April 29, 2012 Saturday

Hello All!
Well my little nephew and future Godson(thank you Laura and Alex for asking us to be the Godparents of "Baby Gio") Sergio Joseph Fontana was born on April 24th. He weighed 7lbs 14 oz and was 21 inches long. He is super adorable and Mother, Father and baby are doing well.
So that means we could leave for our trip, so Friday morning we (ok, me) tearfully said goodbye to Ian and PeeWee and headed to SF to say a quick goodbye to Mikey and then on to see Laura and "Gio" in Redwood City and then head to Reno. We were heading up 101 on the way to Reno and I looked at Gary and said we (ok me!) forgot the laptop! So a few quick calls to Ian to see if he could meet us somewhere which didn't work out so we headed back home... Picked up the computer, another goodbye hug to Ian and PeeWee and we were off to Reno...   Again. :) What the heck we are retired so it was all good...  Made it to Reno, but the Reno jazz festival was going on and every hotel was booked so we found a very "old school" casino/hotel in Sparks...Not my idea of a great place (Brad you wouldn't have gotten out of the car!) and way out of my price range for the look of it, but the room was very nice, clean and quiet...I love to gamble but that place was not for me, sooooo smokey and full of deperate looking, tank top wearing, beer swilling locals, so we headed back to Reno to eat dinner and do a little gambling at the Silver Legacy... I of course played the Wheel of Fortune slot machine (woot woot Sista! Our favorite!) and I won $50.00! Cashed it out and took it home!
This morning we found a Starbuck's and got the first on many coffee's for this trip. Thanks Laurie for the Starbuck's card it will be put to good use! Made it to Salt Lake City after an uneventfully loooonnnggg trip. Over 500 miles today and that is long. Walked to dinner and back so we felt like we got a bit of exercise tonight to make up for all that sitting!
Off to Wyoming tomorrow hope the weather holds out it has been beautiful!
See ya on the road!
Ter  :)

"From the Driver's Seat".....I spent the last several weeks preparing our woodie for its longest adventure yet.... From Santa Rosa, California to Bangor, Maine to Savannah, Georgia and then point it home through Altanta, Nashville, Memphis, St Louis and along Rt.66 to Santa Monica and finishing at Woodies on the Wharf, the last leg home.....at least that's the plan. To say I'm nervous about this loooong trip would be putting it mildly but the car has already been cross country once before.

There was a lot to do......I finished the air conditioning ducts, restored the gauges and took care of a myriad of little details needing attention. I switched over to electric cooling fans but wasn't sure they'd do the job and about a week before we left it got warm enough to run the AC....the car overheated. I flushed the radiator and put in a cooler thermostat and new antifreeze and the problem seemed resolved. I had barely cleaned up the mess from that when the transmission started acting up. I spent a day and a half trying to cypher out the problem and sweating the possibility of a new trans just a couple days before we leave. I narrowed it down to the transmission's vacuum modulator and after replacing it and finding an error in the vacuum line I was relieved to see its operation normal once again. I no sooner fixed that when the electric choke on the carb stopped working. I was able to find a new one.... Was the car saying it didn't want to go or was it telling me everything it needed before going? I'm counting on the latter!

We're almost a thousand miles into the voyage and we only had on little hickup....after going through Sacramento the car was starting to overheat again.... A quick fill and the problem was fixed. For the remainder we've been running between 70 and 75 mph, just humming along.

Looking forward to several more high mileage days, pushing hard to get to the east coast as quickly as possible.....and cruising slowly along the shore.