Jun 14, 2010
Day 2..Valemont to Edmonton
The day started out with Cheikka dumping her seeds all over the carpet not once, but twice!!!! It took us a while but we did finally get going about 9:30Am. It would have been nice to stay and enjoy the beauty of the area and do some hiking but we had to press on.
We had a wonderful drive through the Jasper area and were rewarded with sightings of deer, young moose, a coyote, mountain goats (with baby) and the bighorn sheep. You can see in some of the photos that the animals are just now shedding their heavy winter coats. I was ecstatic to see the big horn sheep so close up and have the time to watch them. They were incredibly nimble on an extremely steep slope and to see a few of the teenagers play fighting and scampering about made me very happy. This was a big one on my wish list.
We finally left all the beauty behind as we kept heading East. While Colin drove I manned the cell phone trying to coordinate some of Colin’s photo shoots for Tuesday. Voice mail is truly an awful thing especially when people don’t reply. A pet peeve….you ask if so and so is actually in the office and the receptionist says yes and transfers to to voicemail!!!! You have to call back and say you NEED to speak with a person and so on and so on.
As we drove Colin realized that the sound he had heard when we first left Kelowna was still with us. He was able to contact our mechanic guru in Vancouver who promptly made a diagnosis and urged us to stop in Hinton ASAP at Cummins. They couldn’t see us, not could the Cummins people in Edson. Meanwhile we are playing the voicemail/real person game over and over. Finally I got a real live one on the line and we lost cell phone coverage! Closer to the next town we called again and insisted on a real person. Fine they agreed to see us about 4:30PM in Edmonton. Meanwhile Colin asks me if I could hear that noise….you know the ‘new’ noise, the other noise? You bet I could. As we are slowly becoming experts we diagnosed an airbag leak. Now this is different than yesterday mornings’ airbag problem which was that it would not fill. Now full, it was leaking and we were riding low. As soon as he found a safe spot Colin pulled over and did the under the RV repair trick. Forty minutes later we were on the road and finally arrived at Cummins about 4:50PM. We left there about 6:30PM depressed. Basically after much driving and running alongside to listen to the engine it was decided to check the actual engine. For those not in the know, the engine in a diesel pusher is under the bed. When we travel we use the bed as storage so all that stuff had to be moved and then we had to manipulate the mattress off the bed and put it on end, remove the screws and voila the engine. This was all done with the slides in and the toad still hooked up. Bottom line, looks like something wrong with the exhaust ?? and probably damage to the manifold. Cost estimate $3000.00. It was decided we could safely drive it to my sister’s house and back in for repairs on Thursday. So we do Dad’s party Wednesday AM & PM and have to have the RV back to other side of Edmonton @ 7:30AM Thursday, where they may work on it till midnite. What will we do all day….stay tuned.
Thank goodness Edmonton is so far north, it stays light late. We got to my sisters about 7:30PM and set up in the cul de sac. Colin had photoshop work to do and I went to bed. Too tired to eat.
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What beautiful wildlife photos…sorry to hear of the exhaust you problems. Fortunately you recognized it before major damage like a fire. Hopefully your manifold is ok..
Our coach is going in for new exhaust pipe before we head out in the fall.
safe travels
Bob