Retirement Road Trip - March 26, 27
We’re on the road! We packed the trailer Friday and left about 6:30 in the morning Saturday. We were aiming for 6 so I felt like we did pretty good. First stop: Yuma, AZ, to visit our good friends Bill & Smitty Schripsema. They live in a trailer park with an extra “party lot” beside their own little home where we could park our trailer and hook everything up.
Highway 5 was horribly bumpy. Just awful. Everything jiggled so much that there was a bit of a mess on the trailer floor when we got there because stuff fell out. Other than that, things went along swimmingly until about 2 in the afternoon. Suddenly we heard a little ding—which should, if you ask me, indicate good news—and Randy read a very alarming error message from the dashboard of the truck that looked like this, except it said 100 miles:
I googled it and up came all sorts of references to “the dreaded limp mode.” To my dismay, I learned the message meant that the system detected something wrong about the “DEF System” and in 100 miles it would go into “limp mode” which meant the truck would not go any higher than 5 miles per hour, a safety feature (it’s a feature, not a bug!) to force you to “limp” to a dealership and get the DEF system fixed, preventing damage. Lovely. Slight panic ensued. To make a long story short, we called Luke and several dealerships within 25 miles or so, none of which had service departments open until Monday, decided to head for Ontario, CA, and wait for Monday, called Bill to tell them the situation, and then…the error disappeared. What?! Hesitatingly, prayerfully, fingers crossed, we decided to hope for the best and continued to Yuma.
And we made it! With only one fight! :D The last little bit to get to the trailer park involved a few turns and a roundabout. I hateit when Randy is demanding to know what the GPS means and I have absolutely no better idea than he does because, guess what, neither of us has ever been there. And besides, I am hugely, ridiculously directionally dyslexic and he knows that.
But we made it and Randy got the trailer parked and hooked up next to the Schripsema’s cozy little home. Unfortunately, the air conditioner in the trailer stopped working. It was the trailer’s turn to have a problem, I guess. Fortunately, the nights are still cool in Yuma and we slept just fine. We hope to get it fixed on Monday. There are a lot of trailers in Yuma so finding a repair place shouldn’t be hard. If this had to happen, this is the place for it to do so.
Today Bill took us to a mining ghost town out in the desert. Pictures below. I love the blue skies, multi-colored wood, and hills and buttes. The biggest hill with an outcropping on top is called Castle Mountain. Afterward, we had lunch at a little town by a lake where we saw a striking, bright orange bird on the hummingbird feeder.
