…and headed inland, following the Columbia River through the Coastal Range. We crossed over into Washington at Longview, picked up Interstate 5 and cruised south on good road back into Oregon. After all those slow scenic winding roads, it felt good to drive on interstate for a while. An easy 65mph. South of Portland however, the engine sputtered. It got worse over the next few miles and we coasted in to Salem. Several stalls and reluctant restarts later, we luckily limped our way into an RV Park here.
It’s a nice park; a safe comfortable place to be while we figure out what to do next. We have a diesel repair guy scheduled to stop by our rig tomorrow and read the error codes. That’s what a modern diesel engine does, it records codes for any problem it has. In fact, most of the time when an engine doesn’t want to run, it’s not that it can’t run, it’s that sensors tell the computer that there is a problem (thus an error code), and the computer decides it wouldn’t be a good idea for the engine to continue to run with a problem like that, so it shuts itself down. Oftentimes, in fact more often than not, it turns out that there really isn’t an engine problem at all, but a sensor has failed, sending a false message to the computer, causing it to shut itself down for a problem that doesn’t exist.
So here we are; inland, and it’s warm; 89 degrees. We’ve been on the coast, on the south side of seventy degrees for the last month though, so this warm weather feels really good so far.
We have plans to visit friends tomorrow farther inland, across the Cascades, near Bend. This is life on the road, though. Sometimes plans change. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
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