The 26 june appeal ! Tackle Tikal !

by | 27 Jun 2015 | Inspiration - Mood | 0 comments

Date de dernière mise à jour : le 29 July 2018

26 june 2015, four in the morning !

The alarm clock rings.

This is the D day! Well, one of the D days that we’ll meet… But this one is the most important because this is the beginning of our History at three! We’ll pick up our future wheeled home!

Let’s go to Switzerland

So departure for the airport and flight to Geneva. Even if Tikal has a Mayan nickname, he lived in Switzerland for a while…

The Alps from the plane

We’re getting the beast !!!

Tikal in a field

The return

Then we clear the customs without any problem (this is important to note, regarding what will happen later) and at noon, let’s go for 490 kms. We decide to get off the main roads and enjoy the landscapes.

Said like that, we thought the return was around 6 hours, and we can arrive just in time for the barbecue…

But we didn’t take into account the 90km/h maximum speed of the big boy and… the “small hitch” on the road ! (if you replace some letters in “small hitch” you will have: “tiny little problem slightly stressing for two novice mechanics“) 🙂

After a little lunch stop on our way,  we take a break to admire the landscapes:

Run over the Ain river

The weather is beautiful and we almost want to stay overnight… But we have to remain rational, Tikal was not built in a day ! And we’ve just done 100 km, we have to move over (yes, but not too fast, we’re coming from Switzerland 😉 ).

A problem?

Direction Paris, transit through the gas station. (The boy doesn’t go fast but it uses some fuel!)

We’re going to strech our legs, because there’s still 200 kms remaining.

Here comes the difficulties! We have a big likeage under the truck!

This is not oil (at the first look) and the temperature warning light comes on… after an intensive reflexion and following the novice mechanics instincts that we just built, we think that it can be a coolant leakage.

The beast… dry

Somehow, we are finally back on the road, after replacing coolant by cold water (well, now we know that it’s actually a very bad idea because that can damage a lot of things in the engine… but at that time we didn’t think about it. We’ll not do it again, we swear!)

It’s 7:30 PM. Still 200 kms remaining. The barbecue slowly vanish…

We leave again, the heating to the maximum (in order to cool down the beast) and after 3 other steps (and some water liters), we finally arrive.

It’s 10:45 PM !

The day after we plan to take a look at this leakage but for now, Tikal isn’t thirsty anymore. We earned our beer!!

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