secretreality: Exploring Death Valley, the Rover's inaugeral run

The time had come to finish breaking in my new to me 2003 Discovery SE and what better way than a nice week long camping & overlanding trip. It was just 2 weeks ago that I brought her home as a replacement for my tired old 1992 Jeep Cherokee Limited and as much as I love that truck, it was time to move on. While my big Jeep, a locked, sprung over 1995 YJ on 35"s can take me just about anywhere I want, longer trips require some especially creative packing. Though the Discovery has substantially more space, between me, my wife and our dog, we still had to pack a bit tight, it would have been really nice to have had some sort of outside rack to put some things on. I really did not like the idea of heading out without a gas can.

At any rate, all loaded up and ready to go we drove down our block to the main route when I noticed the SLS "Service Engine Soon" light had come on. Since it was a solid light I knew that didn't mean too much, though I really didn't like the notion of heading for the desert with a car in less than 100% operational capacity. I guess I'm just lucky, because after a few hundred feet it started blinking at me. Now being a glass is half full kind of guy, I looked at it as a good thing. I mean, better to have it fail a block from home than in the middle of Death Valley. The engine did feel like it was stumbling a bit so I got out and put my hand over the exhaust, which most definitely was telling me it had a miss.

We headed back home, unloaded the wife and dog and out came the OBD-II scanner which threw a lovely misfire on Cyl 6 message, no surprise there. No problem I thought, I'll just swap the plugs and wires, so I headed down to the local parts shop, picked up my gear, went back home and popped the hood, only to realize to my horror that there was no distributor cap. "Ahh..." I said to myself, "must be a coil pack somewhere, now where in the world did they put it?" Looking all around I saw nothing, so I follwed the wires which lead back behind the engine block to the firewall. "No way", I thought to myself, "that can't be right, what kind of asshole engineer would put a consumable part in a location like that?" Well, as it turns out the ones at Land Rover did.

After a little online reading and a lot of knuckle busting, the SAI "Secondary Air Intake" lines were out of the way and I was able to swap the plugs and wires for cylinders 6 and 8. How anyone is able to do more than that without removing the air intake plenum I don't know, but they must have hands the size of small gnomes. At any rate, I buttoned her back up, fired up the truck and felt for the miss which was gone and all was well. So with the Rover in good mechanical shape, we were ready to head out the next morning for our week of exploration which in spite of a rough start, was completely trouble free afterwards.

Unfortunately I only brought along a little point and shoot and left the SLR at home, but I grabbed a couple of decent shots anyway I thought. Anyway, here's a few.

GPS hooked up to my laptop with both Streets and Trips and TOPO software, ready to hit the road.

Flora looks back and me with "how long do I have to be back here?" written all over her face.

An ample amount of space for all of our gear, something I have fought with in the big Jeep for years.

Before adventuring off road, we first had a good stretch of superslab. And though Flora is a great travel dog as she pretty much just lays down and plays with her toy, a few stops along the way to stretch her legs and take in some new smells were in order.