Deja Vu

We are back at the Horizon Casino, in Stateline (map), where we stayed last Friday on our way to the KOA.

The KOA booted us out of our space promptly at the check-out time of 11 this morning, claiming an incoming reservation for that space. (Did I tell you we don't really care for KOA?) So we said our goodbye's shortly before then and the girls and their mom headed back down the hill to the bay area. Their cabin reservation actually expired yesterday, so mom stayed with us last night in the bus, in our little fold-out guest bed, and the girls had a great time in the fancy pop-tent we have in our motorcycle camping gear.

Speaking of heading to the bay area, regular readers may remember that we we considering heading back there ourselves, to get the last of the windshield leaks taken care of in Alameda, by the outfit that put the windshields in. But realistically, we need to be heading east, as we go back on the Red Cross on-call roster on August 1st, and we need to pre-position ourselves for hurricane season (although most of the disaster response operations thus far have been in the west, from fires and flooding). So Alameda would represent a 400-mile round trip from here, and probably cost us another week.

We've decided to just live with the minor leakage for the time being, and either try to seal it ourselves at some point, or perhaps have the shop we like in New York do the work, as we are thinking about having them change out our bent tag-axle A-frame. So tomorrow we will head down the eastern slope, on US50, which will carry us all the way across Nevada.

So far, so good, but the other bad news is that the black smoke, low power problem I reported here on Friday is still with us. So far, I have replaced the air filter and also the secondary fuel filter, to no avail. I've also inspected the exhaust system, which has been banged around quite a bit since being repaired at All Coach in February, and there is a slight restriction in the tail "pipe," but it does not seem like enough to cause the present symptoms.

Many good suggestions have rolled in on the bus boards, including some that I really don't want to contemplate, such as a bad turbo. There is some evidence that the new Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel fuel, 260 gallons of which we took on in Oregon, can clean a bunch of old gunk out of the fuel system (ULSD is a better solvent than the older Low-Sulfur variety), which can then plug filters (the reason I changed the secondary), and also fuel-water separators. I'm trying now to find out if our Daveco FuelPro 380 separator can be plugged without visible evidence in the clear bowl on top of the unit.

I'll be watching things closely as we climb the grade out of the Tahoe basin, and we'll see if anything improves when we drop down to lower altitudes. But at this point I am stumped, and I will need to start looking for a good shop to help us with this. We'll be heading east through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri if anyone has any recommendations.