Delayed

Sunday, December 30, woke as a nice day. We had planned on meeting my family at the airport that night at 10pm, so we were not in any hurry. I jogged, Jonathan read, then we went and took showers before heading down the road. After our showers, however, the van was really acting up. Jonathan pulled over and turned off the vehicle for a moment to check something out, and then it didn’t even want to start. Jonathan eventually got it turned over and we pulled off into an empty lot at the campground to check out the problem.

After two hours under the vehicle in the chill morning, Jonathan discovered the ignition coil was at fault and swapped it for the spare. Yes, we did have a spare as we carry several parts and tools in our trailer. Some people think we are crazy, for a) planning for a vehicle to break down and need parts and/or b) traveling in a vehicle that would need spare parts. But, if you think about it, after travelling thousands of miles in any vehicle, it will need maintenance of some type anyway. We just carry that stuff around with us, as we don’t have a garage to put it in and sometimes a store is a hundred miles away. It saves us time, money, and frustrations.

Anyways, by the time we got everything put back together and a lunch eaten, it was 2pm and we still had 3 hours to travel. We were already tired, so we decided that we would not meet my family on Sunday at the airport and instead would meet them on Monday at the hotel. As it was, we would be pushing it to find a place before sundown. We had planned on staying at Seward’s Point, a free BLM site on Lake Mead, but it was an hour around the lake. We figured that the money saved in gas could pay for a site at a closer campground so we stopped at the one nearest Hoover Dam.

Found out later that it was probably a good thing we didn’t meet my family at the airport. Their plane was delayed quite a bit. So we would have been waiting for an hour or more at the airport for them to arrive. So, we let them sleep in and contact us at their leisure the next morning.