Sweet sound of a purring two-stroke

Today we started the main engine. It fired right up, and other than a minor leak in the power steering system, quickly resolved, all seems to be well. Clearly Joel is confident, since they put the tailgate back on this afternoon. The cooling system is filled with plain water, in preparation for a good flush over the pit before we put all new coolant in, per the recommendation of the radiator shop.

In the meantime, I spent most of the day in the generator bay, trying to get the enclosure and ductwork back together. Yesterday I managed to replace the old and crappy wire-type hose clamp on the leaky coolant hose with a standard worm-drive type. That seems to have cured the leak, although only a long load test will tell, something I can't do with the exhaust just millimeters from the shop door.

We did not get a chance to test the transmission today, as we did not actually move from our position, in which we have been for three weeks. And while we did not actually finish everything up today, I am hopeful that tomorrow things will be buttoned up enough for a road test. If that goes well, we should be able to leave sometime Wednesday, for parts unknown.

My last few posts here have generated a lot of comments, many expressing either sympathy or, perhaps, disbelief. I want to take a moment to address this. While, to some, these sorts of posts may seem to be nothing more than an exercise in whining, I write up all of our mechanical tribulations for two reasons. The first is that, for whatever reason, the mechanical issues and repairs posts are enormously popular with our readers -- more on this in a moment. The second is that, just like a ship's log book, this blog is the record of everything we do with, to, and on this bus, and we often find ourselves needing to go back to our own posts to verify what has or has not happened in the past. For example, while we have been here at this shop, I have gone back to several posts from the two times we had the engine rebuilt, as well as the time the power steering pump was replaced, and of course the posts about our original discovery of the end-plate gasket leak. All of those references yielded valuable information for our current circumstance.

About that popularity... I would like to think that most of the readers who are fascinated by these posts are learning something from them. In my fantasy, readers are looking at these mechanical issues, seeing how we deal with them, and that is giving them the confidence to strike out on their own, knowing that all these sorts of problems are manageable. Some, I hope, are actually gleaning a technical tidbit or two, while others are seeing that there are resources all over the country to help even those of us with weird, out-of-production, custom-converted rigs get things fixed.

Of course, I could be way off base. It's possible that the popularity of these posts is a kind of schadenfreude -- "Gosh, hon, look at all the trouble Odyssey is having. Boy am I glad we bought a Bluebird/Monaco/Newell/Marathon/YadaYada coach that has no problems whatsoever (cough, cough), and, even if it did, we can just go to the dealer and slap down our Visa card and get them fixed."

In any case, I want to assure our readers that we are fine, and we consider all that has transpired in the last three weeks to be par for the course -- part and parcel of owning a 27-year-old weird German bus. I haven't seen the bill yet, but when all is said and done here at Choo-Choo Express, it will not have cost us even as much as one year's property taxes from when we lived in a condo in California. In fact, when we are done here we will have spent the better part of a month, and we've paid nary a cent for rent and utilities, even though we have been helping ourselves to power, water, and sewer. Again, back in San Jose that would have been perhaps a $2,000 expense for the month -- a good bite out of our shop tab right there.

Sure, I'd rather not have had to do this. But in the grand scheme of our lives, it is but a minor annoyance. As you may know, we are contemplating moving from Odyssey onto a boat, and I have every reason to believe that boat ownership will be more of the same, except with higher shop rates. No way are we ready to trade this lifestyle for "the American dream," complete with property taxes, utility bills, pesky neighbors, and, of course, all the same plumbing/electrical/Internet/whatever problems that even homeowners must navigate.

One of the television programs I have taken to watching on occasion is a show called Holmes Inspection on HGTV. Perhaps that is my own form of schadenfreude. It is a good reminder that there are "conventional" homes with even bigger problems than an orphaned quarter-century-old German tour bus. In a day or two, we will be back on the road and enjoying the life of travel that we love so much, and all of the hard work of the last few weeks will fade into the background.

Photo by Godfrey DiGiorgi