Thursday, January 1, 2009 - Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Salt Flat TX
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Dawn at the Visitors Center, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, January 1, 2009
An update on my transmission seal blow-out
There isn't much progress. Some quick Googling yesterday confirmed what I had come surmised earlier in reading forum posts about these Lazy Daze RVs - that the Ford E4OD transmission in this 1992 rig is a fairly early iteration of these transmissions and that they tend to be somewhat fragile and prone to overheating and blowing the front seal.
Then I came across a forum post from a guy who had an experience similar to mine and he learned that the seal will often reseat itself after the transmission cools down. He tried it and after 50 slow miles and a couple of quarts of fluid - it did. That got me thinking this might be worth a try if I can lay my hands on some transmission fluid. It was just quitting time at the Visitors Center when I found this post so I ran over and was able to enlist the poor staffer who had to come in to work today to bring me some fluid. Which he graciously did.
I replaced the quart that had leaked out, started the engine and ran it through the gears - with the brakes on, not moving - and the leak returned. And it's a big leak - there's no way the 6 quarts of fluid I have would take me the 60 miles to Carlsbad I need to go if the seal didn't heal on the road pretty quickly. Phooeey.....
It's time to take a hike
As long as I'm here I might as well enjoy the Park. So I took a hike up the Devil's Hall trail as far as the staircase, about 2 miles. I haven't been hiking much lately so that was more than enough for the day and a beautiful walk up through the canyon to a natural staircase swept clean by the stream flowing down through the canyon.
Question... if you get a whiff of tom cat back in there, what cat are you whiffing?
Night camp
Visitors Center parking lot - not the Pine Springs Campground - Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Salt Flat TX
- This is a small, primitive campground with not very level paved sites
- There are lots of good hiking trails in the mountains
- Verizon cell phone signal is a little weak but adequate - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service is slow
- Find other references to Guadalupe National Park
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Go to Guadalupe Mountains National Park website
- Get a Google Street View and a map
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.