I understand why Dorothy left...

Had a great day today! Jane decided to give me a day off and behaved (more or less). We headed further west from St. Louis early in the morning and cruised on 70 to get as far as we could. The speed limit there is 75mph - and I'm pleased to report that it was no problem for Jane to cruise at 80mph for hours on end with the A/C on and the engine turning 3500rpms. Mileage was pretty good under these conditions, but I still spent a lot of time at the gas station because of how far we were driving. So, I ended up with about a hundred of these pictures...

Not much to say about Kansas, but I will say that their BBQ is excellent!! We stopped at Biemer's BBQ just outside of Kansas City - GREAT food (only BBQ I've ever had that didn't need sauce) and the people were super nice! The manager wanted to hear Jane's story and in return he gave us some nice coozies. 

Aside from that, we spent a lot of time looking at wind turbines and scrubby brush. Rolling hills and/or flat land as far as the eye could see. The wind farms were interesting at first - apparently those turbines spin at a few hundred miles an hour somehow - but they got old fast. Glad we didn't have to run a 13 hour drive today like we did on Monday! 

We stopped at the Sternberg Museum to see some of Kansas's best fossils. My favorite was a 40-foot long mosasaur!

Also highly entertaining was their dinosaur simulator arcade machines. Meant for children, but I took one over for a while to learn how to survive the Cretaceous as a Triceratops (an essential life skill). 

Once that got old we headed downtown to eat at Gella's Diner, a famous restaurant in the area. I managed to wedge myself in a tiny parallel parking spot on main street - very impressed with that as I am not a seasoned or even remotely competent parallel parker, especially in a vintage Mustang with the turning radius of a large truck. I thought it would make for a cool shot though so I was determined to get her in there!

Nothing else to report really - more driving tomorrow as we head further west. Weather is supposed to be pretty crappy, unfortunately. It will be a big problem if there is too much rain, as the mountain passes outside of Colorado Springs flood badly ever since the wildfires destroyed the majority of the vegetation on the slopes. So, we'll see!

Kelly signing out again! I apologize for the jumbled and kind of terrible blog post, but I've been watching Sharknado 2 while writing this - enough said! I promise it will be better and more interesting later this week. In the meantime, here is a shot of Jane looking just as clean and lovely as she was when we left home 1300 miles ago!

Also, you may want to check out my dad's blog, which he will be updating for the parts of the trip that he is with me. He's a much more concise writer than I! Just hit this link here: http://davehmustang.blogspot.com/

A series of useless endeavors and silliness, with some driving in there too

Well, the past 3 days have certainly been an adventure! I’ll just go with a chronological sequence of events…

Saturday:

We left Saturday at 10AM with the intention of making it to Lexington, KY to hang out and see some horse farms and the tracks. 

All was going well and Jane was cruising excellently - even with the 3.25 rear gearing, she has no trouble maintaining 75mph speeds for long periods of time. Then round about noon, the engine just… died. No stuttering, no crazy business, just dead. So I coasted to the side of the road and put on my blinkers and poked around some with no indication as to what could really be wrong. We did find that the fuel pump, while it was turning on (we could hear it), was not generating any pressure at the throttle body. Very strange. Eventually after a couple of minutes it ramped itself up (heard change in tone of the pump), generated 40psi of pressure, and we hopped back onto the road.

Drove another hour at which point the pump died again. And then again. And again, with increasing frequency. So we stopped at the nearest town, which was Wytheville, VA. Made it to the gas station (the pump died right in the entrance to the parking lot for a 30 second period, which was hilarious because it was apparently the only gas station in town and everyone was trying to get into it). We then spent the next couple of hours calling around the parts stores trying to find a pump that would work. For whatever reason, none of the parts stores in town carried in-tank fuel pumps (???? why???), and the guys who worked there were less than useless. So I called the Oreilly’s the next town over to see what they had, and the guy there gave me the number of a speed shop to try. The speed shop had nothing but gave me the number of a local hot rodder to try. The local hot rodder unfortunately also had nothing, so I was back at square one. The worst part was that I couldn’t get a pump shipped in to me until Tuesday, which was just useless! There was no way I was going to stay in Wytheville, VA for three days (especially as the local hotels were for some reason a whopping $179 a night). So, we said, “screw it!” and decided to limp Jane the 3.5 hour drive home. At this point it is 4PM.

We started driving and initially the pump was okay (the first 15 minutes). Then it died again. On the side of the road, we found that NOW (this hadn’t happened before) turning on the emergency flashers caused the fuel pump to also turn on in conjunction with the flashes. Didn’t matter if the key was on or off. Ohhhhhh yes, this has now upgraded into my favorite - a whopping big electrical problem! Now, I redid the entire wiring harness earlier this year and put in an AAW harness. But I was very careful not to do something like, say, crossing the fuel pump wire and the parking light wires. You know, things that actually are pretty easy to avoid. But now somehow they are feeding each other. And this is a huge, huge issue.

Anyways, the problem continues to get worse and eventually the flashers stop working altogether, which I guess is great because it means that the pump also does not come on at intervals with the flashers. But this now sucks because it is getting later (7PM) and thus darker and I now have no emergency flashers to tell people that I am on the side of the road. The fuel pump is also dying much more quickly now - at first it was every 5 miles, and then it was every 3 miles, and then it was every mile, and then it was every half mile. Just the worst! So we stop to get dinner at least. The funny part is that I chose an exit that had food only over this long, shoulderless bridge. So we are stopped at this exit with the car off, hoping to let the pump chill out for long enough that we can make it across the bridge when we next start it up. Now that was a silly experience - just staring at a bridge for 15 minutes like I’m about to go into a showdown with my worst enemy. We made it across the bridge though and pulled into the gas station parking lot, where I had had enough of this wiring problem. At this point the lightbulb had gone on - I had had no electrical problems until this point, and I had had the AAW harness in for multiple months. HOWEVER, I had recently had a security system installed… by someone who was not me… you see where I’m going with this.

I opened up the dash and found a gigantic cluster you-know-what of wiring. These people had spliced into some crazy stuff, despite ALL of my wires being very clearly labeled. I had at this point found the source of my electrical problem. But I couldn’t see anything immediately totally wrong, so I performed my second favorite repair procedure (the current favorite being “kicking it until it works”): rummaging around. I shoved some wiring around, having exactly 0 idea what I was really doing, and magically the flashers started to work again and the pump worked when it was supposed to! What great success!

From there we booked it home the last two hours with nary a hitch. Whatever I had done had solved my electrical problem. Ta-da!

To recap, I had now driven 9 hours in one day to end up exactly where I started, but now with an unknown electrical problem. Joy.

Sunday:

(this paragraph full of technical stuff) Today was the reckoning day. I pulled everything out of the dash and cleaned up the wiring that the “security” people had done. Security, my ass. I also completely rewired the pump under some paranoid suspicion that the Powerjection EFI was doing something crazy and not giving the pump enough voltage (remember, the original symptoms were a pump that was running funny and creating no pressure). Before, the Powerjection powered the pump. Now I wanted the pump wired with 12V power, with the Powerjection triggering a relay. And I wanted the pump to be on a larger gauge wire. Because I didn’t want to unpack the car but I did have to run a new wire all the way to the back of the car from the engine bay, my dad and I devised a series of solutions to drag the wire through (mostly by hooking things with coat hangers). Somehow that was actually successful and so the pump was wired. We got a relay, hooked the pump into the AAW harness (which conveniently has a “fuel pump” wire), and rewired the rest and we were golden! Only had a bit of time to take her for a test drive before we had to go to bed but everything seemed ship-shape. Still furious about the security wiring, but the problem was at least fixed and we didn’t even need a new pump!

I shudder to imagine that I would have spent three days in Wytheville, VA at an expensive hotel room to find out that a new pump didn’t even solve our problem.. that would have induced a volcano-level amount of fury, I’ll tell you that.

Monday:

Well, now instead of getting to go to Lexington with a nice relaxed drive, we had to do a 13+-hour straight run to Missouri to get to my grandparent’s house. Joy! We left before the crack of dawn at 4AM. My dad started the day off driving because I am totally useless between 4 and 6AM (as are most people, to be fair) and before we knew it 5.5 hours had passed with no trouble at all!

Here’s a shot of the last East coast sunrise Jane will see for quite some time:

After 5.5 hours my dad was ready for a nap so we swapped off and I drove for a bit. Made it about 2.5 hours til - surprise! - the car died again, just when we had been lulled into a false sense of security. Hmm. By now I had become an expert at being on the side of the road and diagnosing this problem, having done it at least 25 times 2 days ago. The pump was doing the same thing as before - turning on but making a funny sound, and not making any pressure. Now this pump was an almost-new Walbro that my friend had given me, so it didn’t make sense for it to be dying already. But danged if it wasn’t. Because of the new wiring we were able to rule out low voltage and the Powerjection system as the cause. We knew that the pump would always have 12V as long as the Powerjection was triggering the relay. And it’s impossible to only partly trigger a relay. So, we concluded that the pump was just going bad.

Start adventure #2 in which we made friends with the parts store guys in Lebanon, TN. We went to the local Carquest and the service guy there (who never gave me his name, unfortunately) was INCREDIBLY helpful. We pulled pumps left and right looking for a stock pump that would work for me - inlet, flow rate, and pressure had to be right. Unfortunately, their computer and the Internet was being pretty useless in telling us about the flow rate on the pumps. One pump’s flow rate was listed as “27”. 27 what? We have no idea. Gallons per hour, liters per hour, gallons per second, who knows. Eventually our new friend said “screw it” and called “his guy”. Life lesson: someone always knows a guy. You should always call that guy.

Turned out he was a young dude who raced a lot and did quite a bit of hot rodding. He said he had a Walbro pump that he pulled out of his racecar a short time back (swapping it back to a carburetor). We said “bring it”, he brought it, I gave him some cash, we shook hands. I was now in possession of the thing that would (hopefully) get me back on the road for good.

The Carquest guys (again, above and beyond, just the greatest people) opened up their warehouse for me to bring Jane in to work on her out of the heat. My dad and I tore down the trunk in record time - probably 10 minutes flat, which was super impressive considering that we had that thing stuffed full of camping gear. It was then a simple 5-minute job to plop in the new pump, and another 10 minutes to put the trunk back together. She fired right up, which at this point is not a ringing endorsement of functionality, but at least nothing was leaking or immediately on fire. I said goodbye to my new friends and we were back on the road, now with a racecar fuel pump.

Unsurprisingly, Jane ran fine the next 5.5 hours like a charm. You see, Jane likes to destroy things in threes. Usually the way it works is she kills two brand new parts, and then lets the third be. I have been through three power steering pumps, three radios, three temperature senders, three thermostats, and three ignition systems this way. If I have installed a new part, there’s a nearly 100% chance that I’ll be installing it at least one more time before it works completely. So I’m very hopeful that Jane will let this fuel pump be for a long time.

As for how Jane is driving on the road, she is just perfect. She’ll turn 3200rpms all day long at 75mph in the heat with the A/C on and not get a lick above 210*F. The rack is very steady at speed and there isn’t any wandering or jerking around, except when I get grabbed by the draft made by semis or bad crosswinds in the mountain, neither of which I can do anything about due to the aerodynamics of the car. Even then the car is very steady. The rear suspension is… well, it’s trying. Honestly there is probably upwards of 300lbs of extra stuff over the rear axle right now, and the car is doing a pretty good job of acting like a chopped hot rod (that is, she is sitting LOW). I’m glad that I put in the adjustable rear shocks as I was able to crank them up a bit to keep bottoming out from being as much of a problem over big bumps. Won’t improve the ride height of the car, but at least keeps the alarming BANGs down to a minimum! Front suspension is perfect. The interior is EXTREMELY liveable for two people thanks to the addition of the console and the cargo tie-downs. No hot feet, no hot air coming up through the transmission tunnel. All of our stuff is right there behind us but nothing rattles. My only complaint is that the fuel gauge only works half of the time, which is kinda annoying sometimes - mostly I just fill up every 200 miles just to make sure. Oh, and mileage has been getting better and better as the trip goes on. Not sure if I am getting better at not driving like an ass, or if the EFI is tuning itself out better for highway driving. Either way, I started the trip on Saturday with a fuel mileage of a whopping 13mpg (AHHH!!!) and at the end of the day yesterday my mileage was up to 18.5mpg. Typically I run closer to 20mpg combined, but I am willing to accept 18.5mpg because of the extra load, fast highway speeds, A/C, and distributor badly needing a recurve (the 20mpg was on a brand new dizzy, which of course died on me a few weeks back so I put back in the old 289HiPo dizzy). I believe the 13mpg was partially caused by the fuel pump’s stupidity if fuel pressure was fluctuating, but who knows. Either way, it’s not low anymore so I am totally happy.

The odd thing about this car is how time seems to pass when driving it. I drove for an incredibly long time yesterday and it felt like 3 hours. I can’t figure out if I’m time traveling, or if the car is releasing a calming sedative with the exhaust, or what. But it is the easiest thing in the world to get in that car and just drive. When I’m out of the car, I’m worried about things - you know, like fuel pumps dying - but when I’m driving, there is not a thing in the world that could bother me. It’s like entering a total zen state. So, I guess I must have done something right when I built her.

With that, I’m signing off - I’ll leave you all with some pictures of our drive. Stay tuned for another update from somewhere further west later this week!

Cool tunnel in the NC mountains somewhere:

This is not me:

This person really likes Jesus (not sure how Jesus bumper stickers will help you get into heaven, but they seem convinced):

Kentucky!

The flatness of this land tells me I must now be in the Midwest:

Actual Hell's Angels! (did not think they actually cruised around doing Hell's Angels stuff... silly me). They came by me in a huge pack and cut right in front of me, kind of scary to have a biker go around you and cut right in 2 feet in front of your bumper:

A cool suspension bridge over one of the big rivers:

The end of the day is the best time to be driving:

Three guesses where I have been... and the first two don't count:

An Introduction

Hello, my name is Kelly. It seems a little odd to type that, like I'm writing a letter to a pen pal that I've never met. I suppose that's what I'm doing, really... writing a letter to the internet. So welcome readers! I'm happy to have any.

First, a little about this blog. The tagline makes it pretty obvious, I guess - I created this to chronicle my adventures in a 7-week, 7,000 mile road trip across America and to share them with the world. Part of the purpose of my road trip is to see the best of the American West, which is well known for its endless roads and not so well known for its endless wifi. Nevertheless, I'll try to update as much as I can so that people can get a taste of what I get the pleasure of experiencing! This first post will be extraordinarily massive so that I can provide the background for this expedition, so bear with me.

Now for me... I'm 23 and newly graduated. I majored in geology and marine biology in school with a concentration in paleontology. Obviously, science is my deal. I love adventuring, exploring, discovering, learning, and experiencing. So it's really no surprise to anyone that as soon as I graduated I announced my intention to take a huge trip as the first chapter in my post-academia life. And it’s really no surprise to anyone that I actually followed through with my intentions, as I am well-known for my “bulldog” nature. Once I get an idea I’ll grab it in my teeth and I won’t let go. Which brings me to the next part…

The car I’ll be driving. Meet Calamity Jane, my 1966 Ford Mustang fastback.

I’ll take the opportunity here to give a brief (for me) history of how I’ve come to be driving this 48-year-old monstrosity on a cross-country road trip. I’ve had this car for nearly 4 years now, and everything that this car is is a direct product of my inability to let something pass me by. Back in the spring of 2010, I decided that I was tired of sitting on my butt twiddling my thumbs and that I should learn to work with my hands. And if I was going to work with my hands, it might as well be something useful, so I decided that auto mechanics would be my new thing. But modern cars are very complicated and honestly not that fascinating to me, so I decided that I should get a vintage car to start my new hobby off. And naturally it followed that if I was going to get a vintage car, I might as well go for the gold and get my dream car - a 60’s Ford Mustang. Specifically, I wanted a ‘65, ‘66, ‘69, or ‘70 fastback. It had to be powered by an all-American V8 and a manual transmission - nevermind the fact that I had no idea how to drive manual. I figured I would learn when I got the car in a “sink or swim” type situation. The car needed to be in serviceable condition with no structural body rust or damage (though poorly running engines, fudged transmissions, and dented or rusted exterior sheet metal was fine with me). Mostly I wanted a good “starter project” car. I spent a few months perusing Craigslist and eBay looking for THE car. There are many cars in this world, but I assumed that only one would be exactly right for me.

In September, I stumbled across a Craigslist ad for a ‘66 fastback with a 289ci V8, 4-speed Toploader transmission, running and driving, with a decent body. It was nearby so I hopped over to the guy’s house to take a look. When I saw that car sitting in his driveway I was a goner. Couldn’t have any other car. Someone could have put a concours gold Shelby GT500 in front of me and I would not have looked twice at it. So, that weekend my new old car came home with me. It was the start of an absolutely absurd, totally ridiculous, extraordinarily frustrating, and oftentimes hilarious partnership. After the first month the car had already earned her name - Calamity Jane.

Fast forward 3 years. My obsession with this car had really only gotten worse and I was determined to build her into my perfect ultimate daily driver. This included extra safety (3-point seatbelts, late model Mustang seats, LED taillights), better street handling (rack and pinion power steering, improved disc brakes, throttle body EFI, subframe connectors), and some creature comforts (A/C, a radio with an auxilary port, and that’s about it). It took me three years of weekends to get her exactly right, but in April 2013 she was DONE. I took her to my college in North Carolina for finals week for a “shakedown week” in which I ironed out all of the problems that could and would crop up. This was done in preparation for driving her halfway across the country to Colorado, where I had a summer job lined up.

I got to drive Jane for three days. On the morning of the fourth day, I was driving to pick someone up for lunch and was rear-ended by a guy who was going about 40mph faster than I. Jane was totaled, for lack of a better word. The entire rear half of the car from the doors back was completely crushed. The guy had been fiddling with the dash controls on his brand new Toyota Yaris and failed to watch the road for who knows how long, which is how he ended up with his car’s front end in my car’s trunk. Jane took care of me though and I came away with only minor whiplash and no cuts or bruises. I was completely devastated. Here was my car, my dream, my crowning accomplishment, my everything… and it was smashed.

I took a day to have a complete meltdown and then I set about saving Jane. She took care of me, so I was going to take care of her. And, you know, bulldogs don’t like to let go of their bones. So my family and I fought with insurance, we got what we needed to fix her, and slowly Jane was brought back to life. I got her back from my good friend and body man on December 18th, 2013. 

I then had to reinstall and rebuild a lot of my accessories. Jane was officially put back on the road on April 15, 2014 - just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the Mustang. To celebrate, we headed to Charlotte, NC for the Mustang 50th Birthday Party at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I met a lot of members of the Vintage Mustang Forum (where I learned to build Jane) and spent most of my time hanging out with new friends wandering around looking at all of the vendors and cars. Though the weather really put a damper on things Saturday, on Sunday everything cleared up and all celebration participants were given the opportunity to have a go at the track! Of course I wasn't going to miss that opportunity, so we zoomed around a bit and had a blast. The speed cap was 70mph so it was nothing too wild, but it was still a great experience. 

The event photographer made fun of me because I was crusing around the speedway with my arm hanging out the window... but hey, we weren't going incredibly fast and I hang my arm out the window at faster speeds on the interstate!

Anyways, at some point in time during the rebuild I had decided that there would be no better way to celebrate Jane's rebirth and the 50th anniversary of the Mustang than to take a cross-country road trip. That brings us back to the whole "road trip across America" part that you probably came to this blog for originally (and what you're likely more interested in). Back on track now...

You may have realized by now that I am the kind of person who tends to make absurd decisions based off of initially logical or at least somewhat sensical ideas, which are then warped until they fit my idea of "really interesting". So of course I didn't want to just go to California and back. I wanted to see the best and most beautiful of America (the natural parts, at least, as I still have an aversion to cities for fairly obvious reasons). to make it a truly cross-country trip I wanted to start at the beach on the east coast - and what better way to start a trip than with Mustang Week 2014 in Myrtle Beach, SC?!

I headed down to the East Coast's biggest annual Mustang gathering for a weekend of cars, sun, and sand with my dad. It truly was spectacular. Though the crowd was mostly late model Mustangs, there were quite a few classics scattered around. And man, the whole place REEKED of horsepower. I spent the weekend chatting with people about cars - one of my favorite pasttimes these days - and watching people showing off on the strip. Traffic was absolutely abysmal but it was very cool to chat with other Mustang owners at stoplights and to cruise around looking at all of the other cars. Jane was wonderful the entire trip (which caused intense suspicion on my part; Calamity Jane is not named Calamity Jane for nothing) and we had a great time.

Here she is parked next to the Roadtrippers Mustang (purely by accident) - thought it made for a cool shot:

We stopped at an old school gas station on the way home to fill up:

I spent a few days at home gathering all of my gear to get ready for the really big leg of the trip - the part where I go to California! I decided that camping would be an interesting thing to try out. Though I've been camping before, I've never tried to camp out of a very small, very fast, very loud car so I thought I'd give it a shot. First step was modifying the car a bit into a true road warrior. I made some brackets for the rear seat to clip a cargo net to in order to be able to tie down all of my gear on the fold-down deck. I figured that it would not be great if I had to brake suddenly and then had a cooler go flying into the back of my head, so this step was essential. I also added mudflaps to the rear (which I cut to fit out of universal mudflaps, then secured with removable clips) so I wouldn't completely destroy my paint on gravel roads. Jane likes to dig holes in the dirt, you see.

As a final touch, I created a sun shade for the rear window with the help of my mom. The fastbacks have enormous greenhouse-like windows, and man does it get hot in the parking lot! I didn't want my stuff to melt so a sun shade seemed like a pretty good idea. Additionally, it gave me the opportunity to show off a map of the United States, to which I will be adding route details and information as I progress! I think it turned out great and I am very excited to be able to fill it up.

As of today, Jane is packed and ready to go on our trip! I have deliberately not stated my exact destinations, but they will be revealed as I hit them and move on. My dad and I leave tomorrow morning at 9AM sharp (hopefully). Stay tuned for more updates on the insanity!

I welcome any comments, queries, advice, etc. I can be reached on this blog or through calamityjaneblog@gmail.com!

P.S. - I apologize for the lighter-colored text, as for whatever reason this blog won't let me type consistently in black... not sure why!