Warning! Warning!

I spent the last couple of days on the road, traveling down to southern California to visit my dad & Marty (and probably Mark. Hi, Mark!). Generally an uneventful drive, though there was a point while along US 395 that my dashboard lit up like a very small Christmas tree with warning lights.

Having just had the car serviced on Tuesday, this struck me as an unlikely event, but nevertheless I found the first place I could to pull off the road and dug out my owner's manual to see what all the indicators were trying to tell me. Nothing definitive. All the lights meant something might be wrong, but one might mean brakes or tire pressure, another might mean temperature or battery, another was "general master warning." Great, very helpful.

Being in the middle of nowhere, there wasn't much I could do about it so I drove on until I came upon a rest area where I could turn the car off and let things cool down in the event something was running too hot (I had been driving a lot over the previous 20-some hours). I took a little nap and restarted the car after an hour or so. All lights were normal except the "general master warning." Better? But still of concern, so when I arrived in Bishop, CA, I found an auto parts store and asked if they would plug in their little computer gadget and tell me what the warning code was and maybe identify the problem. After doing their thing they told me, "it says your check engine light is on." Gee, thanks. Very helpful.

But, when restarting the car, I found all the lights were back to normal. So checking the codes reset the system, I guess, and now all read fine. OK.

My best guess is that at the point the dash lit up my hybrid battery was getting depleted and maybe I hit some control that asked for one volt too many that made it unhappy momentarily. Then the "master warning" was going to stay on until it was told it had been looked at and then it was happy again.

Hopefully that's all it was. Because I'll be turning around and doing the return 1,200 miles or so in the next ten days or two weeks.

Meanwhile, this was more of a get-there-quickly trip rather than last year's take-an-extra-day-to-see-stuff version, when I went along the Oregon coast and then detoured to Vazquez Rocks. Maybe I'll be more leisurely going back. Or maybe I'll be too anxious to see the cats to make stops. We'll see.

I did stop for a couple of minutes at Tulelake, as right alongside the highway south of town is the site of the Tule Lake "segregation center," the most heinous of the World War II concentration camps for Japanese-Americans. Unlike at Manzanar, the National Parks service has not made this into a museumesque place for public visitation, but I thought it was north noting nonetheless. It's fenced off with razor wire and can only be visited in the company of a ranger, certainly not in the middle of the night by a single tourist, but there is a commemorative sign:

While stopped along the way I snapped a shot of the low clouds in the high elevations.

Now it's time to get ready for the Marinerless game one of the World Series. I'm sure there will be posts on that to come.