Whitehorse, YT - Ugh, Service Centers

Up early, breakfast and at the Freightliner door by 8:00. They looked at the engine, hooked up the computer and set it to work. Here’s a little technical background: diesel engines as all engines now, have this thing called (in my language) a soot collector, which collects soot and other things from the burning of the diesel. When you drive you burn off all this stuff in this collector. But, if you drive slowly, this stuff doesn’t burn off and causes your engine to lose power. We’ve been going thru lots of construction and we’ve had to drive slowly along the sides of the highways when our engine didn’t have a fan motor. The diagnosis here is that this soot collector is full and needs to be heated to burn all this stuff off. And, because it is so bad, we can’t drive to heat it up and burn it off, we need to hook up a computer which will do this for us.

We took off for a cup of coffee for the hour or so that it takes. At 10:30 we got a call that our horse was ‘bridled, saddled and ready to leave the stable.’ We got back, paid $184 and were off. BUT - we only got about 1 mile or so before we realized that we still had a problem. 9 miles later, after chugging slowly up some minor hills, we called Freightliner and the manager said to return and he’d put one of the mechanics on it.

This horse might be bridled and saddled but it’s got a broken leg.

12:05 we got back but ALL the mechanics take lunch at 12:00

1:00 the mechanics returned but the manager went to lunch (but was still on the shop grounds) without telling anyone to help us. The mechanic who had helped us first thing in the morning couldn’t even look at us in the eye and avoided us.

1:30, I am so hopping mad that I walk into the shop to talk with the owner and Gary goes out to the shop. Finally, another mechanic comes over to help us. He hooks up the computer, tells Gary to turn the engine on and - voila! he knows exactly what is wrong. He rushes in to talk to the manager, comes out and tells us that when he was putting our engine back together yesterday, he didn’t tighten a clamp tightly enough and that was causing all our problems. AND, we’ll get our money back for the earlier work today - which obviously we really didn’t need.

He tightens it, we take the RV out for a spin, return and I went in to talk with the manager about the refund. He doesn’t know how to make VISA refunds. He offers me $185 in Canadian money and asks if I have $15.00 in change for cash: 2 $100 bills. We have assiduously stayed away from Canadian money and used our credit and debit cards exclusively - to get the great exchange rate and just so we wouldn’t have to deal with two kinds of currency. We have no Canadian currency. But there’s no way out so the deal is: he gave me $200 Canadian and I can return in August with the $200 to get a VISA refund.

Now, I’m trying to figure this out using the exchange rate which is $.70 to the $1.00. If it costs $1.00 Canadian, it costs only $.70 American. But the bill was $185 Canadian and he refunded me $200 Canadian. Hmm. I’m thinking I won’t return.

I go back into the shop to thank Sam, the mechanic for his honesty and for telling the manager it was his fault. Not an easy task.

We put a cover on our Jeep to protect the front window from rocks and, we’re off, about 7 hours later than we had expected to be off. The engine purrs and powers up hills. Whew.


We got to Fas Gas about 2 hours away and pull in for the night to a rather basic campground, nothing special but it has hook-ups and there are about 8 other RV’s here. BUT, and this is the good part, it is only 1/2 miles from Frosties with its hard ice cream. I got New York Cherry Cheesecake and was it ever scrumptious.

Now to bed.