back in the...

state I call home now.

took long enough.

minor correction note - leaving at 3:30pm and arriving at 2:15am is not exactly 10.5 hours as my 5+5.5 math might lead one to believe. The way down it was 5 hours to go the first 160 miles, the rest of the trip (the 300 miles) took the balance of the time what ever that was.

The way back home? Holy crap. Could the weather have been any worse? Yes, instead of zero visibility rain from Bristow VA to Providence RI it could have been snowing the whole way. All along 78-287-87-84 there was sleet. So maybe that counts for worse than rain conditions. Leaving at 9:45am and getting in at 9:30pm. That kind of sucked a bit. Yes I drove the whole way. We were only on I-95 for the distance it took to get from Route 6 to 195 in PVD. Sucky wet dark wiper wiper wiper blades all the way.

And no. The car didn't work flawlessly. Saddly a hill on I-78 caused a bit of overboost and it popped into limp mode. A quick hasty exit off somewhere between Harrisburg and Allentown and we pulled into a truck stop/gas station. I popped the hood. MAF firmly connected. Okay that's not the problem.

So I disconnect the MAF. The girls all head to the restroom, and I fire it back up. Drive about 1/4 mile down the road somewhat spiritedly. Turn around, leave it running, pop the hood and plug the MAF back in. Boom we've got boost and power back.

So maybe I unplugged it the first stop and forgot that I had. I was under a bit of stress as anyone might imagine. Here we are, a late dark tuesday night at some rest stop no where near home or where we are going with a car that is messed up and a family counting on me to get them to the destination, with a Looooooong drive ahead. Yeah. No stress there at all.

At any rate. It suggested again that my original feeling that it was the turbo spiking sending the MAP reading a bit higher than spec'd into overboost limp mode was more likely than being an absent minded mechanic.

So a good while later. We cruise out of PA into NJ. Everything is cool. The road tips up, a car in front slows a touch then speeds back up and I give it a bit more fuel, easing it in, but I'm in a lower RPM range and zip power gone. Hasty exit after a bit of deliberation and determining if the exits all have re-entry ramps, I pull off. Repeat previous process one more time. Power back. But leaving the highway either one of two things happened: 1, I lost vacuum, and the brakes went into pure mechanical stop mode or 2, the water and grime on the road caused the brakes to feel like there was no vacuum boost assist.

And maybe my turbo is fine and that one hose I replaced wasn't the only vacuum leak in the system. Although the no vacuum failure mode is vanes wide open least boost possible (VNT system) so that tends to have me suspecting two separate problems. The brakes acted up once or twice down the road usually at Idle slowing down. But I managed to keep the rpms up and stuck with 4th gear over the hills and that coupled with the slow as hell traffic through the sleet and rain on 87 and 84 meant I seemed to stay out of the over boost danger zone.

But man. It was blinding rain. The wipers got so bad that it was a massive blurry mess. We stopped there on 84 in NY, sidewalks and roads covered in sleet. Cold, slippery and wet. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned those blades. And was able to see. Ahhh that was great.

It was a stressful drive. The girls were very patient and there was some fighting some complaining but there was no dvd player no personal electronics for them, except for some little LED head lamps they played with when it got dark. Lucy (our dog) was super patient all the way back. She hates the rain so the sleeping curled up was about par for her on a rainy day. But we were all glade to get back home.

Long

freaking

day...

by the time the car was unloaded and a hasty quick bit of pasta made I was in no mood to fire up the vag-com and check the codes or run through the output tests... or drive around and see what I could see. No. The car is sitting there now. Waiting. Till when? Maybe tonight I'll pull the codes for the hell of it. Maybe. But I'm pretty sure that all I will see is this: Charge Pressure Deviation 17958 code

And I've been through that before.

I'm pretty tired from not sleeping well at all being down there (for some reason i've never had a full or good night sleep in that bed in VA) coupled with starting the whole trip in sleep deprivation, my first priority is to rest up and recover for RI race weekend.

i wonder what has been happening in the blogosphere while i was gone....
heddwch
g

Hey at least it stopped raining for my ride in this morning. Roadway was wet and puddled but at least I wasn't getting wet from the top down as well as the bottom up!