We got up early with the intention of getting out and seeing lots of beaches on the way to our next destination, but then the RV wouldn’t start. After a lot of fiddling with it, we got it to start enough to limp along to the auto parts store, where Michael spent a lot of time troubleshooting it and finally decided the problem was a corroded battery connector, so he bought a tool to scrape it clean, and then it started. A bit after that it had trouble starting again, and it was still making this terrible rattling noise that had started a bit before the brakes gave out the night before last, so we decided we should probably get it to a mechanic before we left one of the bigger towns on the Oregon coast. On the plus side, the brakes worked great after Michael replaced the brake cylinder last night. We had meant to get the RV checked out by a mechanic before leaving Seattle, but the mobile mechanic I had found flaked out on us, and I didn’t have time to find another with all the last minute prep for leaving early. So we found a mechanic in Tillamook who could look at it right away. They found a loose connection to the battery and tightened it, and the RV has had no trouble starting ever since, so that was great, but they insisted there was nothing else wrong with it and it was perfectly safe, in spite of the weird rattling noise. We finally left Tillamook well into the afternoon, and it continued to rattle. We stopped a a brake place in Newport and they confirmed Michael’s guess that it was probably a loose brake pad. The good news is that it is annoying but not dangerous. The bad news was they couldn’t even look at it for at least a week, and laughed at him when he asked if this was a repair we could do ourselves. We’ll try to find another mechanic somewhere along the way.
We skipped most of the stops we had meant to make, but we stopped at the Devil’s Punchbowl:
Sonya went swimming in the freezing water nearby:
And then we stopped at the tide pools at Yaquina Head Lighthouse and touched sea anemones and got very wet in the tide:
After a big day that mostly involved a tour of the Oregon coast’s auto parts stores and auto repair shops, we grabbed delicious takeout in Florence and pulled into our campsite at Jessie M. Honeyman Memorial State Park Campground, where the sand dunes are, around 8pm. Will explore the dunes tomorrow!
Today's route:
No comments:
Post a Comment