NextStepDesigns

Today four friends and their Land Rovers from Southern California ventured out to Moab Utah for the annual Land Rover National Rally. Here are a few (very few) photos of our first part of our journey.

Photos of Day 1 (18 images on SmugMug)

Our trip was not without event.  We budgeted 12 hours, it took nearly 15 I think (lost track after a while…).  One of us, who shall remain unnamed, thought it would be neat to run Zero weight synthetic oil in his engine just prior to the trip (to get better gas mileage).  Well, Disco II’s don’t seem to like zero weight, and the oil started to boil out of his headers before we even got out of Cajon Pass.  The oil leaked out, dripped onto his O2 sensor in his exhaust manifold, and gave him an incredible array of fault lights in his truck.  With a bit of ingenuity, we fashioned a cover to shield the O2 sensor, and headed east once again.  After going through a few incidences like this, we finally made it to Las Vegas, where we found an JiffyLube and got his oil replaced.  Onward once again.  As we leave Vegas, the other DII driver announces that his exhaust is getting louder and he is losing power.  It seems his exhaust manifold has cracked….  We ignore it and keep on.

We make it to Utah, but Joe’s DII is acting up again (oop’s, there’s goes the secrecy :-), so once again we find a JiffyLube, and have the differentials drained and changed.  Luis’s truck is still running, so we head on out.  Adam is on his 10th or 15th Monster energy drink by now…

About 2 hours later, I find myself catching up to and passing Luis without meaning to.  As I get closer, I can hear his truck from quite a distance, and he is losing speed.  I radio over, and he reports a bad headache and a rapidly worsening exhaust leak.  We find a tiny little shop in a tiny little town in Utah called Beaver.  We roll up to the shop at 4:30PM, and the garage doors are closed, but two guys come out, and apparently our sad little faces convinced them to help us.  They roll up the door and our eyes sparkle in the gleaming light of one of best equipped shops I have ever seen.  They had everything!.  20 minutes later, his exhaust was welded together, the bill was less than $40, and we were on our way, again…

The rest of the trip was uneventful, but the scenery through Utah is spectacular.   I loved Fishlake National Forest, and the huge rift of mountains this side of Green Valley are amazing.  it’s like driving through the Road Runner and Wyle E Coyote cartoonland.

We rolled into Moab about 9:30 PM, their time, and called it a day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Land Rover, Moab, trail runs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.