Advice to the American family setting out on the road

William Least Heat-Moon, best-selling author of "Blue Highways," "River-Horse," and most recently "Roads to Quoz," shared his insights on the American road with CNN. I found this last part quite interesting.

CNN: What advice do you have to the American family setting out on the road?

Heat-Moon:

• Go with a loose sense of destination.



• Don't go farther than your time easily allows, and try to move reasonably slowly.



• We're a nation of speeders: speeders in all sorts of things; we invented fast food.



• But speed and good travel aren't comfortable or useful companions.



• Speed is anathema to deep travel.



• If you want to learn the territory between your place of departure and where you end up, you have to have time and use it wisely.



• Speed corrupts travel far more than bad Chinese food.

Second Garage Sale in the Books

Jill's Journal: Another garage sale; another success. What a great feeling! This time it was very spontaneous with zero preparation. My parents were here visiting and were up for the adventure, so we had lots of help (Kristi and Adam were back for round two as well) and lots of fun on an unseasonably warm day. We had less traffic and sold fewer things, but bigger things. I parted with my china, Rob parted with a ton of old electronics, and we all said a happy goodbye to various and sundry other items. We netted a lovely $457. Once again, this was just stuff we weren’t using anyway…fantastic!

I’m told there is a season for garage sales here and we are definitely outside of that. With winter fast approaching, it’ll be spring before we get to have another. Darn…just as I was getting the hang of it!

Truck all happy and purring now...

So - I've waited weeks to get the truck fixed - knowing it was going to cost me so much that I'd cringe at the bill... And then, after I finally took it in - I got good news and bad news....

The bad news - its an injector - from what I hear one of the scariest and maybe costliest fixes aside from an entirely new engine. They told me it basically imploded, broke in half leaving pieces inside the engine. They say they got is all out - I'm hopeful.

The good news - it was covered entirely under waranty - DOH... What was I wating for?

I got in my head that it must be the EGR valve because its been replaced on that truck so much, and everyone I mentioned something to had agreed. I've since read that this 6.0 engine is notorious vor EGR (as many Fords seem to be) and injectors. I'm very hopeful that's my last problem with one. We'll see.

Happily the truck seems to be running just fine again. I've put on a bunch of miles just running around and it hasn't skipped a beat. I'll need to let it idle and see if that changes anything, but the fuel mileage seems to be what it was before the break, and I've been trying to push it a little to see if it'd chug - so far no problems... Yay!