Wall, SD

It rained most of the night. Not a stormy kind of rain, but a moderate, constant rain. By the time the coffee maker woke us up at 7:30 the skies had cleared, but by then the damage was done. Not literally, but we found the leak had not been fixed after all and there was water coming in to the bedroom. Not much, but enough to eventually ruin the interior structure of the coach. Of course, it is Saturday, and we are another 300 miles into our journey and far from the Winnebago factory. It will not be until Monday that we can call the service center and work out a plan of action. What is obvious is that Yellowstone and Colorado, the two major goals of this trip, are now off the table. To salvage this trip we will extend out stay in South Dakota through this coming week. Then, based on the schedule at Winnebago, we will return to Forest City to have this slide problem addressed. It is simply not something that we can let go, and it is complex enough that we came to Winnebago to get it right.

We had a great drive over to Wall, SD this morning and got set up here at the Sleepy Hollow campground. The drive was uneventful. There were miles more sunflowers, but they began to yield to other crops and cattle.

 

Wall is a town of 818 people that exists to support Wall Drug. Early on when people were beginning to travel across county by car, oases cropped up at certain intervals to provide food, fuel and accommodations. Many have disappeared, but a few have thrived and grown to be full-fledged wallet vacs.  Think South of the Border in South Carolina on I-95, and Little America on I-80 in Wyoming. Families stop to break up the boredom on the long drive west, and over the generations it has taken on a life of its own. It is the gateway to the Badlands National Park, though, and that is what drew us here.

We plan to explore it thoroughly tomorrow, but this afternoon we took a quick recon. It is amazing; you drive through miles of prairie and all of a sudden the terrain drops away into a weathered and eroded landscape. 

How would you like to mow this yard?

The wildlife is great fun to watch. We have seen Prong Horn Antelope and Bighorn Sheep.

Prairie Dog towns are all over, and we stopped at one particularly large colony for Barbara to take pictures. When she was done I went to put the jeep in gear and … no dice… it was in Park and that is where it was going to stay.

“Hello, Triple A? We are in the middle of Badlands National Park 25 miles from the nearest town (of 818 people). Can you send help”? “Sure, I will hold”. “You say no one answers in South Dakota”?

That is how it went, so I got out and tried to find the problem. It was obviously a problem with the linkage. I had a similar occurrence last spring. I would have been surprised if it was the same problem because I had a very robust fix for that problem. I crawled under the jeep and confirmed that the linkage at the transmission was intact. Barbara tried shifting while I looked under the jeep. Everything looked proper, so I started at the other end of the linkage. I managed to lift the dust cover mechanism at the shift lever and was able to see that the linkage cable had become disconnected. Luckily I was able to put it back in place and we were able to continue. I have to be careful though because there must be a clip missing or something that allows the fitting to come apart. I will start looking for a Chrysler dealer as we move towards Rapid City.

Stay tuned to see what goes wrong tomorrow as we drive into the back roads of Badlands NP.