Our first day of travel on our Alaskan trip started on Monday July 5th and was pretty eventful. We left home around 11:45 and all seemed to be going well. We were near Davenport, IA when Larry asked me to get the copy of the route directions he had printed off from a folder in the back. I looked everywhere and could not find any folders. He pulled into a truck stop on I-80 and we both looked for the folder that had all of our documents for the trip. We could not locate. As he began thinking about where they might be it suddenly occurred to him that he had put them in the back seat of the truck to take over to the RV earlier that morning. The plan changed and we decided to just take my car over and put it on the car dolly and drive the motor home back to the house. We moved everything from the truck to the RV EXCEPT--yes the two folders with our papers for travel --one of which was our passports. We had no choice but to return home to retrieve them so we unloaded the car off the dolly and planned to just leave the motor home in the parking lot at the truck stop. As we were preparing to leave we noticed that we had lost the cover off the side of motor home for the water heater. We were pretty upset about this as well since it was painted to match the RV. We drove back to Peoria found folders and left to return to Davenport. As we were driving along RT 74 Larry spotted the cover for the water heater lying off the side of the road in the grass. We stopped and he ran back and pick it up and was amazed at the fact that it was not bent up or scratched up. We were both thinking maybe today is our lucky day. Returned to truck stop on RT 80 in Davenport and reloaded the car onto the dolly and continued on our way. We drove only about 20 miles and the 'check engine' light came on the dash so we pulled into a rest area and shut off the motor home for about 10 minutes. When we restarted it, all seemed fine so we drove on again. Another 10 miles and the engine light again came on. Again we pulled off and shut the engine off. We restarted the RV again and never had another problem with this issue. We drove to Waterloo Iowa and parked for the night in the local Walmart. We had to run the genset all night for the air conditioners as it was raining and very muggy.