My Man Wolf
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006From Bryce Canyon we made our way to Zion National Park. Our van was knocking the entire way. After Zion, we decided to head to St. George since there was a VW mechanic. We didn’t arrive until Saturday, and of course the repair shop was closed on Saturday and Sunday. We decided to spend the night at Snow Canyon State Park. That is one of those surprises I mentioned – it was beautiful. It had petrified sand dunes, live sand dunes, narrow canyons, tortoises and Gila monsters. It was extremely hot – close to 100 and that night we laid out on the hot pavement and watched for shooting stars. William finally saw his first shooting star, and Julian just fell asleep on the blanket.
We decided we would not wait until Monday for the repair shop to open and start making our way head Vegas, where there definitely were several repair shops. In Snow Canyon some Dutch women told us about Mesquite, NV and how it is possible to get really cheap hotel rooms. When we rolled into Mesquite it was about 104 degrees (40 Celsius) and an air-conditioned room sounded perfect. That was definitely the right decision for us since at 10:00 PM it was still 97 degrees and the Yoda Van was sweltering. We paid 30 bucks for a decent hotel room and went swimming twice.Mesquite is not a nice place. At least Vegas has a lot of flair and they go all out. Mesquite is just cheap and trashy and the worst of what these casinos are all about: crappy $7.99 prime rib buffets, cheesy flashing lights, bingo tournaments and old run-down casinos.
That night we ran some errands and the knocking sound was even louder, no longer just in 3rd and 4th gears, but was occurring in all gears (even reverse), and also even when the clutch was pressed down. This was not good.
The next morning we assessed our options: stay in Mesquite another night, have our car towed to Las Vegas or just risk it and drive to Vegas. We didn’t want to stay in Mesquite another night since we’d wake up tomorrow with the exact same dilemma. We called our road service and they said they would tow the car to Vegas, but then we’d still have to get all of us to Vegas somehow. To risk it and drive was not ideal either since it was 75 miles and almost nothing in between us and Vegas. We decided to just take the car out onto the freeway and see how the noise was first. We put in a call to the shop before we left and got on I-15. The knocking was just the normal/customary knocking we were accustomed to so we decided to just keep going and live on the edge and risk it. The temperature along the way was about 105 and breaking down would have been horrible. These were the longest 75 miles of the entire trip.
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