I have a picture on my phone of Henry in the back seat on the morning of our departure, replete with neck pillow, sunglasses, stuffed dog, and thumbs-up. The time stamp is 9:30.
For reasons that don’t warrant explaining here, I needed to put 20 PSI of air in each of the truck’s rear tires to get them up to my preferred 80 PSI for travel with the camper. My shop air compressor was not ready and the portable tire inflator I carry with me would take the better part of 20 minutes to get the large truck tires from 60 to 80. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just hit a gas station in Salem on the way to the freeway.”
We stopped at four gas stations before we found one that had a working air compressor, a three mile trip that took almost an hour. Then in the final minutes of that ordeal, Safeway called to let us know the doctor had called in a prescription and it needed to be picked up right away. Well, at least that happened before we left town.
One of the big question marks on this truck (that is, one of the very few things that I didn’t touch in the process of putting it back on the road) was the transmission. I immediately noticed that it was up to 180 deg F with just some mild city and freeway driving which is pretty warm for a bunch of reasons that I go into in the equipment entry. You might then say that I was a bit distracted on our first day of travel by the gauge hanging out at around 200 deg F for most of the trip, climbing to 250 (very pretty warm) at one point while we made our way out of the Columbia Gorge.
It was a stressful drive and I never really found a rhythm. Everyone was in good spirits, I think, but to be honest, I was pretty absorbed in the transmission temperature gauge and the steady drip of transmission fluid that made itself known at every stop. Every time we stopped, a small puddle began to form under the truck. Every time I saw a puddle, I added more fluid.
As you may know, I’m licensed by this state to teach automotive tech. Which makes it all the more embarrassing when I admit that I was overfilling the transmission in that truck for the first several legs of the trip. In all fairness, this dipstick seems to read Full even after it’s a quart overfull (which I can’t explain but…?) But nevertheless, I was adding fluid when I didn’t need to and the not-great torque converter seal was bleeding out the excess as quickly as I was adding it.
Slow as the going was, so also was the heat, as predicted, merciless. Previous to this trip, we’d camped mainly on the coast in summer and Central Oregon in late spring / early fall. Meaning: we’d used the furnace in our camper a lot more than the air conditioner. In the days leading up to the trip, as I watched the forecasted temperature go up and up and up, I couldn’t help but wonder if we would be roasting in our tin fiberglass can.
I’ll dispense with the less interesting parts of this trip and just say: if you count 9:30 as our departure time, the typically-four-hour trip to Yakima took about six and a half hours. We rolled into Yakima Sportsman around 4 and I immediately threw a piece of cardboard under the truck to catch what I knew would be a sizable puddle of transmission fluid when I shut it down (should have been a clue about overfilling). Our friend Travis was in town and was cool enough to meet us at our campsite; he entertained a sweaty family while I leveled the rig, plugged in to the electrical service, and crossed my fingers for functional air conditioning. As soon as it was confirmed that some amount of cold air was coming out, we jumped in with our pal and chilled out in Yakima for a while before returning to camp.
The campground (Yakima Sportsman State Park) was nothing special. It was a place to sleep. “Lock up your valuables” sign at the checkin booth, dirty showers, not much privacy, and plenty crowded when we were there. Those things coupled with the heat made it a fairly lackluster place to spend a night.
When we got back to the camper, two things stood out: the air conditioner (which I’d left on high) had tripped the circuit breaker and a lot of transmission fluid was on my cardboard. The air conditioner thing was scary at first but I reset the breaker, turned it back on (on medium), and everything was fine. Best guess on that one: everyone in the park was firing up the A/C at the same time and the voltage dropped far enough to cause an amp problem. Truth be told, the air conditioner in that camper is over-sized and even at 110 degrees F ambient and in direct sun, the highest fan setting isn’t necessary.
The transmission fluid situation was concerning, particularly after the temps I saw on our way in, but I had a long talk with myself and you’ll read all about that in the next entry.