We left Catalina Spa RV Park this morning at 9:30 AM under sunny skies and in a comfortable temperature of 25C (77F). Our destination by tomorrow afternoon is Redding in northern California where we will take in some sightseeing and stay for a week. Redding is roughly a 13 hour drive so our plan was to break it up over two days spending this evening in a rest area, casino or truck stop, depending on how far we got.

The scenery driving through Burbank was very pretty however the thick smog/fog nixed any chances I had of capturing it for the website. We were making great progress until we started to climb through the mountains in the Angeles National Forest and all of a sudden the motorhome just lost power. It couldn’t have happened at a worse place…serious climbing, no pull-offs, guardrails and big-truck traffic around us. Rick inched over to as far to the right as he could; hugging the guardrail, four-way flashers on and completely baffled as to the cause. All gauges were fine, no smells (but plenty of black coloured exhaust fumes) and with the accelerator to the floor, we were barely crawling. Finally, about ¾ of the way through the mountains the guardrail gave way to an area where we could pull over and see what was going on. In our Cummins manual, we found a service centre in Bakersfield, about 40 miles ahead, so after 45 minutes of double checking everything he could, we started the journey once again, unsure of where we would end up.

Rick had determined that it was either caused by a computer problem or the turbo (or lack of) and just as we were nearing the service centre we finally heard a telltale whooshing sound, confirming that a leaking hose was impeding the turbo in the engine. The Cummins folks were wonderful, taking us in right away, fixing the faulty connection and sending us on our way. It took us about three and a half hours to limp the 40 miles and get repaired; changing the distance we had planned to go and currently we are in a rest area south of Sacramento but only 5 ½ hours from tomorrow’s destination. Despite our setback today we will rest for a few hours until we get back on the road at dawn; it’s still good to be on the move again!