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| North by Northwest 'Mog | Short Cuts | ||||
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By: George Reiswig - 8/2002
August 20th
These are the times that try men's souls. And women's. It's been awhile since I updated, but... you'll see why. It most certainly is NOT due to laziness. Were I to bore you with all details of what we have been through in the past couple of weeks, it would cause you, our favorite readers, as much pain to sift through them as it caused us to experience them. So we'll try the condensed version...
We set out from the Bell II campground early on that fateful morning of the 10th, trying hard to make our aggressive goal of driving some 400 miles by days end. Driving on a smoothly graveled road, we made fairly good time for the first two hours of the day. Our Unimog was still noticeably underpowered compared to the Fitzgearlds, but we were on our way. Then it happened.
Just as we crested a hill, it felt like the engine started missing in one cylinder. A moment later, I glanced in my side mirror to see white smoke coming out of the exhaust stack, while simultaneously hearing Fred's voice in the CB saying that he smelled coolant. I immediately shut down the engine and coasted to a stop.
Nooooo!
"Well, folks, I think this trip is over for us." It was all I could think of to say.
The whole trip has been an emotional analog of the topography we have been driving over: up and down, extremes of zenith and nadir. All of us were ready to throw in the towel at this point and just ship the Unimog home on a truck. I felt it was a good bet that one of the cracks we had seen when we magnafluxed the cylinder head in Prince George had propagated, and the coolant had finally found its way into the cylinder. Finding a new cylinder head seemed unlikely, and doing all the work necessary was certainly unattractive.
Fred flat-towed us some 80 miles from where we stopped all the way to the next town, Dease Lake, B.C. This was some of the more harrowing driving of the trip, since my engine no longer was turning the compressor that powered the air-assist for my brakes. On some of the steeper downhills, I got in front of Fred and pulled him down the hill, letting his engine help with compression braking. Exciting, but in all the wrong ways.
Dease Lake is a small town, with some 400 people on a good day. It does not have any truck repair facilities, and (not surprisingly) no Mercedes-Benz OM352 cylinder heads or gaskets. We spent a lot of time on the telephone there with our insurance company, at first successfully explaining to them that towing to a good repair shop would cost more than shipping the truck to Oregon. But they changed their minds at 5:00 PM one day before we were to ship the truck, saying, "We found a great little shop in Watson Lake (population 600), Yukon, that can fix it... And they'll tow it up there for $100." Sure.
My confidence flagged as we dipped into another low point on the emotional roller coaster. It seems that every time we make plans and have some sense of certainty, our plans are thwarted.
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