Maintenance & Restoration

Patrick M. · 09-04-2007, 09:02 PM

This link was posted by Ruth and Dave over on the Casita forum - their second trip to Alaska in two years! http://www.jeeptrek.com/Yukon/Yukon.html

Quote:

Our plan was to leave Santa Fe mid-morning and drive straight through to Banff National Park, about 27 hours away. But when we hooked up the FJ Cruiser to the trailer (for the first time- oops) to make the final electrical checks, all the trailer lights worked, but the car wouldn’t turn off. (!?@%?)

We made a mad dash down to our Toyota dealership, which had installed the 7-pin harness when we bought the FJ in June, They dropped everything else and very kindly went to work on our problem. Later that afternoon, the problem was diagnosed to be a missing xenon diode to prevent the trailer battery from feeding power back to the ignition. Of course, the part needed to correct the problem wasn’t available, so the automotive electrician figured out another route to bypass the ignition wiring.

Finally, we hit the road just a bit before 4 PM. It turned out to be impossible to make up any of the lost 6 hours. We crossed the border at Sweetgrass, and followed the TomTom’s directions to pick up the TransCanada Highway (Canada Route 1) in Calgary. Unfortunately, TomTom didn’t know about major road construction in the form of a large pit in the middle of Calgary at the start of the TransCanada, and we drove in circles a bit until we got routed correctly. We arrived at our reserved site at the Tunnel Mountain Campground around 8:30 PM.