A friend told us “The adventure starts when the plans fail”. If that’s the case, we started our true adventure 1 hour out of town when the “Service Engine Light Soon” lit up on the dash of our truck.
Bummer.
We were in Kalamazoo at the time - the home town of MsBoyink’s parents. While it was greatly disappointing for us to give up on our first-night’s goal it was easiest to get off the highway and setup “camp” in their driveway overnight, where we could plug in to have heat for the 40-degree overnight temperatures expected. Once we had unhooked the trailer the Service Engine light went off. I took the truck for a drive and hammered on it a bit and couldn’t get it to light up again - nice, but we still wanted to have it inspected.
Another nice part about being by family is we could then get the truck into a garage that my father-in-law knows and respects, and also the garage we had the truck inspected at when we were first considering buying it.
So we spent the night, and then bright and early the next day Data and I took the truck to Woodwards Garage where the technician hooked up a code reader to see what was triggering the light. He said it was related to the Mass Airflow (MAF) Sensor, but was OK now. He took the truck for test drive and same thing - the light would not come back on.
So we topped off with gas, went back to the inlaws, took showers, hooked up the trailer again and pulled out of Kalamazoo around 11:00. I had a 1:00 conference call to make so we timed it out with a rest area on the route to Columbus. I got my first taste of “Technomadism” doing the conference call from the driver’s seat of the truck at the rest area while the rest of the family ate and played frisbee. Once done I had a quick bite and we hit the road again.