The next morning we figured we would do a few hours of coolant-line tightening and be on the way. Instead, we spent 12. On investigating Gloria's underbelly, Matt discovered a shredded belt flopping uselessly around one of its pulleys, and several other belts in poor condition (not to speak of the dozens of dripping coolant line connections). There was graciously an auto parts store near the Wal-Mart where we had parked overnight, and between the two stores I made well over a dozen trips back and forth, buying tools, coffee, coolant, lunch, and countless belts before finding the close-enough-to-right sizes (we hoped) to replace the dry rotted and shredded originals. Matt busted his knuckles all day trying to figure out how to properly remove and replace the old belts. As the day wore on, customers and employees in the auto parts store would talk about the impending winter storm, and how outside of town had 30 inches forecast. It was - it had been - time to get out of Dodge.

Dark having fallen and satisfied, if exhausted, with what had turned out to be far more work than we had anticipated, we started Gloria back up by the light of a friendly trucker's headlights, and prepared to make it as far as necessary to get out of the path of the looming winter storm. We would drive all night if we had to.

We did.

The details of that night are a little blurry, smeared and dulled by the long day of work prior, cut through with the absolute terror of crossing the dark expanse of southern Wyoming with few-to-no populated outposts in which to seek respite (all of which were under threat of serious winter weather), overheating badly, losing engine power, pulling over at exits for literal ghost towns and places with names like Red Desert, with a severe winter storm aggressively bearing down on us from the west, lit signs along the highway warning us of that fact, barricades at every highway on-ramp still open, but serving as a stark warning that if we broke down long enough for the snow to start, we may very well be stuck without access to any passage to civilization until the storm had passed and the highway was cleared and passable again.

After countless stops, an attempt at adjusting one of the belts that we had replaced, and gallons more coolant filled, boiled off, and sprayed out from some unknown source, bless god, we made it to Laramie, limping in, smoking and shuddering, at 6am.

Sleeping would have been desirable after what we had just endured, but we had decided to seek professional help as soon as possible, so after an hour nap we left to find an available mechanic, accepting that, perhaps, Gloria's issues were beyond our capacity to resolve. Finding several mechanics who wouldn't work on RV's and one who was booked up for the day and evidently operated on a first-come-first-served basis which we found less-than-encouraging, we headed to an auto parts store to buy more coolant and get into a sleep-deprived argument before my father called me to advise me that "when you're in a hole, you should put down the shovel." Things weren't looking good.

Matt didn't want to be stranded in Laramie. It was cold, blustery, and with limited resources. Even if we waited for the mechanic to see to Gloria, we couldn't be sure how much it would cost or how long we would be stuck there. Matt was inclined to make it to Denver - if we had made it through the last night we could make it the two hours to Denver, which would at least be nicer to be stranded in while we had Gloria repaired, he reasoned. I was too addled with stress and lack of sleep to reason and put it in his hands. He started filling up the coolant again. Gallons went in. Many more gallons than we had been able to put in before, oddly, until a river of coolant began ushering forth from a line near the top of the system, in an area that we hadn't noticed leaking until that moment. Our diagnosis adjusted. The shredded belt that we had replaced the day prior, we reasoned, had been for the water pump and until then, coolant hadn't even been circulating in the system, just sitting in the radiator. Once we had replaced the belt, the system began circulating but hadn't been adequately filled, at which point what little coolant was in the system reached a line that had been dry until then, and which also had a massive hole in it, accounting for the spray of coolant and serious overheating and smoking on the prior night's drive. Additionally, one of the other belts that we replaced was still not the right size and was slipping, accounting for our intermittent loss of engine power. Time to get back under Gloria and do more work.

Another five or six hours of knuckle busting in high winds and dropping temperatures in another Wyoming auto parts store parking lot, but once through, the primary leak was fixed and our belts were tight. I had done quite a bit more reading in The Gloria Bible and online for diagnostic tips and information on what our gauges should look like, and as we drove back to the Laramie Wal-Mart, things were finally looking the way they should. That night, we optimistically made it a point to drink a few beers, eat a rotisserie chicken, and watch a movie before getting a good night's sleep and heading out early the next morning to finally make some miles under more mechanically-sound conditions.

We awoke to a freezing interior at 3am.

It had been 16 degrees outside with 60+ mph winds all night. It still was. And all of our batteries had died. There is good reason for idling your diesel engine all night when it's that cold, it turns out.

I called insurance for a jump, and Matt went in to Wal-Mart to buy a propane heater, and a scarf and gloves for me since I hadn't packed for this kind of weather, certainly hadn't accounted for the possibility of being stranded in the high windswept plateaus of Wyoming for two days, and the zipper on my jacket had busted days before. The woefully ill-equipped tow company arrived and was no help jumping either our engine batteries or our house batteries, to my dismay. Matt went back in to Wal-Mart to buy new batteries. Over the next several hours he split time between trying to untangle an electrical rats nest, extracting the old and woefully-inadequate-to-begin-with batteries, and replacing them with new heavy duty truck batteries, and huddling inside trying to stave off hypothermia. By daybreak, new batteries were installed, the engine was idling, and the thick layer of ice that had accumulated on the inside of the windshield had nearly melted. Once Matt's hypothermia wore off, we were on the road.

Cheyenne was our first checkup stop, and there were no puddles or smoking, no red light whining at us from the dash, no gauges out of whack. Denver was next, and we were still nominal. Passing the double check, we headed on towards Kansas.