[Richard and Rhonda]

Little did I predict the nature of our holiday adventures. You can read about my trip to the ER over on my blog if you're curious. The Newell element I thought would be on topic to post here.

The last pic is one of Rhonda and I riding the tandem on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi on the way East.

One of the purposes of taking the coach back was to tow my Dad's pickup back to Texas. My Mom wanted the boys to have it, and selling it was not an option to her. I didn't feel comfortable driving a 92 model that had sat virtually idle for almost 7 years for a thousand miles, so hatched the plan to tow it back with the Newell.

Taking off the bumper and bolting on tow brackets went very smoothly. So did hooking in the wiring for the lights, and disconnecting the drive shaft. While backing up the coach to the now disabled truck, I discovered a "little" issue that was to have some consequence.

Imagine, it is approaching dusk, you are scheduled to leave early the next morn, and a puddle of coolant is forming underneath the Newell. Uh oh, this is not good. Coolant dripping on the eve of a thousand mile drive is not a good omen. And just for grins, there is a weather system coming into the Texas, Mississippi corridor that I need to travel in to get back home from SC. Therefore leaving to beat the storm is imperative, Rhonda is not much for driving in the snow.

Not much I could do about it in the cold dark, so it had to wait for the next day. Daylight and flashligts reveal what is probably just a loose hose clamp, and not a hole in the radiator as I had imagined all night. Shouldn't be an issue, right? Well, the hose clamp is at the very back up against the firewall, and in the upper corner. I can see it, but it's about a foot and a half beyond what I can reach even with my body jammed into the space.

WELL, WELL. Maybe I can access through the outside radiator panel on the side. Drill out the rivets that hold the panel and find......NOPE. Ok, how about the bedroom. Take out bed, and remove engine access panel. Great, I am now standing on the engine, and I can really see the connection, but still a foot and half away. OK, back to the engine bay. Since it's a side mount radiator the fan is a hydraulic one. So, I unbolt the frame that holds the fan, unhook the hydraulic hoses, which incidentally spills Valdez quantities of fluid and invokes emergency spill drill, and finally I can wedge my body into the space and ALMOST reach the clamps. A number of extensions later, it takes all of a minute to tighten both clamps.

It does take about three hours to reinstall the fan, fill and bleed the hyraulic system, reconstrusct the bedroom, reinstall the radiator panel, and clean up the oil spill. Oh yeah did I say it was COLD outside?

We were on the road at 3 pm, we pulled into Fort Worth at 2 pm the next day. The snow literally started as we turned into our neighborhood. No leaks, all gauges were rock steady for the thousand mile blast.

Here are some pics, have a good laugh on me.