[pairodice]

Thanks for the sympathy guys (really).  We have been stuck before (as you probably know) but this time I would NOT be talked into a ‘normal’ tow truck.  We finally found a ‘Bus Trailer’ as they call it but it was not going to be available until Monday afternoon or so.  Karen was able to get the new Turbo after having to wake some guys up at the Freighliner place and get them to find it for her (it was hidden WAY back in the bushes by the building waiting on her).  She spent the night in a nice hotel, which was good because I had a horrible night on the side of the road waiting for a DPS officer to come banging on my door, which never happened and trucks passing by and HONKING just as I fell asleep!.  So Karen arrived from the hotel at about 7am and the guys from Bernd’s shop arrived about 9am along with Bernd just after that.  Thank GOD, the turbo was an exact replacement for the old one!  The guys unbolted the old one, rebooted up the new one and did some rewriting on the alternator that decided it didn’t want to play anymore.  They did some testing on the turbo and all was good.  We drove for a couple hours (since 1.5 hours seemed to be our litmus test for all things mechanical) then collapsed at a rest area.  We got up at about 6am this morning and headed out on the road and into the deserts of West Texas on a wing and a prayer (literally).  All is going great, we have a small leak of antifreeze around the air compressor on the engine but are monitoring it as we go along - it used about 1/2 gallon of antifreeze yesterday and last night (nice size puddle this morning).  I have my VMSPC monitoring ALL kinds of info and added some more diagnostics to it this morning so it hopefully will tell us if the coolant hits under 90% full.  We are almost to El Paso and have to be in Phoenix at work tomorrow morning so we’ll see how far we make it today.  The wind is definitely slowing us down but the coach is doing fine.