I was rereading Travel Blogging II and it brought to mind a similar event maybe twenty years ago. We were driving west toward the Tetons across the middle of western Wyoming one summer, pulling our 5th wheel trailer.
Five miles west of Dubois our 1983 Chevy pickup blew its second transmission, leaving us with low as our only working forward gear. We turned around and crawled the five miles back to Dubois at maybe 10 mph, taking a tortuous half hour during which our preoccupation was with whether the tranny would die completely - it did not.
In that tiny town there was an RV camp next door to a repair shop which diagnosed the problem, ordered a transmission from Denver by phone, had it shipped in on the Greyhound Bus, installed it on a.Sunday, and had us on our way first thing Monday morning. And it cost less than it would have in a regular dealership, of course. That rebuilt transmission was still working when we traded the truck a couple of years later.
More recently we had another like experience in Paso Robles CA with an earlier seized turbocharger in this truck. We have RVed for forty years, albeit never full time, had some breakdowns on the road, and other times when we limped home with a sick engine or a less-than-fully-functional RV. As the Sinatra song says, "That's life...."
Later ... we have arrived in Wyoming which is in the full bloom of spring - it arrives late in the mountains. Everything here is green and beautiful, unlike our part of CA which in May had already turned the golden tan that is summer in CA. The other DrC gets to experience her spring allergies twice, once in CA, again in WY. Again, that's life ... some of the roses have thorns.
