On the weekend after Thanksgiving we headed to Stub Stewart State Park to meet up with our friends, Marvin and Jodi Pierce, and ride the trails. Unfortunately we weren’t being blessed with the glorious sunshine from the day before but at least it wasn’t raining! We loaded the 4 horses in the trailer and set out about 8:30 am Saturday morning.

Me and the girls - a little cold but still planning our trail route!

There’s nothing that will ruin a day of trail riding faster than “truck trouble”! On the last leg of the journey to the park entrance, just as we were climbing the hills of Hwy 47, that part of the road where it’s narrow, full of twists and turns and has no shoulder to speak of, the truck started to die. I was flooring it and we weren’t going over 20 mph and rpms weren’t even hitting 2000! Of course I immediately went into panic mode as I looked at the line of semi trucks behind me and no spot to pull over in sight.

I instantly start having visions of saddling up the horses and riding our way back to Newberg while we abandon the useless truck…and besides being a bit silly would have been one heck of a long ride home! Fortunately there were two pull-offs I came across where I could get off the road, let the line of traffic go by, calm my jagged nerves and finally turn the driving over to Charlie. We managed to crawl into the ranger station area where an adjustment of the gas cap seemed to revive the truck enough to make it to the horse trail heads and get us home without incident.

Our friend Marvin on his stallion "Squirt"

The ride was nice but we were definitely cold! Time to pull out the long underwear! Stub Stewart is great for barefoot horses because the trails are mostly soft dirt – very little gravel anywhere. There were parts that were slick but not too bad as there had been some good days of dry weather. Since Charlie, Ralen and I managed to get ahead of the group, we ended up getting separated after the first 20 minutes…we went right and they all went left at the first fork! We spent the next 45 minutes playing “bad tracker” until we just gave up and enjoyed the rest of our ride. When we got back to the trailer, the rest of the group showed up about 10 minutes later so all was good – especially considering my older daughter was in the other group and needed to ride back with us!

The rest of the group - all bundled up!

We got home with no break down incident but I knew it was time to take the truck in! For all you diesel owners out there – it can be tough finding a place to work on your rig that isn’t the “dealer”. And you all know the prices those dealers charge! I followed a couple of good leads to Steve’s Auto Service (503-554-1778) here in Newberg but they don’t work on diesels (but their work on regular rigs is great I’ve heard). However, manager Bob Stephens was super nice to talk to and sent me to a place in Sherwood he’d heard good things about – Electronic Injection Services.

For future reference to those of you who own diesels – these guys at Electronic Injection Services are “all diesel” and they are awesome. They’re some of the nicest people I’ve come across, their prices are great and they took the time to explain what might be happening. As it turned out, my fuel filter needed changing bad. I could have sworn I’d had that done (oh about 25k miles ago) by the dealer in McMinnville but according to Patrick (the mechanic) it might never have been changed! Which leads me to believe I just might have gotten ripped-off by the dealership in McMinnville because I swore I heard “fuel filer changed” and sure got charged a lot of money!! Oh well. Patrick changed the filter right away, took all of 20 minutes, the price was super and my truck sure runs a whole heck of a lot better. So my new instructions are to change my fuel filter every 15K miles and since I have found such a great place to take my truck, maintenance will be easy and I won’t fear going broke in the process. Plus, I don’t ever want to crawl up a hill pulling 4 horses with a line of irritated truckers behind me ever again!