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#45h Mount Rainier and Mount St Helens

Randall Cothren
Sep 30, 2016
2 min read

Updated: Sep 17, 2021

I figured since the truck is broke so let’s go see Mount Rainer and Mount St Helens.

That's what we did on Thursday and Friday. We went down and we looked at Mount St Helens and I didn't get there until it was getting late. I got some really cool sunsets. We saw a lot of devastation and really got a lot out of the visitor center. We stayed in a kind of a dive motel called Randle. We went to a diner near closing, but they were very nice about the time of day and got us fed.

The next day we visited Mt Rainer and took lots of pictures and it was really quite amazing, majestic and wonderful. We got back and checked the voicemail and found out that the truck was actually ready.

That evening I dropped the girls off at the RV and drove down to Sequim to get the truck as we had paid the bill over the phone.

I was going to drop off the rent a car but when I got to the truck, I just thought I would crank it up to be sure. I turned the key it did all the same horrible things it did at the carwash. I'm beginning to wonder what in the world was going on. It eventually it did smooth out so maybe they thought they fixed it, but I ended up having to return it for them to look at again. I kept the rental car and called them the next day and all they could say is we’ll try to figure out what went wrong. The mechanic looked at the truck and he said it would appear that somehow a wire was loose or shorting the computer signal to ground. This causes the computer to send and receive false signals. This explains the crazy behavior of the truck. He checked all the electrical connections and put an electrical lubricant on them and then he thought he had it then he didn't. It was working fine 800 dollars later when we left Chimacum.

It kept on popping up every once in a while, all the way through and after Dallas. I ended up spending an enormous amount of time on the throttle position sensor later. It happened again in Wilmington. I replace all of the known bad wires I think I've got it now. Having said that I would like to have a new wiring harness to make sure it can’t happen in the future.