On the Road Again.........

Early friday morning ( June 13th my birthday :o) ) Angie and I saddled up the orange rocketship and started our 1760 mile journey to Moab,Ut. We got off to a great start, got through Knoxville right after morning rush no problems. Continued through Kentucky and on into Illinois where we were skirting some real nasty storm cells. We managed to miss most of the rain although we did get a little wet. Up and around St. Louis and onto Kansas where we bedded down at the local Days Inn just an hour west of Kansas City,Ks. We got up had a continental breakfast. Why do they call it a continental breakfast??? they should say eat your cereal and juice, oh heres a donut if you want also, yuk! Anywho........... fueled up and of we go. We had a hellacious head wind that dropped our fuel mileage to 16mpg. We had to stop BEFORE we got out of Kansas for fuel again. Got rolling and the GTI started acting up on the cruise control, I was thinking" thats not good!" We stopped and got some fuel conditioner for the gas thinking we may have got some water in the fuel. It seemed to help or at least I thought it did. We were climbing the mountain out of Denver and the car lost almost all power, it would barely get 40mph going up the hill. we stopped several times and these new cars you can't tell anything by looking under the hood. I filled the car up to see if that might help get going. We left and the car ran fine all the way to the closest (at that point) VW dealer in Colorado (Glennwood Springs). That small town was AWESOME. Theres a small bike path that runs for 30+ miles in the middle of the interstate! How cool is that? We arrived at the dealer and service was closed, imagine that. We talked to a guy that wanted to help us but didn't have access to service dept. We called the 24 hr roadside service and talked to them and they said nothing could be done 'til monday.................crap!!! We drove across the street to a checkers auto parts store. He put the handheld onto the computer and diagnosed the problem... fuel pressure regulator valve. Dang something major. He said "is your fuel cap on tight?" We checked, it was. He cleaned it and reset the warning light on the dash and wouldn't charge us anything.I slipped him 10$ that he reluctantly took. Its good to have people like that around. We made a secondary plan for the trip in case of breakdown again and after a nice cool DQ ice cream we continued on our trip. 2 1\2 hours left to Moab. Hammer down and we made it ! We ran about 85mph the majority of the way and averaged 21mpg not bad for a two day trip. This place is soooooo cool and its not commercialized hardly at all. We are getting ready to head out for our first ride after letting breakfast settle. More to come soon................

Later G...............................