV and we retired for the evening. We tried to get a television station to catch the evening news (I’ve been feeling particularly detached from the news, although I think that’s a good thing) but as I expected there was no television stations (or radio stations, for that matter) to be found on the dial. Instead we ended up watching “The bucket list” on DVD.

We headed off to bed, but I forgot to set the furnace beforehand. Ooops - a cool night was ahead.

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