I stopped in the town of Houghton last night and, before the clouds opened up, it looked like quite a nice place, with a large university, and one other claim to fame.

That’s pretty important in the northcountry!  But since I had a nice flat place to park, and I had passed the 5,000 mile mark on my trip the day before, I thought it might be time to check on the health of my Baby Blue.  Toyotas are the cacti of the car world, and seem to thrive on neglect, but he’s been taking care of me very well, so I want to make sure he gets some love too.

Of course, I’ve been keeping an eye on things in general, watching my oil and temperature gauges, doing a walk around most mornings, but I wanted to look a little deeper.

First I popped out the air filter, and aside from some dust, it looked almost still new.

Then I checked the pressure in all the tires.  They’re supposed to be on 32 psi, but they were all running equal at 31.5 psi, so I’m happy with that.

The tires are wearing evenly as well, so I don’t have any alignment problems, and that’s pretty clear from the handling too.  I can see by the wear bars that I’m probably not going to make it through the year in these tires, but I was thinking of getting new chunkier treads before the winter anyway, so if I keep going at my present rate I think that will be good timing.  A quick look at the brake pads while I was under there showed me that I have plenty of wear left.

Under the hood I found that my auxiliary battery had loosened up, so I locked that down again.  No signs of other abrasion or wear.  Brake fluid, power steering fluid,  and radiator fluid all looked good, and I’ve got no leaks underneath either.  For some reason I was assuming that I was running a full synthetic engine oil and so could afford to be a little bit lazy about when I replace it.  Checking the FJ’s oil, though, I think it’s a bit too thick to be a synthetic.  And although it doesn’t look too bad, I think that I’m going to take an afternoon in Duluth, MN for a pit stop to replace it.  That will be close to 6,000 miles, and that’s probably a good point anyway.

I also fixed a wiper blade that wasn’t sitting right, and looked again at a stone chip in the windscreen that I found a couple of days ago.  I doesn’t seem to be getting any worse yet, but it does go all the way through, so I need to look at my insurance and see if I can replace it.  If so, I should be able to get an appointment at a Toyota dealer a day or two down the road, but for now I can just keep an eye on it.

So that’s it.  I think Baby is humming along quite nicely.  After I change the oil and filter in the next couple of days, and check into my options for the windscreen chip, I think we’ll be ready for the next 5,000 miles!

After the check-up, I noticed a few spots of rain, so got inside.  I was just in time, because then the skies opened up with the most rocking thunderstorm I’ve seen in a while, with the rain drumming on the roof, thunder rolling overhead, and lightening flashing all around me!  I kind of love the power and energy of storms, so laid back on my bed and lost myself in it for a while.  And anyway, I was dry and safe inside Baby Blue.  We take care of each other like that.  We’re mates.