MovingWell, the hardest part of our trip preparations is over. We rented a U-haul and trailer and hauled all our stuff worth keeping down to Boise. On the way, I was driving the bus, following Seneca in the U-haul, when the engine temperature started going up and the warning light came on, so I had to pull over. The back was steaming up and coolant was leaking everywhere. We found a small leak in one of our coolant hoses, which is thankfully a pretty minor problem. Well, not as minor as we had hoped. We’ve had one hell of a time finding the coolant hose we need because the diesel Vanagons were only made for 3 years and they apparently don’t make those custom coolant hoses anymore. So, we will probably end up making a hose ourselves that will fit.

We unpacked the U-haul yesterday after stopping in McCall overnight to see my sister. It took several hours in the heat, but it sure felt good when we were done and the U-haul was empty. Now, we need to go through the bus and re-pack it since everything got tossed around when we had to open the engine to find the leak. We’ll probably also need to condense our stuff for the trip quite a bit. Once we got it packed up we realized we had way too much stuff! So it’s time to do some weeding out and figure out what can actually fit in our new little home, and what we’ll need to leave here for storage. Then we will do a final cleaning up and get on the road to Portland tomorrow for my cousin’s wedding.

The adventure begins…