We left Indiana Sunday morning, but the bus was struggling to maintain power. This is the story of how a 3 hour trip took us 10 hours!

About an hour into our trip, the bus started stuttering a little bit. We could maintain speed at 55, but she was dying every time we came to a stop. We headed for the nearest auto parts store. Kyle has designed a “smoker” system for vacuum leaks, we force smoke into the vacuum lines, then watch for smoke in the engine compartment to find where the leaks are. It looked like one of the intake manifolds was leaking, so Kyle took it off and smeared sealant on it. Not a pretty fix, but a band-aid.

This wasn’t too much of a surprise, considering she was doing similar things when we put her in storage last winter, and we’ve only been driving short hops lately (the bus only acts up after the engine is warm).

Soon after that we were on the freeway and seemed to be running fine. Our first stop was Kalamazoo, we were going to stop at a brewery. As soon as we got off the freeway we could barely keep the bus running. We pulled into the first parking lot we found.

We had to wait for the bus to cool down, since she runs fine before she’s warmed up. Then we started doing additional troubleshooting – we tried testing the fuel pressure and adjusting the timing. We still weren’t sure what was going on, so we notified our family that we were now officially “limping.” Because we could take the freeway all the way to our destination, and we seemed to run okay at 55 mph, the best course of action was to continue on as far as we could go.

We were about an hour from my parents house when the gas pedal seemed to stop working. We rolled to a stop on the side of the freeway, then the engine died. We couldn’t restart it at all. We called my dad, he had to go pick up a trailer and then drive out to meet us.

This is when things got pretty tense. We were just beyond a curve on the freeway and we watched as semis and fifth wheels drifted across the line onto the shoulder as they approached us. I finally shifted my mirror so I couldn’t see them. There were a few things we could have tried at that point, since it seemed like a lack of fuel there are things we could have tried to limp that system along, but nothing we could safely do whilst sitting on the side of a busy freeway at the tail end of a holiday weekend.

Dad arrived with a trailer and got the bus loaded up. After adding our fully loaded bus to the trailer we noticed a trailer tire was flat. No problem, we’ve got a 12V compressor! Except it wouldn’t reinflate. Dad tried to make it to the nearest exit, but the tire shredded before we got there.

This is probably starting to sound like a bad day, and I can’t say I’m thrilled that we had to abandon the bus on the side of the freeway, but honestly I was just happy to no longer be sitting on the freeway, waiting to be swideswiped or worse. It took an hour or so to get to a tire place and have them put a new tire on. Once we got back to the bus it was a quick re-install and then we were on our merry way!

About 6 hours after we’d planned on arriving, we finally made it to my parents house in Northern Michigan! We all cracked open a cold beer and decompressed, tomorrow we can relax and start ordering parts.

To give this story some closure, when we got new manifold seals we realized that the vacuum leak was never in the intake manifold, but just below it in the valve cover. That was fine, we needed to adjust the valves anyway. With the vacuum leak fixed we could start to troubleshoot the next problem, which took some time, but the short version of the story is that there was no gap in the points (this affects spark timing, spark voltage, etc). After the points were adjusted, she’s been running fine, but we still ordered a tune-up kit because it’s probably about time for some TLC anyway.

So now we’re in Northern Michigan! We’re ready for summer produce, campfires with friends, brewery adventures, and beach time!