Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A good dam drive

We are at Government Wash (map), a free boondocking area in Lake Mead National Recreation Area. We're just one road over from where we stayed two years ago (almost to the day). Almost everything I wrote back then is still applicable today -- the approach to the dam was impressive, all the Wackenhut people needed to eyeball Odyssey, we are staying on what ought to the the shore, except the lake is even lower than it was then, and we can see the glow of Las Vegas and the vertical beam of light from the Luxor. About the only thing different was that the dam was much quieter, since we (deliberately) crossed on a weekday.

Yesterday we had a relaxing drive from our quiet BLM site to Kingman, where we stopped for more diesel and water at Flying-J, and to pick up oil and a filter for the genny at Napa. By 2:00 we were at our friends' house, about ten miles north of town (map).

I spent about an hour playing around with his Pro-Link, trying to get meaningful information out of our ECM. I had to jury-rig the wiring, since he did not have the adapter for my diagnostic connector, but, after some fiddling, we got it to read. Unfortunately, his Pro-Link turns out to have a problem, in that it would hang periodically for no reason. Sometimes I could get three or four keystrokes in before it would hang up, other times I could get maybe a dozen (and sometimes none at all). Each time I would have to power-cycle it and start over.

I copied down as much information as I could, and I did make some progress. Peter learned something too, which is that his Pro-Link is faulty. It had been doing the same thing to him on his rig, but the Pro-Link people were telling him that the wiring in his rig was faulty. Odyssey was the first independent confirmation that it was the Pro-Link that was to blame.

There are a couple of setting screens that I might have tried fiddling with on our ECM, but I was not comfortable writing ECM data with the Pro-Link acting up. So I gave up after an hour or so, and we spent the rest of the afternoon kicking tires and telling lies, as they say in motorsports circles. They were very gracious to let us park in their spacious driveway for the night, and also to drive us into town where we all had a nice dinner.

We left this morning around 11 or so, leaving enough time for the detour in case the Wackenhuts decided to turn us around. With no such problem, we arrived here with plenty of daylight remaining, and managed to get the generator oil changed before it got too cold and windy to do much else. Tomorrow, we will pressure-wash the coach, relax a bit in this lovely location, and then head in to Las Vegas for a night.

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