Day two of our big adventure and it sounds awesome, right?
Well………
Last night I noticed quite a bit of power steering fluid under the front of the coach as we pulled in. This morning I verified the fluid is coming from the Steering Box around the PITMAN arm shaft. I checked the power steering fluid level and there was nothing on the dip stick, even though I checked it was full before we left (never a drip before). Uh Oh.. We took the Jeep to Autozone and got more Dexron III to top off the fluid and planned a 8 mile trip to Fleet Maintenance in Austin. When I pulled into Fleet I had a hefty puddle and a trail you could follow, presumably all of the way back to the falls. We are definitely losing too much to attempt any highway trip.
So…….
Here we are “camping” in the industrial Fleet Maintenance lot waiting to be looked at in 4-5 days. Yes, this is typical of “big-rig” repair shops. They do supply electric and water RV hook-ups here for no additional cost. I have spent over 8 hours on the internet today investigating power steering on my rig. The overwhelming recommendation in forums is to dump my existing Sheppard steering box in favor for a much better TRW box. I’m guessing about $2000 for that privilege. It could take a week to get parts and who knows how long for this shop to get to this 6 hour job.
We have temporarily canceled Corpus and Big Bend until we know we are travel ready. If only it had failed at home I might actually have completed the repair myself. On the road we don’t really have a choice. Of course if this happened on the road to Alaska it could have been way worse. Just so you know I do have an emergency towing service I pay for.
While I probably paint a pretty sad picture we remain pretty happy and optimistic. Issues like this can happen at any time and we anticipated a long trip like this would have bumps along the way. Now we’ve got a week or so to explore all around Austin. Today we ate at the Trip Advisor #1 Pizza place, Home Slice. It was good but not exceptional. Feels very much like a college place. I think BBQ in Lockhart TX is on the agenda for tomorrow.
The Fleet Maintenance camping experience isn’t great. While we do have 30amp electric and water hook-up, we need to conserve water because we don’t have sewer and moving the rig around to use a dump station is not easy. Unfortunately a large air compressor runs about every hour near us and we are in the Austin airport flight path. The noise alone makes this less than ideal. Also walking Maverick after dark is a little scary in this setting. On a side note, it is REALLY nice to have mobile internet and Satellite TV no matter where you are 🙂
As some of you may know a year ago we had planned a June trip to St Thomas and we planned to end our RV trip to coincide with that. The resort called and said they had to cancel because they still couldn’t open in June due to damage from the 2017 Hurricane. We realized this opened the opportunity for us to continue on to Alaska “IF” we weren’t too tired of RV’ing and everything remained good on the home front. So you may hear me refer to a pending Alaska trip this summer. More to come….