Taking the wheel off and dragging it into Walmart for repair cost us two hours that evening, but the trip seemed to have gotten off to a fine start none the less. Unfortunately it was all down hill from there, and I did start feeling like the trip was cursed, like my "bad omen" comment was a self fulfilling prophecy.
Once in the Badlands of South Dakota we decided to take a road we had been down many times before. This road has several small creek crossings and takes you through some badlands terrain up close. The scenery is outstanding and at one spot along the road the butterfly and dragonfly watching is amazing. We came to the last creek crossing and, unlike every other time before, we didn't make it.
We tried all sorts of maneuverings as well winching to fence posts till the winch died. After two hours of struggling and starting to think it was finally time to really begin worrying, we were most embarrassingly though gratefully pulled out by a Ford F150 that happened upon us on his way to shooting prairie dogs. Once out I managed to stall the truck thus discovering the hard way that the starter was no longer working. So, the F150 pull started us (one added benefit to having a manual transmission). We thought all would be well again once things dried out. This was not be the case.
We hit the interstate and made it a total of 18 miles before the truck died. We watched in horror as systems started to fail, one by one starting with the air conditioning, as the battery lost its charge. The alternator was gone. We got a tow into Rapid City, dropped the truck off at the dealer, and got an air conditioned hotel room on a 108 degree night. It took two days for the dealer to find and install a replacement starter and we ended up sourcing the alternator ourselves to speed up the effort. When we finally got our truck back and drove into town to find a car wash more systems began to show their disdain for having been submerged in water and bentonite. The airbag light was on, the recirc for the air turned on and off on its own, the truck would sputter every once in a while and seemed to be lacking acceleration, and the speedometer needle was bouncing around a lot meaning that the cruise control was also not functioning.
We limped our way to our final destination in Colorado. Here, in the comfort of the Arlberg Club in Winter Park, my brother, an electrician, educated me on the finer points of bentonite and how the electrical conductivity of the minerals in bentonite would cause short circuits even when dry. Great. And to think I thought bentonite was only good for clearing out your pores. By the time we left Colorado we had lost the speedometer all together though the recirc problem disappeared as did the sputtering. And maybe we just got used to it or maybe it improved, but the acceleration was no longer an issue.
We get through most of Wyoming and decide we will not make Devil's Tower in time to camp so we find a nice piece of BLM land along the Belle Fourche and head for it. A matter of just a few hundred yards away from where we were going to camp, BOOM. Smoke/steam rose from under the hood and the speed at which my husband cut the ignition was nothing short of heroic. At first fearing the worst (blown engine), then thinking radiator, then thinking power steering, we see that it is none of the above, it is the high pressure hose for the air unit. Completely unrelated to our little episode in the creek, a battery acid leak had slowly eaten away at the hose till it blew. Truth be told, we knew about this leak a long time ago and had simply not gotten around to replacing the battery. The next morning we called the dealer in Rapid again and ordered the hose which would be in the next day. We bummed around Devil's Tower, then headed to the Hills enjoying Slate Creek until the part was in the next morning. My husband installed it in a Walmart parking lot and recharged it with the kit Walmart sells for $29.99, all in less than an hour. We made it home with no further incidents other than my husband losing his sense of adventure.
This trip was most definitely the worst either of us has ever had in more than 20 years of overlanding in terms of mechanical failure, on a scale grand enough that it's easy to see why people believe in curses, jinxes, bad omens, bad karma, or plain old bad luck. But in the end, everything except the hinge pin was a result of our own actions. Today, as I write this, the electrical shop in town is working on our winch, and my husband is tearing into the truck and one by one taking apart all previously submerged electrical connections, cleaning them, and coating them with dialectric grease in hopes of finding the one that has been shorting out the speedometer. Despite all this, my daughters and I leave on yet another adventure to, yep, you guessed it, the Badlands, Black Hills, and Devil's Tower in less than four weeks. Glutton for punishment? Maybe. Maybe we just don't believe in curses.
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