Friday, August 5th, 2011 – The first day of our planned two-month trip is a short one.  About 75 miles to Carol’s Mom’s house in Mesa.  We can’t sleep in the GMC while it is parked at Mom’s so we just had to leave it in the parking lot soaking up the sun.  We went in at the end of the day to get our jammies and you would have sworn that the floor was about to burst into flames it was so hot.  The refrigerator, of course, could not keep up but the food was still OK – not hot but cool enough (we hope).

The trip to from Marana to Mesa was pretty uneventful except for one short incident.  Traveling in the right lane on I-10 about half way to Mesa the engine just stopped running while we were driving at about 60mph.  I pulled over – fortunately there was room because lots of that area is under construction with no breakdown lane – and just waited for about 5 minutes and it started again after a couple of tries.  Seemed like a fuel problem – the coach was stored for two months with a quarter of a tank of gas and I suspect there may have been a little deterioration of the fuel in that time.  I had added about 30 gallons before we left but that is all I can figure because that was the end of that problem.

We spent the night and got started at about 9:30am after breakfast with Mom and Ken (virtual step-Dad) and it was already in the low 90’s.  Our destination for Saturday the 6th was  Lakeside, AZ which is right next to Show Low in the White Mountains.  Lakeside is at about 7000 feet and Mesa is at about 1000 so we have a climb ahead of us and it is hot.  We decided to take Arizona state highway 87 north until it hit state highway 260 in Payson.  The only other real alternative is to take state highway 60 through the Salt River Canyon which is not recommended for RV’s – especially with newly installed disc brakes.  There were lots of climbs of several miles each but we made it.  I shifted down to second when the engine rpm got to about 2000 and everything seemed to work great except that the engine temperature got to a maximum of 230 on some of the hills – I did turn the A/C off on the longest hills at the higher altitudes.

The interesting thing for us GMC geeks is that thanks to the air dam and the air deflectors around the radiator,  the temperatures were very steady and the cooling system worked as you would expect it to work.  Last year, everything was the same except that the air could go around the radiator instead of through it like it does now, and the temperatures fluctuated between 190 and 220 constantly with the fan on more than half the time – 60-90 percent of the time actually.  With the fan clutch I currently have installed I mostly cannot hear the fan except at slow traffic speeds.

Lakeside is beautiful but not as cool during the day as I had hoped.  It did get down to the high 50’s on Saturday night – very good sleeping weather.