Are we there yet???

Day 7: There are some places a lot of people wouldn't consider staying at for the night, but when it's already dark, you are tired and miles away from larger cities, choices become an adventure in itself. Audrey's Motel in Mound, MO was one of those places. It is US owned and operated and the room was clean and we slept well. Hot breakfast in the morning set the tone for a good start. So off we went...for a whole hour when we started getting dire warnings about the whole truck shutting down. We pulled off into a truck stop and there we were recommended to seek out the Ford dealer to see if they could help us as the warnings on the dash where getting more urgent. They couldn't do anything with a GMC vehicle so we called the last GMC technician. He felt it was a problem that would fix itself and told us to go on which we did making it to make Rapid City SD. We called ahead to the GMC dealer there and set up an appointment for 8am.

Day 8: We were at the GMC dealer before opening and they took us in and diagnosed a different problem. They kept the truck to work on and drove us to a mall to walk around for 2 hours. We were picked up at 10:45 and the truck was again tested and declared good to go. We left Rapid City around noon and within an hour out, we got the same warnings as before. We found another GMC dealer in Sheridan WY. (Are you seeing a trend here...maybe a few of them??) (1-we ARE making progress west and 2-GMC dealers are our new best friends!). These guys were too small to be of much help but he assured us we would be fine driving to Billings Montana, which we did. We stayed at a Howard Johnson's in Billings and had an appointment for 8:00am (again, opening time) at the service department. Gee I wish I had taken pictures of all these places but who knew I'd even want to??! 

Coffee Anyone??

Day 9: Billings, Montana...This dealer had a very nice crew, just like all the others. They checked out the diagnostics on the truck and told us 2 things it would have been helpful to know: 1- It takes a while to manually reset the diagnostics system and the last dealer probably felt we wanted to get back on the road so; 2- the system will reset itself but more slowly, sometimes taking a day or two. In our case, by the time we got to this newest dealer, all warnings and such had cleared and there wasn't anything showing.

We got back on the road and stopped at Albertson's in Livingstone, Montana for groceries and made it to the cabins on Thursday, March 1st around 1:30pm. Here is the drive off the main road to get to our cabins.

Here was our first view from the back deck (yep, taken from inside the cabin!)

Good part of all this, the truck is fixed and running well again; the snow and ice we were concerned with trying to miss passed by so we were able to stay on the interstates that were all clear and we still made it to start off on time. And so as far as the service departments go, Rapid City has the nicest waiting room area; but the one in Billings was equally as nice :)

A trip of 2,660 miles that would normally take us 5 days to drive...9 days, 4 GMC dealers, a Chevy and a Ford dealer, a much lighter wallet and we are in!