What promised to be another “routine” long-distance ride (about 650 miles) from Jamestown, ND to Great Falls, MT, turned out to be anything but. About an hour after our start at 8:09 (odometer reading 100370), Ray noticed that the temperature gauge wasn’t working—no reading at all. Then, he tried the air conditioning---UH OH… no air. The fan worked, and everything else worked (including the electronic message center that tells you when stuff goes wrong—like low tire air pressure, open doors, high engine temp, etc). What to do? I checked the car manual. No help. So here’s the scenario: do we just tough out an upcoming ride of 590 miles in 90s heat without air conditioning, and hope that the message center would accurately tell us if the engine was overheating? Or should we stop and get the problem diagnosed and fixed? Remember that we still had about 9 hours more to drive and it was 10:00 am.
Being the reasonably sane folks that we are, and I, being a very sweat prone person, immediately opted to get the damned car fixed. I checked online for potential assistance. Nothing. So we decided to call the nearest Chevy dealer to see if we could drive in and get help. I checked online for a local dealer and called them. The first dealer in Bismarck, ND said that they could take us “maybe later this morning”. Forget it. We need assistance NOW. Drove a bit further and called a dealer in Dickinson, ND. YAAAAAY. “Come on in.” So we plugged the address into the GPS (soooooo helpful) and off we went to the dealer, Sax Chevrolet in Dickinson. Al Meier, the service manager there, took the car in immediately. After a 2.5-3 hour wait, we discovered that the computer controller for the car was on the fritz and had to be replaced for the tidy sum of $658.00. Yeah, but at least we now had air conditioning……
So, onward, starting at about 2:00 pm…to Glendive, MT, the beginning of an amazing road that’s pretty much of a straight shot to Great Falls, a road that’s about 343 miles long. For about 220 of those miles the scenery is essentially wide open spaces, (and I do mean WIDE OPEN) with ranches that spread themselves over the miles. The only way I can give you some equivalent is this: Imagine driving from our house in NH to Alex’s place in NY and all you can see for 80% of the ride is open land as far as you can see to the horizon, all rolling hills, and buttes. This ride would be punctuated over the first 220 and last 100 miles with a few ranches whose houses you cannot see—just driveways with a mailbox on the road. Amazing. We couldn’t help but speculate where the kids go to school… We also wondered at the number of road kill on this road. Geez--didn't their mothers tell them to look both ways before they cross the road?
Then the landscape started to change. We saw trees, and the road became curvy, ending in Lewiston, MT, for this part of the country, a good sized town. By then, it started to rain—not a good thing because we are camping tonight. And it was 7:00 already and we still had 1 ½ hours to drive.
By the time we had arrived at the KOA campground at which we had reserved a tent space, it was 8:30. It was apparent that the skies had opened up here and drenched the campground. Large, deep, puddles were everywhere. We were assigned a space, and told that if it was too wet at the space to come back. It was, and we did. When I went back to the office, the girl at the desk said that because it had been raining, and was very wet, she might be able to upgrade us to a cabin. After a call to the manager, the deed was done. We are spending the night in the comfort of a heated, dry cabin.
We sat on the porch swing of our little cabin, protected from the rain that had started up again, drinking a beer, and celebrated our day.
See pictures of the day here.
Til tomorrow...
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