Not much to report that will interest blog visitors; we’re still in Michigan enjoying the hospitality of Teri’s friends and relatives, expecting to hit the road for real in about a week. Should you find yourself near Beulah, Michigan, we highly recommend the Phoenix cafe, with great coffee and wifi. Beulah:

About 700 miles into our trip, I started to get a klunking sound upon decelleration, coming from the right rear. My guess was cv joints, and the experts on thesamba.com concurred. Stopped for the night and the sound was gone in the morning, so I continued on to Detroit without any problems. I’ve been collecting information/parts/tools for the joint work, but hoping to put the job off till I get somewhere warmer. In the meantime, I’ll be injecting them with grease and crossing my fingers. When I pull ‘em, I’ll document the whole thing here, because I had to read about half a dozen sources to learn all the stuff I want to know before getting under there, and I figure it’s a good chance to write an ultra-detailed guide to the job for CV noobs like myself.

We’re decompressing in Detroit, after the interminable Ohio crossing yesterday, and will really really start writing about the fun and exciting and annoying things that are happening. We had the most incredible apple cider at the mill in Franklin, MI…like drinking an apple pie. Should’ve had them put a hose into our freshwater tank and fill ‘er up.

Teri and I are blogging the fun parts of our trip at http://www.dingoroo.com, but I’ll keep the mechanical related posts over here. We left five days ago from Brooklyn on a planned 3-month trip (details at dingoroo.com) . The van was running perfectly in every way, and sporting new tires, muffler, etc. It started losing power and stalling in heavy traffic and heavy rain on the BQE, and finally died IN the tollbooth for the Triboro bridge. We managed to limp to the first rest stop outside NYC with flashers on, stalling and coughing. First there would be power loss – butterflying the pedal seemed to help it keep going, but it would go through periods of nearly no combustion and we had to roll to a stop and restart a few times, then do hurtful things with the clutch to get it moving with a heavy load and reduced power. It felt like a fuel issue, so I got down under the slider door and asked Teri to turn the ignition to on. BAD noise from the fuel pump – hooray! Something that makes sense! I clamped off the lines and pulled the fuel filter, which I had installed about 6 months ago. It was orange; when I shook it, it looked like *(^% coffee grinds coming out of there. Gas tank rust….OK, simple…but I’m in a rest stop at night in the rain with no spare filter. I filtered the crud out of the spilled fuel which I had collected in a starbucks cup, then poured the filtered gas into the input end of the filter. Inverted the filter and blew with all my might (mmm, taste of unleaded!), and repeated the process, rinsing out the filter. Reinstalled the filter, and made it to Woodstock, where we were staying with friends. The VW gods at busdepot.com got me 3 new filters overnight for less than the FLAPS wanted to charge me for one filter, and we were back on the road. I’ll have to pull that gas tank and clean it out, but in the meantime I’ve got two extra new filters. Summary: Symptoms: intermittent loss of power, seemed like partial combustion. Coolant temp started dropping as less and less fuel got burned. Diagnosis: had someone turn the key to “on”, and heard the fuel pump cavitating (sucking but getting nothing) Ozark Engineering fix: rinsed out filter with clean gas and reinstalled, good for another hundred miles. Replaced with new filter and keeping a few spares on hand. Proper fix: Gotta pull that fuel tank and clean it out, which will be a good time to replace all the hoses, too.

Too tired from our adventure thus far (how’s that for a teaser?) to write, but here’s a couple of pix from our stop in Woodstock:

Last night we finally left Brooklyn and headed out to visit my mom in Long Island before heading North and West. Should’ve been easy; we even decided to stay at an RV park on Long Island to save the First Big Drive for the next day. We spent a couple of hours enjoying the BQE/LIE branches of Hell and finally arrived at our campground, after dark, in a light rain. In the dark, I missed seeing a pothole in the parking pad, but Teri’s foot found it right quick. You know what they say about head wounds? That even a minor one produces a great deal of blood? It’s true, it really is. So there we are, geysers of gore gushing from Teri’s gourd, the dog getting wetter and wetter in the rain, and no idea where the restrooms might be since we showed up after closing time. We determined that Teri wouldn’t need stitches by the simple expedient of mentioning stitches – she was having none of that hospital stuff, ergo, no stitches. The injury, once cleaned, turned out to be not that bad, and we had a lovely sleep. Despite everything, it feels good to have begun. More later….

Some of you may be here because peterbergin.com emails are bouncing…while I work this out with my service provider, you can reach me at XXXwebdesign ‘at’ gmail dot com (use my three initials (the middle one is M) in place of the XXX)