A rough start!

Here we go! We've not taken a long trip in the trailer for over a year but now we are leaving on a long trip to the Southwest to escape the winter.

We've never travelled in winter before so this will be a new an interesting experience.

Sadly on day 1 of our driving we started having some engine misses when towing up big hills, at first it just felt like we were hitting occasional bumps in the row.  But on one big hill I tried to accelerate and we got a lot of misses and the enginer ran rough for a bit until we got to flatter ground.

After pulling into rest area for a dog walk I checked the road ahead for a town with both a Ford dealer and an overnight OK Walmart.

Port Jervis was the winner, it had a small Ford guy who got right back to me and said he knew what the problem was and would make sure he had the part and be able to work on it ASAP in the morning.

We had hoped to get farther today but it doesn't really matter.

 We slept in the local Walmart and drove to the dealer early the next day, un-hitched and he took the truck right away. We had a bad coil and a cracked spark plug.

We walked all over Port Jervis with Tucker from 8 - 10 am and the car was ready.  So we got on the road! Or so we thought, lucky for us there was a big long hill right at the start of our journey. Although the car seemed better it still end up missing on the long uphill. We made it 1 exit and turned around back to the shop.

Fred at the dealer apologized and took the car back in the shop. We went to Dunkies and had coffee and did some internetting.

We also had lunch at a place next to the dealer called Tom & Arlene's where we both had "Meanie Burgers" a burger with 4 layers of cheese, onions and toppings.

We also split a piece of yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

Just as we finished lunch the truck was ready again, there were mis-fires in 2 more plugs and they replaced all the plugs just to be safe.

Back on the road we had a lot of hills coming up through PA and the new plugs did the trick. No more misses and nice smooth acceleration up the hills. They are big hills!

We barely drove 100 miles for the day and ended up in Scranton for a stop at Steamtown to checkout the steam trains

The weather was looking like rain so we didn't spend too nuch time before getting on the road to the next good Walmart in Hazelton, PA.

We ate light dinner in the trailer and then went to see the new Bond movie at the theater next to the Walmart (That's what made it a good walmart!)

All in all we didn't stress much at all about the car problems and we didn't really have anyplace we needed to get so it all worked out ok.