Day 4 - August 9 --- Home, temporarily I hope

We made it back home safely on Monday evening, but not without incident. I stopped off at a friend's home in York, Pennsylvania for a few hours to cool off the Defender, although the temperature gauge rode at only 60 percent (normal is about 47 percent) most of the time and never seriously overheated, thank goodness. If it had, I would have called AAA to have the vehicle towed to DC and rented a car to get the dogs home instead of leaving them in the vehicle for the tow home. (Prior to the trip I had worked up numerous contingency plans for things exactly like this, including buying a new car along the way. Also, I take along the entire Defender Workshop Manual, a container of hard-to-get spare parts, and a significant tool kit.) At Baltimore, a large portion of the beltway was shut down due to a fatal accident, and so we had to detour 60 miles to get to DC. Thanks goodness we stopped in York because we might have been stuck in the traffic blocked by the accident on a hot afternoon with an overheating vehicle for three hours, or worse.


First thing I need to do now is get vehicle taken care of. The problem is that it overheated inexplicably. The belts and hoses, all new, were intact. The coolant level was normal. The radiator, water pump and thermostat were installed just the week before the trip. Strangest of all, when the vehicle went into the red zone, nothing happened. The viscous fan clutch is operating normally. The only possible cause of the problem is a faulty gauge. If I had been traveling alone, I would have taken the risk that that is what it was, but I couldn't take that risk with my dogs. We will see.


Assuming that the vehicle will be fixed soon, I will mostly likley resume the trip with the Larbador leg, which was the purpose of the trip to begin with.  Being optimistic, I already changed my reservations on the Nordik Express cargo ship from August 19 to September 2, since it would take two weeks to get from DC to where I have to pick up that ship in Labrador. When we get to Quebec on September 7, I will decide where to go from there. The route to Alaska is still a possibility, but unless I change my reservations on the ferry from Skagway on the 26th, that may be pushing it. Again, since the idea for this trip came about because of my desire to return to Labrador and try out those 600 miles of new dirt and gravel roads (all through wilderness with literally nothing along the way but nature), I just might be satisfied doing that  and then spending a few weeks on Prince Edward's Island or in the Laurentians north of Montreal. We will see. That's the beauty of these road trips. You make decisions at every intersection and see where they lead.


One final note, despite all my planning for this trip, I am neither upset nor disappointed that this happened, although I am by no means elated that it happened*.  Keep in mind that it is an adventure (certainly not a 'vacation") and not some real crisis in life.  A vacation gone bad where no one was hurt  is not something to get upset over.  Just look at any paper and see the suffering in the world, with people and animals.  That's something to get upset over. And dealing with the inevitable challenges is partially what these trips are all about. I just decided to sit this one out in DC waiting for the car at home instead of in Scranton (Wilkes Barre, really) at a campsite, although that might have been nice.  Once the car is fixed, I’ll be back on the road, to Labrador if all works out. Maybe next year I'll pick up the Alaska leg, but I still could fo it this year. We'll see.

More to come later.

ED

* Actually, there are two things I am elated about from this. For one, I discovered that Leben, at 110 pounds, is too big to maneuver around comfortably in the front seat, which has been converted to a dog bed. (My emergency equipment is stored on the foot well in front of the seat to make the bed.)  While home, I am going to rip out that front seat and make the bed more substantial for him.  The second thing I discovered is that on these long trips, the heat from the rear differential dissipated into the back of the Defender where the other dog stays.  Fortunately, the two dogs beds stacked back there insulate the heat, but I am going to build a platform for the beds to make sure none of the heat affects the dogs. So there was a silver lining to this problem after all.

Incidentally, since all the AC vents are in the front seats, I connected two 1.5" inch pool hoses to two of the AC vents and ran them into the back with funnels at the end for the dog in the back to get his or her share of the AC.