Part One-The North Carolina State Bluegrass Festival

 PART ONE NC Bluegrass Festival. 

August 14, 2024

With the departure date for the North Carolina State Bluegrass Festival trip fast approaching, we were facing several issues. The Silver Bullet which has already cost thousands in repairs was still in need. The ASB controller had finally bit the dust, rolled over and died, or my personal favorite meme, the magic smoke has leaked out! 

Magic smoke on a circuit board!

Prior to The Great Summer Road trip of 2024, the ABS module was on again, off again and in fact we departed on that trip with it not operating. I didn’t really care about the anti-skid function, pulling the RV I don’t think it would do much anyhow. My problem is when the unit is in fault condition you can’t use cruise control nor the electronically activated four-wheel drive. Cruise control is almost mandatory when you are on a cross-country trip and driving for hours at a time. Four-wheel drive is not necessary in normal driving but when you need it you need it.

ABS controller from our truck

Bashing our way through the horrible interstates in Tennessee and Arkansas, the jarring potholes brought the ASB back to life. It worked flawlessly for many hundred miles before needing another rest. It started working again on our four-day blitz eastward on our way home. 

Why didn’t I just fix the thing you ask? Well, I couldn’t, there are no replacement parts available, and no one seems to know when or if ever they will be made. The few ASB repair facilities have disclaimers about the Ram truck units with fault code C2200, they can’t fix them. 

My only option was to take a chance on buying one from a junk yard and hoping it would work. Of course, the junk business knows about the whole fiasco and prices their junk parts accordingly. I purchased one out of Canada for $400 and installed it about a week ago.  As I write this, we are several hundred miles into the trip and so far it is working.

We got lucky dodging this storm.

The second trip launch concern was Hurricane Debby. We watched and waited until we had a pretty good Idea what the storm path would be and what we could expect from it. A week before hurricane landfall I rearranged our schedule by moving the first two scheduled stops to the tail end of the trip. 

We departed several days after the storm in clear dry weather and crossed all the flood prone areas before the water from North Carolina could flow south. Even the Grass field at the Tom Johnson Event Center was dry and solid ground. If the field had been saturated we probably would have needed four-wheel drive.

Everyone here is parked on Grass