Re: A Grand Tour of the US and Canada
Hi folks
Just thought I'd check in and do a brief summing up of how we got on.
THE MOTORHOME
We ended up buying a Born Free 24RB President (1997) class C motorhome with just short of 90,000 miles on the clock. We bought it from the manufacturer in Iowa last April. It cost us $23,000. Probably a little high for the mileage and we did have a few things go wrong with it.
The first thing that went wrong was that little 'service engine soon' light on the dashboard. Being unfamiliar with US vehicles, I hadn't seen anything like this before. We immediately put it into a Ford service centre who found a small leak in one of the air lines and they blamed this for the engine running slightly weak. They fixed this, but 60 miles down the road the light was back on again.
A month later we took it into another Ford truck service centre who this time diagnosed a failing fuel pump. We got that fixed ... and 60 miles down the road the light came back on again. We've not had any trouble from the engine, but the damn light is still on! We had a few other things break on us - mostly early on, and now we seem to have shaken out all that's going to break for a while. Most of the problems we've had we've been able to fix ourselves.
The motorhome has fairly consistantly delivered about 10 miles per gallon, whether we've been climbing over the Rockies in Colorado or on the flat in California. Actually, since we carefully checked the tire pressures a a friend's garage, we've got about 11 MPG.
The motorhome has been comfortable inside pretty much all of the time, with the furnace and the air-con being able to cope with being snowed in at Castle Rock in Colorado last April or 'baked-out' in Phoenix, Arizona.
So. Basically, we've been pretty happy with our choice of vehicle/home. It's been easy to drive, and has held the road well in very windy weather and with passing trucks. The only gripe I'd have is that it is so easy to drag the motorhome's rear end on the ground when turning into parking lots etc. Why do US roads/lots have that big slope so often?
THE TRIP
We've had a ball! We picked up the motorhome in Iowa and drove to Colorado first (where we have friends). We stayed in Colorado Springs for a while before an un-planned return visit to the UK interrupted our travels. We resumed from Colorado Springs again in August and made our way through Colorado to Utah (where we took in Dead Horse Point, Moab and the Hovenweep Monument.
Then we drove up to Salt Lake City and west through the Bonneville Salt Flats (how strange to see the landscape covered in white in the middle of summer!) By the Labor Day weekend, we'd got to Yosemite Park in California, where the signs and the talk was all about bears. Didn't see any bears, but we saw a lot of squirrels. At one point, we were wondering whether there was some confusion amongst the rangers between the two ;0)
We've visited San Francisco a couple of times and Mendocino on the northern Californian coast. We got as far north as Seattle and then drove most of the coast road down to Los Angeles.
We've seen the high desert in California, Nevada (near Las Vegas) and Arizona. We hiked into the Grand Canyon (not all the way down, but we did walk down 3,000 feet and back up again in one day. (Met a tatantula spider there). We've also been whale watching in Monterey Bay and went to a couple of music festivals in California.
We've been briefly in New Mexico in the Sante Fe area and are now back in Colorado Springs spending Christmas with our friends. All this time we've continually met such great people. So much so that, when we started off, we were staying in campsites and wal-Mart parking lots. In more recent weeks, we've been able to stay with new friends most of the time; people we've met along the way who have almost immeduately said to us, "come and stay with us" if we were on the way past again.
Anyway. This post has pushed the definition of 'brief' somewhat beyond credibility! So I'll sign off here.
thanks again to everyone who gave us advice when we posted here back at the beginning of the year.
Martin and Strings.
