We found Kritter's Northcountry Campground had availability and was centrally located to many of the places we wanted to see as we continue our clockwise tour around Lake Michigan. We booked 6 nights with them and headed to Newberry. The drive was not all that far and really only planned on stopping somewhere along the way to pick up groceries since Newberry seemed like it may be the middle of nowhere.
As we were driving up US 2 just entering Gladstone, we came to a single track railroad crossing that seemed in good shape. I had down to about 45 MPH as we crossed. The crossing felt smooth but as I was going to start accelerating again, I noticed a strange vibration in the coach.
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| Snapshot from Garmin Dashcam Just Before Tracks |
It took a few seconds to realize that the Jeep was fishtailing fairly significantly. I could see it moving back and forth in the rear camera. Worse, I could see the two mountain bikes on the hitch rack behind the Jeep seesawing back and forth wildly! I slowed the coach down and by the time I was at 10 MPH, the uncontrolled motion had stopped. We drove a few more miles until we could safely pull over - the whole time keeping a close eye on the rear camera monitor.
At the pull off, we discovered the bikes firmly mounted in the racks, but the brackets and bolts holding the racks to the cross member were all bent up and loose. Seeing the end result made me wonder how the heck the bikes didn't completely come off. Guess the fact that we bought a very sturdy rack had payed off. Fixing the rack at that point was out of the question, so the bikes went into the Jeep and I made sure the rack was not going to fall off over the next couple hours of driving.
At the campground, I was able to bend the brackets enough to make them usable. The upside was that I was able to justify bringing along some of my clamps that I decided not to sell. The next day we drove into town to pick up some replacement bolts, only to discover that the dreaded "check engine" light was on.
To our amazement, there was Jeep dealer in town. Newberry Motors got us in and read out the codes. The service manager asked me to take a look since he didn't know what to make of it. Most of the 8 messages had the word "implausible" or "invalid" in them related to steering and ABS systems. I described what had happened so he had a tech check things over a bit and we decided it was safe to clear the messages. So far so good.
This was the first time where I was grateful to have the Garmin dashcam in use while driving the motor home. I was able to go back to the files and see what was going on at least with the forward facing camera. And by having the GPS coordinates and speed, I was able to figure out all sorts of things, with the exception of exactly what happened to cause the Jeep to behave like it did.
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