On Friday July 1st we broke camp and started the trip home. We took the ferry to Anacortes and drove south across Findalgo Island. The bridge to Whidbey Island goes over Deception Pass and it is one impressive bridge! What made it doubly impressive was the huge flood tide going in under the bridge way down below us. Maryly and I got out of the car to walk across the bridge and joke about kayaking in waters this dangerous. We took an afternoon ferry from Whidbey Island to Port Townsend and had a seafood dinner there. Then we drove into the late evening to visit Leslie Goss for the night. Leslie is a BASK member who's family owns shorefront property on one of the branches of Puget Sound. Late the next morning we headed south and started down a freeway with a familiar name, Highway 101! This highway would take us most of the way home so even the on-ramp made us feel like we were making progress. We stayed in a Motel south of Eugene Oregon with only one more day of driving ahead of us.
On Saturday July 3rd we expected to reach my house by sunset. But at 6:00 PM we stopped to change drivers on an off-ramp in a little town called Fortuna (The Friendly City). The VW Bus started up the on-ramp and died again with the same old ignition problem. This time it would not start up again after wiggling wires and cooling off for a while. I went through the steps and diagnosed the problem as being the ignition coil. It was only producing a weak yellow spark. But the clinching clue was the clear fluid dripping out of the ignition coil and pooling on the top of the distributor. I assume this was PCB oil running over my hands and now I shouldn't have children. This should be an easy repair, (of the car, not my polluted genetic material) but by the time I was convinced I knew the solution it was 8:00 PM on a Saturday night. Fortuna has a Napa Auto Parts store which claims it is open on Sundays but this Sunday is July 4th. Will they be open?
We pushed the VW Bus into a Park-N-Ride lot on the other side of the freeway. Fortuna does turn out to be a friendly city. A guy got out of his pickup truck to help push us up into the parking lot. I was amused that he would rather get hot and sweaty than risk scratching the bumper on his shiny red pickup. There was a KOA campground 200 meters from where the car broke down and we reserved a "Camping Cabin" for the night. The camp host was very helpful, giving us a map and marking it with the locations of all the auto parts stores and good restaurants. We hitched a ride (with some friendly people) to a Mexican Restaurant which was about to close but they let us in at 8:57 PM, served us dinner and even let us use their phone. We walked the five kilometers back to the car and the campground and it did not seem very far. Perhaps the Margaritas made the walk seem short. We figured we deserved those Margaritas.
On Sunday morning July 4th I called Napa Parts and found them open. They had a new ignition coil for my bus. I walked the 3 kilometers there and back, then spent a greasy hour replacing the coil. A friendly guy (this is Fortuna, the Friendly City) in a roadside truck nearby selling apricots gave me two just out of sympathy. He said he has had to spend a holiday or two working on his truck. My diagnosis was correct and with the new coil the bus started up first try! We drove the rest of the way home with no problems. We had left a day early, and spent it with the car stuck in Fortuna but made a reasonable adventure out of the stop.