Southwest Vacation, Day 5

This was to be a long drive day -- a long drive to Canyon de Chelly, our next tour visit, and then on to Kayenta for the night. Well, along the way I noticed my temperature gauge was climbing. We turned off the air conditioner and turned on the heater (yes, we were in Arizona in July) to draw heat away from the engine. It climbed all the way to the top before I could pull off at the next exit. At least there was a gas station there.
Unfortunately, the gas station was no help. The lady working there was annoyed that someone would want to pull her away from watching television, but did manage to tell us that there was a repair facility about 6 miles down the road. Preliminary analysis indicated the top hose had blown.
John and I jumped into his truck (fortunately we had two vehicles on this trip) and drove down the road to the recommended location. Note: We were officially in the middle of nowhere. The place had a wooden painted sign that said "Tire and Lube" and there were a couple guys under a pickup in front of the place. The garage itself was loaded with miscellaneous stuff strewn about -- seemingly no order whatsoever. Next to the building were a bunch of junker cars.
After explaining our problem to the guy that seemed to be the owner, he instructed his worker to go get the top hose out of some Buick he had in the junkyard there. The worker found a handy screwdriver laying on the floor of the cluttered garage and went off, returning in a few minutes with the hose. We told him it looked a bit short, so he got another section of hose from somewhere, some clamps, and a section of galvanized pipe to hook it all together. He told us we could use this for a makeshift repair until we could get to some real civilization. For all this, he charged me $5.00.
We drove back to the gas station where the Suburban was, and upon closer analysis, we found the top hose was only loose. We tightened it up. All the coolant was gone out of the 'burb' and the gas station with the not-so-friendly lady didn't have any. They did have a sink in the back room, so we cut up one of our water jugs to use as a bucket and filled the radiator with water only. When I started the truck, we found the real leak -- the hose that went from the water pump to the engine. A much smaller hose, our makeshift parts wouldn't work. We took the parts and drove back to the Tire and Lube place and explained to the owner. He took the hoses back and was going to return the $5.00, but we told him to keep it if he could find us a hose that would work. He found some old section of hose off an air conditioner or something -- anyway he said it should be strong enough. We took that back, cut it to size, and managed to get it on without the need of removing the water pump -- or the engine.
All patched up, we were ready to drive, but we really needed to get to someplace that could permanently fix our kludges and put real coolant in instead of just water. Clearly Canyon de Chelly wasn't such a location. We were told the nearest place with an actual repair facility was Gallop, NM.
Using the database in my GPS, we found a radiator repair place in Gallop and called them. They said they could fix us up. Using the GPS for navigation, we drove there with no problem. When we got there though, they said they were too busy (thanks for that info on the phone). They did tell us where the Chevy dealer was though, and we drove there. Their repair center was also too busy, but they had a lube place that could handle us in a couple hours. They flushed out the radiator and deemed our hose repair worthy of a permanent fix. They did have some concerns about the thermostat though and told us to drive around Gallop for a half hour or so before hitting the road, just to make sure everything was working OK. Since evening was approaching and Gallop was a long way from Kayenta, we took off anyway and the 'burb' performed great...
...except along the way, we noted one of the tires that had been deemed "OK" by Discount Tire in Flagstaff was going low. We stopped and tried to pump it up, but noted the valve stem was leaking. We were close enough to be able to drive on to Kayenta and spend the night.