It was really nice to wake up in the middle of gorgeousness. 😊
What a stunning gem that little canyon is.
My heart and my home. 🥰
All of the multiple days of working on vehicles has left me covered car filth– Greece, brake dust, Aunt all that nastiness. So I’ve been sleeping in My bed dirty like that, but today, this morning, it was time for bath. 🙂
And what better place to take it than in The beautiful turquoise pool at the bottom of One of those lovely waterfalls. 😊
Joe I grabbed my more quick drying shorts, my shower glove, my bar of environmentally friendly soap, much less environmentally friendly microfiber washcloth 😅, drove up to the little camping spot that I knew was right next to the waterfalls, peeled my eyes for bears, and hiked over to the falls.
Holy moly, that water was cold!
It was already a very chilly morning. I would guess probably maybe the high 30s or low 40s?
And then there was the snow melt that made up my bath water. I think the only colder water that I’ve taken a dip in was the lake right at the base of the glacier in New Zealand, where the temperature of the water was like 33° or 32.3° or something like that.
At that temperature, within just a handful of seconds, my body just hurts.
Still, it’s super refreshing, and I enjoy the experience. If I had to bathe in that temperature water everyday, I’m sure it would probably start to wear on me a good bit, but here and there, it’s quite the experience. 😊
Apparently, my hair was greasy enough that it took three separate latherings to get it fully clean. The third lathering coming by virtue of the fact that when I tried to discreetly use the Great outdoors as my bathroom, I managed to pee all over my self, so I needed one more dip in The turquoise pool anyway. 🙃
After finishing up my little bath, taking some pictures in the morning Sun, with a light shining down on one of the turquoise pools, headed back to the van.
My mom voted head on down the road and look for a beautiful place to eat breakfast, and I thought that was a good idea, so we got everything situated in the van for the day and began rolling back down the dirt road down the canyon toward the main road.
It’s nice to not be in a hurry. The speed limit on the million dollar highway, and the stretches of highway 550 on both sides of it, are generally about 50 mph, but with the area as beautiful as it was, we spent most of the drive at about 25 mph, just pulling over every time someone would come behind us, and then popping back out onto the road and leisurely plodding along.
What an absolutely beautiful place. 😊
On the drive down the canyon toward Montrose, we stopped off briefly at the huge mind that had been in operation since the 1800s And only closed down sometime late last Century.
We also stopped off briefly at part of the remnants of the old town that was built I think in 1881. We were looking for a beautiful little place to stop and eat our breakfast when we accidentally ran into those old buildings on a dirt road.
Oddly enough, we never ended up finding that beautiful place to eat our breakfast we were looking for, but we did see beautiful vistas, including a super tall waterfall that plunged down right under the Main road itself, probably a couple hundred ft below.
When we got to Montrose, we stopped off at Home Depot, bought some wood, had the nice young man cut it to the length we had measured it to be, bots and screws, and then screwed the two boards together with the leftovers from having them cut to fit. Then I fit the little assembly that I put together in the back, between mom’s bed and the two rear doors, so she could push stuff up against the little wooden frame I just built and not worry about it falling out of the van when the rear doors were opened.
Since I’m dropping her off in Payson tonight, she won’t get to use it and see how well it works until we get ready to head West from Utah in a week or so.
After Home Depot, we headed over to the AutoZone that I had ordered the wheel studs from as the backup to the junkyard. I was just going to have them refund the purchase, but it turns out that they messed up the order anyway– In two ways: 1. They didn’t actually submit the invoice to pay for the wheel studs, and two, they accidentally did the order as a buy their pickup in Grand junction.
So that means no refund was necessary, and gratefully, we didn’t actually need the wheel studs, or we would have been stuck in Montrose, potentially, waiting for them to correct the order, which would have put us stuck there for probably an entire day..
After finishing up in Montrose, the next stop was going to be for gas in Grand junction, so we once again headed on down the road, Google gratefully sending us on a route that took us through back roads instead of main roads, so instead of passing buildings and businesses and busy busy busy stuff, we were driving past cornfields and alfalfa fields and ranches and farms and what not.
That was nice 🙂
We got gas at the Maverick in Grand junction, as a little thank you for The Mavericks so far for being a nice place to sleep for the night.
Amazingly, perhaps even shockingly, Rover averaged over 15 mi to the gallon on that drive through the path and everything before it from… I think maybe alamosa?
Anyway, Rover is doing absolutely phenomenally on the MPG side of things.
We crossed into Utah fairly shortly after leaving Grand junction, following i-70 West, as per normal. Then we jumped on I think it’s highway 6 up to price, as usual as well. When we were about 20 mi from price, the recurring fuel smell that we have been smelling every once in awhile on the trip returned, this time stronger than ever.
I decided to look up some information on my mechanic website about fuel smell issues with these Vans, and one of the things that it mentioned as being super common was the spark plug issue that was a nightmare in these, where the original spark plugs were designed with too few threads, so few, in fact, that over time the power of the combustion inside the combustion chamber would slowly loosen up the spark plugs and eventually blow them out of the spark plug Wells, head threads and all. When that would happen, you would have to drill out, tap new threads, and install a helicoil kit in order to be able to put another spark plug in there. The only other alternative Would be to pull the head off and redo the whole head or buy a new one.
So it’s kind of a big deal. And one of the common symptoms to that issue is smelling fuel. With the loose spark plug, the combustion gases slip past the spark plug threads and get sucked in to the HVAC system such that you smell it inside the car.
That being a large enough concern that I didn’t want to just let it go, and honestly didn’t want to drive much longer, given that this gas smell was getting stronger and stronger, we ended up gingerly making our way into price and pulling into the AutoZone parking lot there, where I proceeded to remove all eight coil packs so that I could test the torque of all eight spark plugs.
The first six went just fine, gratefully. Unintentionally, however, I left the most difficult to as the last two. And the most difficult one of them all as the last one. The last two are challenging enough, that I debated not even bothering with them because all of the other six that I had done thus far were all super tight, no issues that I could see.
But, I didn’t want it to end up that the two that I didn’t check happened to be the ones that were having issues. Joe I fought with the last two, the closest one to the driver seat being challenging, but accessible, and then the last one, the second closest to the driver seat turned into an absolute nightmare.
The second to last one had a different coil pack in it than all the rest of them, which seemed to indicate that somebody who had been taking care of the car had decided they didn’t want to fight with that one. And same with the last one, it had a completely different coil pack than even the one that was closest to the driver seat. So there were three different kinds of coil packs on the van, and two of those three different brands were on the most difficult to get to cylinders.
So there was the debate, the first six were all totally fine, so that would seem to possibly point to the last two being totally fine. Except, with the last two having evidently been neglected, that might make it more likely that one of those two or both were having issues.
The one closest to the driver seat was fine, so that just left that one second to the closest. And it was a nightmare because the coil pack came apart when I was pulling it out, which isn’t all that uncommon, but of course, it had to happen on the most difficult to deal with cylinder.
So I ended up fighting with it for I don’t know how long trying to get the rest of the coil pack dislodged from the spark plug. I ended up squirting WD-4 0 down the middle of the coil pack boot in order to loosen it up from the spark plug itself. After several attempts even after putting The PB blaster down the coil boot, it finally gave way. So I grabbed my spark plug socket slapped it on down the hole, went to check the tightness of the spark plug, and all that happened was that it spun and spun and spun. There was definitely some resistance, but it just spun and never tightened. So I tried to loosen it, and it was the same thing it just spun and spun and spun, with sufficient resistance for me to conclude that the spark plug was indeed stripped out inside the head– The worst case scenario.
To add insult to injury, the socket got stuck on the spark plug, and it took me probably 15 minutes just to get the socket off the spark plug.
All the while that I was trying to get the socket off the spark plug, I was trying to process and work through my feelings of having this worst case scenario happen. The repair is not a simple repair, and especially if you’ve got a spark plug that’s just spinning inside the head, you may be looking at disassembling the engine and pulling the head off, which at that point just means junking the van, leaving me looking for another van to buy while stuck in price, Utah.
Fortunately after 15, or so, minutes of trying to get the spark plug off, it eventually popped off, and what did I find? Stuck to the end of the spark plug socket was the little rubber insert that goes inside cheap spark plug sockets.
At first, I thought maybe it was part of the spark plug boot because I had made absolute sure to bring the magnetic spark plug and not the one with the rubber boot inside. I specifically went through my spark plugs one by one until I found the magnetic one, grabbed a spark plug to verify for sure that it was indeed the magnetic one, verified it, and dropped that spark plug socket directly into my tool bag to take with me.
How I ended up with the cheap spark plug socket that uses the stupid rubber insert is a mystery.
Aunt was a perfect example why you don’t buy those cheap spark plug sockets because that’s not the first time I’ve had that issue happen. Unfortunately, it happened on a cylinder where I couldn’t look inside and see what was going on, and I couldn’t even get the spark plug socket out to have known anyway, and it was producing the same symptoms that I would expect from a stripped out spark plug.
So for any of you wanting to buy spark plug sockets, buy magnetic ones, never the ones that just have the stupid little rubber insert.
What was even better, was Dad it was the rubber insert that was causing the socket to spin and spin and that was giving that bit of friction making it feel like a stripped spark plug. In reality, the spark plug was just as tight as all the others.
So it wasn’t the worst case scenario this time, a reality I was very grateful for.
As I was trying to put everything back together, I dropped my phone again, the screen popping off yet again, and this time not powering back on. So many emotional highs and lows, and I was totally frazzled. Even with the good news of not having the issue be the worst case scenario for the van, it was just up and down and up and down, and I was emotionally exhausted.
Gratefully, though the phone wouldn’t power up, I’ve done a sufficient number of surgeries on cell phones in the past, that I knew a bit of what to look for is a possible cause. And I noticed that the ribbon that connects the screen to the main board was slightly diagonal, indicating that it was no longer properly attached to the board, so I popped off the little retainer, reconnected the ribbon to the main board, reinstalled the fastener, and she powered back on.
Mom suggested that I use her phone flashlight from then on, so as not to risk another mishap with mine, which I was grateful for. The sun was down by that point, but there was still some light in the sky, and I was racing to get everything back together.
It was a pain to get things back together, but eventually I was able to. Part of the pain because AutoZone’s aftermarket coil packs are engineered just a little bit longer than the factory ones, A fact which I forget regularly, so I always worry that the coil pack isn’t properly installed, so I keep fiddling with it and fiddling with it and fiddling with it until my memory kicks in and I remember that their coil packs are just slightly too long, and have to be forced into place and held there while you screw in the coil pack so that it actually stays where it’s supposed to be.
When you’re already dealing with a coil pack that’s super hard to get in and out anyway, that’s an extra little kick in the pants to have to figure out a way to hold it in place while you also figure out a way to get the bolts in place past all the other things that are in the Way.
With all of the emotional ups and downs, and the struggles getting everything back together even after it turned out that it wasn’t the worst case scenario with the engine and it wasn’t the worst case scenario with my phone that I thought was Tate, I was just running on shear willpower, out of breath as though I had been physically running, and just trying to get everything back together so we could get moving and make some progress.
It’s funny, the only place Rover is actually put a foot wrong that I can actually prove is when the tire blew. Everything else, all the wheel and wheel stud saga was all my fault, and this gas smell… Stopped to try and figure it out twice, this last time taking I think more than 2 hours to try and figure it out, and haven’t found anything wrong at all. I’m not convinced that the issue was even with our vehicle, though that’s what makes most sense.
I went into AutoZone to try Aunt buy a couple of backup parts that I wasn’t able to get on the way out of town in Arkansas, but they didn’t have them either. The parts are less common, so they are likely only going to be found at hub stores and not peripheral stores.
They did look it up for me and both the parts I need are at the Orem AutoZone, so I’ll head there tomorrow to pick them up so I’m prepared in a couple of additional ways for things to go wrong.
But so far, though I’ve spent part of every single day of this trip working on Rover, the only time that it was actually provably necessary, was with a tire blow out.
After getting everything back together, we hopped back in Rover and headed on down the highway, and that’s where we are right now, having just entered Utah valley via Spanish Fork canyon, and heading down I-15 South past Salem on our way to Payson to drop my mom off at her sister’s house.
So I will pause right here and finish this entry up later when I’m wherever I’m going to stay the night and I’m about ready to crash for the night.
…
Got my mom successfully dropped off at my aunt’s place in Payson, Utah, unloading some of the stuff that we brought my brothers for her to take to them, and also unloading her stuff as well.
Rover is a lot roomier inside now. 🙃 After having spent the last 4 days, or so, in Rover with my mom, I’ve learned a few things about what we can do to to streamline processes and what not and make it even more comfortable to travel in. I’ll be working on implementing some of those things over the next handful of days before my mom and I joined back up again to head West.
I said goodbye to everybody and headed over to pick up some supplies at the Walmart in Payson before they closed, and now I’m at one of my regular spots.
I’m going to veg out a little bit, and then I’m going to crash for the night.
I’m definitely ready for some good sleep.
G’night, all, and hello, Utah.
Lift the World 