Today was a day of vehicle problems…

It started out this morning when our pickup truck, which we are towing behind the U-Haul truck, was dead.  There should have been no reason for this.  Mark had set up some lights on the truck that would indicate what the lights on the U-Haul were doing, but the harness for those lights wasn’t attached to anything under the hood of the truck.  It was attached to the U-Haul truck.

So you might ask, as I did, “Why does the truck have to be running if it is being towed behind the U-Haul?”  Apparently, you can’t shift the truck out of park unless the motor is on.

Mark found a wire attached to the battery that must go to something inside the cab.  He noticed that a fuse on it was broken, so he pulled the wire out and found that it was also corroded.  It has been causing a parasitic drain on the battery.  (Mom, this is why the battery died on me a couple times in the last couple months.)

We called and had someone come and give us a jump, and then Mark left the engine on the truck running as we were towing it down the highway for about an hour.  When we stopped, Mark found that the truck had turned off by itself, but it started again when he turned the key.  He doesn’t know what that wire went to, but it seems to run fine without it.

Foothills of the Blues

I was trying to read my devotions and I kept being distracted by the beauty of God’s world. Mark said that I should let the beauty be my devotions!

An old barn against the backdrop of the Blue Mountains

We pulled into Jerome, ID to get gas, and Mark discovered that the magnetic tail lights he had put on the back of the pickup were gone.  There had been a terrific wind hitting us as we were going through the Blue Mountains, and best he could figure, it had blown the lights off which had dragged behind us on the ground until the wiring that was holding them to the truck broke.  We had to buy another set of lights and he spliced them on right there in the parking lot.

Previously, he had had the lights stuck to the side of the truck. This time he decided to leave the tailgate down and attach them there so the wind wouldn’t hit them quite so hard. I put all the things that were in the back of the pickup into the U-Haul so they wouldn’t fall out.

Splicing the wires that hooked the magnetic lights to the U-Haul truck lights.  Mark is so handy!

For the rest of the drive, I began reading the book, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, to Mark.  We just watched the movie a couple days ago, but the book goes into a lot more detail than the movie could.  I am benefiting from scholarly works in all the fields pertaining to the Bible located in one book.  I find it fascinating, and it has certainly made for interesting conversations with Mark!  (He’s LDS, I’m Quaker.  ‘Nuff said!)  At some point while I was reading, we crossed into Mountain Time.

I had planned for us to stop in Howell, UT tonight which would have been a shorter drive if there had been any motels there.  We didn’t actually get stopped for the night until around 8:00.  After we got registered at a funky Howard Johnson motel run by an east Indian man, I took this picture from the parking lot:

On the lower left at the crest of the hill, you can just barely make out the spire with the Angel Moroni (slightly to the right of the brighter spire) on the Brigham City Temple.  The Wasatch Mountains are in the background.