Broken Down Blues…
Well, when you drive thousands of miles, several times a year, your RV is bound to break down once in awhile, right?
You may remember that we were having trouble with our engine block leaking coolant last week. Well, this morning, just after we jumped on I-95 in Virginia, it started spewing coolant again. The first thing we noticed was smoke coming from my side of the cab. We pulled over quickly and got the children (and yes, Percy, too!) out of the RV, put them safely far away from the highway, and investigated.
Green goo was pouring from the heater onto the passenger side floorboard. The “smoke” was actually steam…LOTS of it! We were glad it was the same old problem (aggravated by us adding more coolant that morning) and got back into the RV.
We should have figured something was amiss when, after getting back on the highway, the coolant started again pouring from the heater onto the floor, but faster than I could soak it up. Ali was handing me clean towels while Frank was taking the soaking (and steaming) ones into garbage bags.
While Richard was looking for a gas station, and about the time I ran completely out of dry towels, the engine started overheating severely. It went almost instantly to red. We had to pull off on a median of sorts. We were off the highway, but I was still very nervous because we were between two lanes of traffic. Richard looked under the hood while I finished mopping up the rest of the green goo. We figured if we could wait until the engine cooled, we might be able to get to a Target parking lot that was about a 1/2 mile away. So, we waited, and we waited, and we waited…
It took about 45 minutes for the RV to cool down. I have lots of experience driving leaky, overheating cars (don’t ask) so I took over the wheel. We timed it just right, when there was no traffic coming behind us and when there was a green light (not yellow or red!) about 1/4 mile in front of us. I gunned it (well, as much as you can gun an RV) and, while it only took us about one minute to get to the Target parking lot, the temperature gage was almost all the way to red again.
We whipped out our cell phone (thank God for those!) and called our friendly Roadside Assistance lady (thank God for her!), courtesy of Good Sam Club, and waited patiently for a tow truck. Boy, those RV tow trucks are big! You can see a picture of our poor RV on the tow truck HERE. It arrived pretty quickly and Richard, Frank and Percy rode in it while Ali, Max and I waited for a cab.
But that wasn’t the end of our troubles…
This story was continued the following day HERE.