caigoose9

As the eager readers may have noticed north face denali, there was a distinct lack of a blog post yesterday. This was due to some rather unexpected circumstances, which you’ll read about below. I want to offer my sincere apologies for ruining your day, but I hope that this post will make up for it. This could end up being a very long post, as lots has happened, but I’ll try to communicate it as succinctly as possible (well, perhaps not as succinctly as possible...).

On Wednesday morning we woke up in a random location (as normal) and Gaz took the captains seat to drive us the few hours to Voralpsee. Everything was going well, but at about 50km from the crag I heard a strange noise the north face jacket. It wasn’t the strange noise (or smell) of Gaz or James’ morning display of masculine stupidity, but something that was perhaps more serious. To understand more fully how we’d arrived at this point it’s worth explaining the back story. Early on in the trip I heard a noise from the engine that I wasn’t convinced was normal, and I mentioned to Gaz that I thought there might be something amiss with the turbo. He responded by saying that the noise wasn’t audible if you turned the stereo up, so he did just that and drove on. It definitely didn’t seem like a serious noise, but something that I logged in my mind. Now fast forward to Wednesday morning at about 10am. We’d already been driving for a few hours when the noise suddenly became a little worse, which caused us the great problem of being audible over the music. Within the space of a few km the noise had become louder and rougher, so we did the only sensible thing and pulled over at the north face denali jackets.

The RV had no power and clearly something was wrong with the turbo. Being top class mechanics we opened up the hood and stuck in our heads, only to see a bunch of black hoses connecting various bit of metal. Not much help there. I guessed that the turbo had broken internally and was hopeful that the broken blades hadn’t done any damage further into the engine. We didn’t start it up again and James made the call to Fiat Assistance, who called European Assitance, who called someone else, etc. Whilst James was doing that Gaz was setting some different wheels in motion.