Days 14 and 15: Price to Pocatello to Livingston

The trip's final two days were its most boring in terms of sightseeing--all but the first 70 or so miles was a retrace of the trip there, and we'd planned no major activities. But they made up for it by being the most exciting in the air-cooled-Volkswagen-mechanicking sense.

Soldier Summit

After a night in Price we planned to get to Idaho Falls for our last stop. This fierce headwind (note the flags) all day did a number on our mileage.

But how much of a number, exactly? We couldn't really know since Ludwig's gas gauge has two modes: inaccurate and non-functional. That's usually okay though, we just determined our fill-ups by the miles traveled since the last fill-up and a conservative estimate of Ludwig's mileage.

This works unless you fight a headwind, lower your mpg beyond your conservative estimate, and run out of gas. Which is what happened, just short of Pocatello's Southernmost exit.

We called AAA for a tow truck to bring us a couple gallons, keeping in mind that something else might be wrong. I mean, I tried to figure out what else the problem could be but it really seemed to be just plain running out of gas. Melissa hoofed it to a gas station about 1/2 mile away to buy a can and some gas as well, since the wrecker was taking so long to arrive.

The wrecker and Melissa showed up at about the same time but none of the gas worked. I asked the driver to tow us 300 yards to the gas station. He let us ride in Ludwig during the tow, surely a violation of his company's insurance.

It wasn't as harrowing as all that.

I thought maybe the carburetors weren't primed, which, if you don't remember how to jump the safety relay and prime them that way (I didn't), requires getting at them from above, itself requiring the removal of all the sleeping bags and blankets and suitcases and everything out of the back. The idea of dumping all our gear alongside the interstate wasn't appealing, hence the tow.

The priming worked and Ludwig fired up. In fact, he fired up a little too enthusiastically, with a huge backfire, thanks to my unintentional over-priming. At this point darkness had fallen, so we retreated to Pocatello's Holiday Inn Express.

Montana! That's the second-longest stretch, by about 12 hours, we've been out of Montana since we moved here in 2006. (The other time was in Ludwig too.)

All the next day, the last day, Ludwig ran like garbage. Well, that's not totally correct. He idled well, ran cool, and if you could get him up to speed, sped along just fine. But pulling away from stops and climbing up even the slightest grades, he was a dog. To me, that pointed to the loss of his vacuum advance, which the previous evening's big backfire might've destroyed.

We soldiered on, Ludwig soldiered on.

The poor running made the last day a long, anxious struggle, but we did make it, including up the alley to our driveway which I suspect was the steepest grade of the whole trip. 

miles 40871.7-41492.1