Butte to Ronan, MT

Monday, June 10, 2013

Phil took the truck into the Dodge dealer this morning to get the turbo replaced and spent some time on the phone to talk the dealer in Billings into giving us a refund on the repair they did while we were there, since it didn’t need to be repaired, but replaced. They had the truck ready to go in about 4 hours and John took Phil back into town to get it. When Phil got there the people at the dealer told him we didn’t have an extended warranty, and the bill was $1800.00. When we were in Billings the discovery was made that the wrong mileage was entered on the Chrysler paperwork, it was 10,000 miles over what we had at the time he bought the extended warranty, and it could only by fixed by a dealer who had read the mileage on the truck. So, the service mgr in Billings told us he would get it fixed. When he called Chrysler, the girl there cancelled it instead of fixing it, and refunded the money to the Dodge dealer in Little Rock. Very long story later…like 4 hours later, the girl at the Butte dealer finally got the policy reinstated, Phil paid our $100.00 deductable and he left.

By the time he got back to the campground it was 3:30, and he wanted to go ahead and leave, since we were scheduled to. The rest of us were more than willing to stay put for the night, but we packed it up and were on the road by 4:00pm. We had 150 miles to go to our next stop, and some pretty steep grades to pull over the mountains.

The first grade when well, the turbo kicked in like it is suppose to and everything was fine. During the second climb the damn engine light came on AGAIN!! Phil said the mechanic told him it might, there was a switch code showing when they pulled the codes from the turbo warning, but they weren’t sure if it was an issue of its own, or part of the turbo problem, so they couldn’t fix it. It didn’t seem to be affecting the performance so we continued.

We pulled into our destination in Ronan, MT at about 7:15pm with daylight to spare. The sun doesn’t go down up here until about 10:00pm.  Tomorrow Phil gets to deal with the Dodge dealer here. Pretty soon he is going to be on a first named basis with every service manager in the whole country.