Thursday, October 31, 2019

Day 4, I-70 saga, the Decision

I spent a lot of time last night going over my options, torn between my mantra, "drive the Defender back to Dc," and the Salina Rule, "if the Defender cannot be repaired fully in a reasonable period of time, ship it back." Although i found in Jim an experienced mechanic (he owns a number of Defenders himself) who would get the job done right, because of parts availability and my hesitancy to test drive a new transmission 1200 miles to DC in problematic weather i decided to ship the Defender to DC after all. If all goes according to plan, a trucker will pick up the Defender at the Land Rover dealer today at six (for delivery in DC on Saturday), and i will rent an SUV starting tomorrow to get us home.

With the decision made, the only thoughts now in my head now are how lucky i was to end up here. I owe that decision to Phil, the AAA driver who suggested Wichita and the Land Rover dealer. After that, the list of extremely helpful people gets longer and longer - Lea and Jeff, as well as others, at the pleasant oasis i am in, La Quinta; Austin and Brandon, as wll as others, at Land Rover; Jim, of course, and those who helped him; the extremely cooperative Dawn of Casey and Dawn trucking who arranged for truck; Greg at Rovers North who provided critical parts availability information, the friendly Cansas from Kansas at Chillis restaurant, to name a few, but the list goes on and on. Without the involvement of good people like this, these unexpected layovers would not be pleasant at all.

Of course, at some point my attention will turn to how what happened was allowed to happen. The tentative double answer is this. First, you just do not replace your transmission willy nilly; you replace it when it is not working, and i had no prior indications that it was not that i recognized as such. Second, 90 percent of my miles these days are put on the Defender on these long Road trips to , which means i should expect 90 percent of problems to show up on the road. I know that before i set out and accept that risk. Fortunately, it did not show up until this trip was just about over and that it did not show up just two hundred miles earlier. Things would be otherwise be turning quite differentlyo, i am afraid. The bottom line is that it did nothing to disturb the success of this trip, but enhanced it.

I got some packing to do.

Ed and Donner, from the road

2 comments:

  1. Ed, have a safe trip back and sorry your Defender broke down! Thanks for staying with us at LaQuinta! Jeff the maintenance guy! P.S. I will be following your travels! Thanks again for the patch!

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  2. Good decision. Happy Halloween to you and Donner. Go Nats!

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