FMCA Update & another Total Engine Failure

First, the good news. The four days at the FMCA Albany rally -were very enjoyable overall. The picture to the right shows us shortly after we arrived on Tuesday. However, on Wednesday they located new arrivals on both our left side and directly in front of us making us feel a little claustrophobic. Since we weren't going anywhere anyway we adapted to our close quarters. It was mostly sunny on our arrival day, but mostly cloudy and some rain and thunderstorms through the rally.

We enjoyed talking with our part time Yuma neighbors Erv Fleming and his wife, and Gary and Sue Tilley. The did a great job at introducing us around and making us feel at home. We will be sending in an application to join their NW Pacers Chapter of FMCA and look forward to participating in some of their future rallies during our summer travels.

We went to all the provided meals and enjoyed the many conversations we had with people from all over the country. We particularly enjoyed meeting Jerry and Kristi from So. California and hope to meet up with them again somewhere down the road.

Then on to the 'other news' as one of my business partners always likes to say.

We took off for Florence on Sunday morning as scheduled. The first ominous sign of a bad day came when the small electric awning over the door wouldn't retract. Tried everything we could think of and finally had to partially disassemble the awning and mechanism and tie wrap the arms and the canvas to the side of the coach.

Then we got on the road and a couple of miles short of Coburg, the rig did the same thing that it did before we got to Albany. The engine went into 'limp mode' and the transmission display went totally blank. Since we were fortuitously only a few minutes away from Cummins in Coburg we crawled into their parking lot. After verifying that we only had forward motion capability, we PULLED into one of their RV slots. We kept trying to restart the engine occasionally, expecting it to start working again after about an hour like before. I was actually hoping that it wouldn't restart, but it did, this time after more than four hours. We got ourselves backed in and reparked and we will spend the night here. Tomorrow we will probably have to fight for attention competing with the other 10 rigs that are parked here. Most of them are on their way home from the FMCA rally and have scheduled appointments.

We are trying to treat this as just another part of our summer adventure, but engine reliability is one of those things that no one really wants to have to deal with. Hopefully this time they will be more successful at diagnosing the problem.