Our next official destination after Yosemite was Death Valley, but we stopped halfway for a night at a place called Horton Creek, a secluded spot in the Round Valley area.
We were in the middle of the desert with wide open space for miles all around but with the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains looming in the distance on each side. The mountains had an appealing, light dusting of snow, but it was plenty warm enough at ground level. The only noise in the day was the trickling of the creek and the occasional bird.
At night, there was so little ambient light that every star seemed ten times brighter, the only artificial light emanating from a couple of small towns in the distance that couldn't even be seen during the day, but could be observed from afar after twilight.
If you're in the mood for some solitude, this place could not be more perfect. We liked it so much that our one night stopover turned into a whole week before we moved on. This gave us the chance to disturb the peace for a while by performing the joyous task of changing our brake fluid, which I mentioned in my last post.
Turns out our brake troubles didn't end there. When we left Horton Creek, we had a noticeable scraping noise coming from one of the brakes. I got one of the wheels off to check the pads but, knowing that I probably didn't have the tools / parts to do anything about it even if I could see what the problem was, we resigned ourselves to visiting number seven on our unplanned, but ever expanding, "Garages Of The USA" tour.
When we eventually found a garage that could work on something our size, we were met with the usual combination of not knowing when they can "fit us in", not knowing where to get the parts they needed and generally not being able to get anything done particularly efficiently.
To cut a long story short, our brake pads and rotors were pretty screwed, some more than others. We decided to put new brake pads on and get the rotors "turned" (flattened / smoothed on a lathe) instead of buying new ones. The first garage kept us waiting all day then told us they couldn't look at us after all, so we went somewhere else. The second place didn't have a lathe to turn the rotors and spent a whole day trying and failing to find the right pads.
In the end, I found the pads myself (took about 15 minutes of research) and even got them delivered to the garage same day with no extra charge. I got them to change the pads and arranged for them to take the rotors to the first garage, who (a.) had the equipment to turn them, and (b.) I had guilt tripped into agreeing to do this aspect of the work because they wasted so much of our time the previous day.
Job done, all in all about three hours work. This is the brake pad that was making all the noise:
Yeah, I think we probably made the right decision by changing them!
You can tell the apathy and ineptitude of these garages gets to me though. I don't know how some of these people manage to get dressed in the morning without somehow amputating a limb.
Speaking of amputations, here's Winnie, legless again:
The mechanic that actually did the brake pad change was a good guy though and had some experience with RVing. He gave us some pointers on the best route to take to Death Valley, so it wasn't a completely wasted couple of days.
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