Total Eclipse (or 70% of one, I guess)

8/21/2017

I must confess, I slept in a bit today. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me – it’s a little over 500 miles home, and it’s an 8 hour drive straight through. That translates to more of a 10 hour drive when you include all the stops for gas and screwing around when I’ve just been sitting for too long. But hey, it’s not like I could leave early – I wanted to see the solar eclipse in Roswell, NM, dangit!! And I’m certainly not in charge of when the sun decides to scoot behind the moon.

So I hung around all morning and finally drove into town a ways to see the UFO Research Center before the eclipse. If you’ve never heard stories about Roswell, this would probably seem like a pretty strange thing to find in a small town. But it’s not, not for Roswell. You see, sometime back 1947, someone saw a UFO here. And then for whatever reason the town just wouldn’t let it go. Here they are 70 years later, and they are still completely fixated on this UFO thing. But hey, when you’re in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, I guess you have to find something to occupy your time.

Anyways, they built a UFO Research Center right in the middle of town. You pay 5 bucks and then you wander around reading newspaper clippings and interviews and official statements and witness testimonies and all kinds of things like that, until you find yourself kind of wondering if maybe these people are really actually on to something. You can hang out in there for hours poring over documentation of this one event and subsequent possible UFO sightings, and every possible reason for the government cover-up is discussed in detail. It’s enough to make you want to get your tin hat out. But it’s also a really interesting snapshot of history – and it’s really kind of cool to think that maybe there is something else out there.

I had figured that Roswell would be a good place to see the eclipse, just on the off chance that the aliens come to watch the eclipse as well and make a stop past their favorite town in the States. So around 11:30, I left the museum and wandered around outside, looking for people who had solar eclipse glasses. I hadn’t had the foresight to get a pair for myself, of course, and there were not any pairs left for sale in town by the time I thought of it. Since Roswell was only expected to get 70% coverage, it wasn’t supposed to get particularly dark, but the sky did get a weird cast to it. Kind of a late afternoon level of light, but with the light coming from directly overhead. It looked a lot like a photo that’s had its exposure turned down too much.

 

Just a little bit odd.

I lucked into find a pair of solar glasses laying on the ground, and so got to see my first eclipse! It was pretty underwhelming, I’ll be honest. The sun just turned into a little sliver, kind of like a particularly orange, particularly small moon. If you take a picture of it with a non-fancy camera, like mine, then it’s even more underwhelming:

But hey, a solar eclipse isn’t a common thing to see, so I was glad I saw it. And I was doubly glad that I was seeing it from little old Roswell, rather than a large city in the path of totality. My friends in the large cities were reporting complete chaos and foolishness – people stopped dead on the highways, running around in the streets, that kind of thing. I didn’t have any of that to worry about as I hopped on the road and headed out on the last long leg of my trip. After all, I was headed into west Texas, where the oil rigs and cattle outnumber the residents by quite a large margin.

While the weather was sunny at first, as the hours droned on it turned to rain, as weather is wont to do in west Texas. I don’t mind driving Jane in the rain, not one bit. There’s just something really calming about the low roar of the motor running counterpoint to the squeaking of the windshield wipers and the pattering of the rain. It’s kind of the same feeling that you get when it’s raining outside and you’re snuggled in your bed, all nice and warm and dry and sleepy. Except it’s impossible to be sleepy when driving Jane, so I guess it’s kind of not like that at all.

And, of course, the last day of a trip is not complete without one last silly adventure. As I was driving through the middle of nowhere, I saw a pretty large storm cell up ahead. That’s the good thing about the American southwest, you know – you can see the weather coming for hundreds of miles, which is nice even if you intend to drive straight through the middle of it anyways.

Well, this storm cell was centered right over a tiny town and was just sitting there, not moving. I arrived and quickly found that this town had somehow succeeded in building every single one of its intersections in a low spot in the terrain, resulting in every single one of its intersections being completely flooded.

So I had two choices:

1) Pull off at the gas station and wait it out for a few hours until the storm moved on and the water drained.

2) Put brawn over brains and drive through the flooded town to escape and get home faster.

I think we all know what option I picked.

I mean, sitting for hours in a little town – a town with NO stores open because it’s Sunday, no less – just did not sound great. Right? Right.

Plus, my estimated time of arrival at home was already 11 PM. So adding a few hours onto that time would put me at home very late at night, which would wake up my neighbors and make them hate me.

Well, it just seemed more reasonable to drive through the puddles. I mean, how bad could it be?

I placed myself behind a van that looked like it had similar clearance to Jane, and proceeded to do a very bad thing: I drove through puddles that were quite a bit deeper than I should have been driving through. I’m not talking, “Oh boo hoo, this puddle is three inches deep and it’s getting my tires wet!” Some of these puddles – small ponds, really - were deep enough to reach the bottom of the sill plates. And my methodology for getting through them was to hit them going probably a bit faster than I should have been going, resulting in a massive rooster tail of water fanning out from both sides of my car approximately 15 feet up into the air. I figured if all the water was in the air, it couldn’t be used to drown my car.

Stupid as that logic is, my car did not drown, which perhaps proves me right.

Unfortunately, it was the last puddle that did me in. After driving a slow mile through flooded streets, the end was in sight, and I confess that I hit that puddle with a bit of gusto. Upon exiting the other side of the puddle, my vintage V8 abruptly sounded like an unmuffled underwater diesel. Hoo boy.

Of course, it was raining and I didn’t feel like crawling around under my car to figure out what the issue was because then I’d be wet for the next 6 hours of driving and that would just be silly. Obviously. So I did what any insane person would do… I drove right out of that rainstorm at a brisk 85 MPH, Jane bellowing like a wildebeest (an underwater wildebeest, that is). The alternator was struggling to charge, having been repeatedly dragged through several hundred gallons of water, but it was hanging in there. And quite frankly, I didn’t care if I had left part of my exhaust system back there in that flooded town. I was fully prepared to drive the rest of the way home that way. Sometimes I just get a little bullheaded for no good reason at all and this was one of those times.

Fortunately, the next town over was dry, so I pulled over and crawled underneath Jane for a look-see. Turns out that the problem was actually quite simple! The force of the water hitting one of my mufflers had separated it from the intermediary pipe. The pipe was still pointed into the muffler, more or less, and the muffler was full of water, which is why she sounded like an underwater diesel. So I kind of dumped the water out of the muffler, hammered it back onto the pipe, tightened the exhaust clamp back up again, and went on my merry way.

Oh, and the alternator eventually dried out and started charging properly again! Hurray.

With that, we motored on through the rest of west Texas, enjoying first a gorgeous Texas sunset and then a lovely star-spangled sky after sundown. The hours rolled on and on and we kept cruising down the blacktop, Jane's motor humming contentedly as we settled properly into the "long haul groove". Drive, pause, gas up, drive some more, repeat. 

As the clock struck 11, we rolled into the safety of my garage, finally home after six weeks of nomadic life. There’s a trail of power steering fluid running up the driveway from a leak in a seal who-knows-where in the steering, she’s covered in dirt and bugs and mud, one side of the exhaust is hanging on by a thread (and a pair of vice grips), but we’re home. And hey, she even has a new ring gear and starter, and a new old decklid to boot! I’d call it an even trade. I've got a few days of pretty intense cleaning ahead of me, and then Jane will return to daily driver duty, becoming just an "ordinary car", if she could ever be that.

Have I ever mentioned that my Jane is a complete rockstar? I mean, this is a car that gets abused. Heavily. I am merciless to this monster. It seems like I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing with it, and despite that, she always finds a way to get me home in one piece. This car has taken me through extreme rain, dust, wind, heat, hail, snow, and now flooding, and has never really come out the worse for wear. We go screaming down the highway at a billion miles an hour, then go off-roading down pothole-filled washboard paths, then jump back on the highway and howl down the road some more. Usually there’s a car show in there too, where she must do double duty as a show pony and a daily driver, as well as being an occasional rabble-rouser. I require that my car be able to burn rubber, eat up the blacktop, win shows, turn heads, traverse any terrain, and do all that reliably for thousands and thousands of miles without any maintenance whatsoever. Sure, this trip had a little silliness with that starter issue. But when it comes down to it, Jane tends to only have a complaint if I’m somewhere where I’m equipped to fix it with friends, so even that didn’t really set me back any. When it comes down to it, this car takes care of me far more than I do her. And that’s why Jane’s my “forever car”.

This trip has been pretty insane. Every trip that I take is a little different – not just in the destinations, of course, but in the overall “feel” of the voyage. This trip’s theme, if I had to verbalize it, would be “persistence”. Sometimes adventures can be a bit of work. Sometimes you get thwarted by huge wildfires, heavy smoke, weird issues, and unforeseen events beyond your control. But in the end, with the right application of persistence, you can push through and twist things back around to make the adventure awesome again. The first day, I felt worse than I’ve ever felt in my life in extreme heat and that huge amount of traffic. But I turned around and made a great new friend who reaffirmed my belief in the basic goodness of people. Partway through the trip, I got chased out of Washington by the wildfires, and ended up discovering a great little national park – Lassen Volcanic! I had that starter/ring gear issue, and that turned into a hilarious adventure at the top of Tioga Pass, followed by a lovely visit with friends I hadn’t seen in quite some time. It all comes around if you persist.

Part of the greatest thing about adventures, especially solo adventures, is that you have the flexibility to view and react to anything however you choose. That can really make or break a road trip. It’s up to you to find your way and to keep things positive even if the going gets a little tough. Jane makes that all easy. It just can’t be a bad day if I’m behind the wheel of that car, heading for the horizon. Every day’s an adventure, even if the adventure of the day is an unforeseen repair.

Despite the occasional silliness, this trip I saw some incredible things. I visited a new country – Canada – where I saw two of their most famous national parks, Banff and Jasper. I saw five new states – Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington – and eleven new US national protected areas – Mount Rushmore, Badlands, Devils Tower, Little Bighorn, Glacier, Olympic, Mount Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Lassen Volcanic, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon. I also participated in a week-long car festival/show/extravaganza where I met tons of new people and made some new friends. Not bad for six weeks of travel!

 

A map of all of the states that Jane and I have traveled through in the past few years.

I’ll put up one last post after this one as a follow-up with some stats and some “best-of”s. But I guess this is pretty much it for 2017’s trip. It’s always sad coming home and going back to “reality”. But reality is a necessity sometimes… after all, it’s when I’m bored that I get the chance to start planning next year’s trip!

Until next time… Kelly signing out.