Journey Notes

Today was filled with ups and downs but few were related to cycling.

Our first task of the day was to find someone to see if they could figure out what our fuel system problem is. We tracked down a shop that was very close to our campground late last night. This morning, we went there but they said that they were too busy to help us. Instead, they sent us down the road to Al's Auto only a few blocks further.

It turns out that Al loves VW Westfalias and had one when he was younger. He even had a picture of it on his wall. He was eager to help us and did a bunch of research on our problem before diving into it. They immediately found that there was a broken vacuum hose to the fuel pressure regulator and felt pretty confident that this was our problem. It was fixed inexpensively and we were on the road by about 10:30 am. I left feeling unsure if our problems were really fixed because when we had arrived, everything was running fine anyway so this "fix" didn't really change anything.

We went back to where I stopped riding yesterday. It was raining heavily and had been all morning. I got dressed up in my heavy rain gear and started on my way. Because the area has no cell coverage and I was concerned about how well VanGo would go, we decided to have Rochelle drive ahead 15-20 km and wait for me. If I didn't show up in a reasonable time, she would double back and look for me and if she had any problems, I would reach her fairly quickly and we could deal with the issues together.

After the second such meeting she said that she was starting to experience the loss of power and hesitation that we had experienced the day before. It seemed prudent for us to move out of this area fairly quickly so I put my bike on the back and we drove the rest of the way to Houlton, ME.

VanGo ran pretty well over that distance. It had a few little hesitations going up hills but nothing more than a little annoyance. We decided to cross over into New Brunswick and head for Halifax although likely only go as far as Moncton.

After waiting at a very slow border crossing, we started to experience more serious hesitations and once on the Transcanada highway, we were slowing down to unacceptable levels so we decided to take some of the older, lower speed highways. These worked fairly well but we were noticing more and more hesitation and power loss on hills. By the time we reach Fredericton, we were having problems even on the flat and decided that we wouldn't even make it out of town again. So we ended up stopping at a Walmart for the night and we will start calling around in the morning to see about repairs.

It rained pretty hard all day. When we arrived in the Walmart we noticed what looked like some water spills on the rug in the back of VanGo. Upon further investigation, we found that the rug and the older original run underneath were soaked. I'm not sure where that water came from but we squeezed and incredible amount of water out of those two rugs.

It's been a long, tiring and frustrating day. Time to sleep.

Sorry, no photos today. I guess I was too busy trying to figure other things out.