I took The Titsworth to the van doctor this morning. "Well that's strange, didn't the van just get a doctor's visit recently?" you may ask yourself. You would be correct if you have made this connection, but today's visit is equal parts prep for a trip for my birthday next week and reaction to the trip we took just after the repair trip that I last wrote about. What did the van do in between you might ask? Sitting. Lots of sitting. We are part time RV types ya know.
(it makes sense to jump here to keep the main story all together. Do it. You know you want to.)
When we last checked in with The Titsworth, we had arranged for a hole in the gas fill hose to the larger gas tank to be repaired. In fact it was repaired. We then made plans to take the van on a short getaway in a highly controlled social situation for the celebration of a good friend's birthday. The location: Leavenworth, WA. If you don't know Leavenworth, check it out. It's a fun place and an interesting story. The story of the transformation of Leavenworth from logging town to full-blown tourist town is not the point of this post, so I get back on topic.
The information relevant to Leavenworth for purpose of this story is that a) it sits 111 miles away from our house and b) one crosses Stevens Pass to get there. If you haven't ever driven through a mountain pass before, it is a special treat. Invariably beautiful (you're driving through the mountains, dude), the flip side is that there is frequently weather to be dealt with. We were early enough still yet that our weather was rain, to which I would hesitate to apply the moniker "inclement". As one wouldn't, per se. A thing that I forgot to factor in as we were preparing to depart in what I felt was a decent time that should allow us ample daylight to get from point a to point b was that in the mountains, you lose daylight much sooner than other places because, well, mountains are tall.
All of our driving in The Titsworth to this point had been done during the daytime. This was much more by circumstance than by design, but eh.. let's call it a retrospective fact that I was glad of. It was known that the headlights did in fact light up so it really shouldn't have been much of a difference either way. Until you are in Stevens Pass with the rain happening as you are climbing and it is getting dark and you come to the realization that although the headlights may in fact light up, they are woefully inadequate for the purpose of seeing what you're doing on the road. This is problematic.
Fortunately, the mountain passes that I have been through in my life have all been brightly lit. This is likely because of the aforementioned tendency towards less-than-sunny weather. The drawback to this is that not every last little inch of roadway is lit. There is a bunch that you cannot see.
Once upon a time, vehicles were built in which the high-beam headlights were activated and deactivated through a foot toggle to the side of the break pedal. Once upon a time, in fact, includes the time during which a 1989 Ford E-250 chassis would have been produced. Speaking personally, which is important because I was the one who was driving in these rainy conditions during which I couldn't see quite as well as I might have liked, I had never driven with anything other than the column-mounted actuators that we are used to these days. Having believed that we had left in plenty of time to have daylight, it didn't seem to matter.
When it did seem to matter was when the street lights through Stevens Pass were becoming less and less frequent and your were descending the other side of the pass. The roads were increasingly resembling those winding mountain road pictures that you see in your mind's eye, it's raining, and you can't necessarily see 100%. At this point, you're starting to tap around with your left foot to try to locate the high beam switch because the feelings of dread are increasing to the levels of "imminent mortal peril". As the curves and the rain and the darkening continue, the searching becomes something more akin to a left-footed, one-legged tap dance. Maybe like trying to step on the world's fastest spider with your non-dominant foot while trying not to alarm someone nearby who may not enjoy spiders.
Or dying. I kid.
Eventually, I succumbed to the "literally just start stamping your foot and hoping" method of searching and it quickly yielded results. I did finally locate the foot switch, which made that situation feel so much better. Although the high-beams themselves were probably inadequate in the general scheme of things, they were enough to carve through that mortal peril feeling that had been building in the pit of my stomach. It is at this point that you probably are raising your hand to ask "but wait - can't you change your own headlight?" Yes. In fact I can. It's not as straight ahead as you might think on a 1989 van, but even then, yes. Well sort of. I got the driver's side done and functional. I got three of four screws removed from the headlight frame on the passenger's side. With the van doctor's appointment that I had made two weeks ago coming up this morning, I did not feel compelled to fight the last screw. Let the doctors take the entire grill off to make the process easier. I certainly had no desire to do so.
If not the headlight, then what? you say. Well, after having fixed the gas line to the rear tank, I was feeling really great. I went to fill the larger tank up seeing as I could and all. It pretty well overflowed so it seemed it was full. A strange thing, and perhaps a harbinger of what is to come in this story, is that in the rear tank switch configuration the van would start about 50% of the time. There was also a slight rough-idling situation as we were getting out to the main roads and truly under way. OK, no big deal. The back tank has been sitting still for a while so it probably has some feelings to work out. It's cool.
Part way down the pass, the fuel gage level on the back tank, which hadn't moved at all though we were more than 75 miles into the trip, plummeted to nearly empty. I switched to the front tank because although the rear tank should not have been anywhere near empty, the front would be far more than sufficient to get us where we were going. The switch flipped, I was expecting the gas gage to return to full... which is the opposite of what happened. It stayed down close to empty. It appears that the fuel system has been drawing from the front tank this whole time (even though the switch was on the back tank for most of this time) At this point, I'm beginning to math to figure out if we're even going to make it to town, which also represents the next available gas station. This is all dovetailing with the headlight situation, so things are going well.
If you have been following along from the beginning, you know that on a front-tank-only configuration, the fuel numbers are loosely 100 miles on the 14-gallon tank. The distance to Leavenworth started at 111 miles, you recall. Add in the climb to get over the pass and, well... We still had our emergency gas in our gas can at this point, so the stress was low. We go and go and, much like any highway town you drive through, the first thing you see is a gas station. It's been probably 4 years since we had been in Leavenworth, so I tell Laurie "I'm going to stop, since we know this is here." I get to filling the front tank and I'm watching the gallons closely because I want to know where we truly were at having drawn exclusively, it seems, from the front tank. The final number: 14.5 gallons. On what we believed to be a 14-gallon tank. Cool... cool. And THAT, friends, is the story of why the van is seeing the doctor again. I would really love to have a longer range than 100 miles. These doctors are RV specific, so hopefully we'll see more complete results this time. And they'll do the other headlight because better them than me. Also, I have asked them to investigate the propane system so that the cooking surface works long enough to make a bacon cheeseburger. Also, the passenger side windshield wiper is missing the pin to the blade, so it doesn't hold position. And they're going to try to locate my data plate to find Coachmen's recommendation for my tire inflation. So cool - we're getting some of this stuff figured out. And next week, we're going down to Astoria, OR for some common-vector socializing in these times of COVID.
We'll speak again soon. And I'll take pictures this time.
Never have you ever a foot switch high been before? Strange.
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