Jersey Girl

Well after the worst road trip I've ever been on, we finally made it to New Jersey 3 1/2 days later. Our van was definitely worse off than I was however. After about 4 hours of driving, the van started really struggling going up hills. He wouldn't even do more than 40-50 on some of them. We rode it out and made it to North Platte, Nebraska, where we stayed the night and tried to do our own little fixer upper in the morning. That clearly didn't work so we made it a few more hours before pulling off and getting a quote from an auto shop in Omaha. They told us it would cost $1181 to fix the fuel pump so we left angry and decided to tough out the issue. By this point, we were lucky to get up to 60mph on flat ground and even hit 31mph uphill! So we drove all day and stopped in Davenport, Iowa for the night. The next morning we went to an auto shop and they told us it would cost $175 to fix the van...lucky we didn't get ripped off at the other place. So it took about an hour to fix, meanwhile it's freezing outside and nobody will let Walter inside anywhere. We got kicked out of Burger King and the mall unfortunately.

After the van got fixed, we got back on the road and we could actually drive 80mph now! After cruising along like we were unstoppable for about 5 hours, this happened...
Luckily we had to remove half the packed van to get to the tools and spare. That was awesome.
What was also great was that this happened right around 5 which meant that all shops were closed for the night. We were able to convince a kid with a swastika on his arm to hook us up with a new tire. So about an hour and a half later we were on the road again and only had to spend another $60! We camped out in some town in Pennsylvania that night and made it safely to Jersey the following morning. Needless to say, we were very happy to be done with that trip. Now we get a 5 month break before we get to do it again.