New adventure, new drama

It's 2019 and it's been quite awhile since my last trip! But that's how life goes, I guess, when you don't have unlimited vacation time.

Fortunately, though I do not have unlimited vacation time, I do have three weeks saved up, and so I'm back on the road! This year's trip will, of course, have me stopping by Reno for Hot August Nights. But I'll also be tooling around western Colorado, southern Utah, and northern Arizona for a couple of weeks revolving around that event.

Jane is rocking a new Holley Stealth Terminator fuel system, which I just got reasonably tuned up as of last week (of course), so I am prepared for all kinds of strange issues. So far I've been really pleased with it, but you never know with new parts... and what I do know is that Jane loves to eat fancy shiny parts for breakfast.

With that in mind and, consequently, no small amount of trepidation, I packed Jane up and we set off for New Mexico yesterday! I've said it before and I'll say it again: this drive SUCKS. It's mostly just terrible gray flat scrubby land and oil rigs for nine hours. I took a picture and it's terrible:

Anyways, despite how terrible the drive is, I have to say that I loved it. Jane is running better than she has in YEARS (apparently I've been driving around with a massive vacuum leak due to a warped intake and the old fuel system was masking it enough that I didn't notice... no words for that one) and the weather is significantly nicer than it was last year. Last year, I drove across Texas and New Mexico and Nevada and Arizona and Southern California and it didn't get below 100*F the ENTIRE TIME. This year, we've got nice balmy 90*F weather. That's not even sweatin' weather!

We screamed across the Texas plains and into New Mexico for a good 8 hours, definitely enjoying the high Texas speed limits. Life was good, even if the scenery left something to be desired. Some rain bands did make things a little better:

And then, as I was scooting through a small town somewhere in eastern New Mexico, suddenly the motor died. I stomped the gas, but got nothing. I then swapped down into 2nd gear to see if I could bumpstart it the ghetto way, and initially got nothing... but then everything came back online and we were back in business! Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Very suspicious.

Suddenly my nice wonderful drive through rural New Mexico was an extremely concerned drive through rural New Mexico.

Well, I got about 30 miles outside of Santa Rosa, my destination for the night, when it happened again. And this time it wouldn't restart.

I checked fuel first, and verified that it was all good. The next step was to check for spark. I hooked my spark tester (basically a strobe light on a plug wire) into the coil, and was attempting to figure out a way to see the strobe and also sit in the car to turn the key, when a good samiritan showed up! Wonderful. Cecil asked if there was anything he could do to help, and I told him that I could really use a pair of eyes.

So as I cranked the car over, he looked for a strobe light and found... nothing. We concluded that the coil had mysteriously died. He was majorly bummed for me, as the coil is not a "fixable on the side of the road" kind of part.

I went and got the hammer.

He looked at me holding this hammer, and said "that can't possibly work" and I just said "you'd be surprised..." and hammered the coil.

Then, I got back in Jane and cranked the starter over... and she fired right up!!

Poor Cecil got a pretty good shock as he had been holding onto the spark tester, but he was good natured about it and told me, "Man, I didn't think that had a chance in hell of working... if you had told me I'd see something like this today I wouldn't have believed you"

I will NEVER, EVER forget the look of extreme amazement on his face. I laughed about it for another ten miles.

And then, of course, the car died again. I pulled out the hammer, and... well, bummer, the coil was leaking oil from the top, so I figured that it was probably really truly dead.

I called AAA and another good samaritan, Patrick, and his daughter Lily stopped by to stay with me. They were kind enough to keep me entertained for the hour and a half that it took to get the tow truck out to me. Fortunately I was only 20 miles away from Santa Rosa at this time, so it wasn't too big a deal. In the meantime, we were treated to this absolutely spectacular sunset:

The "DO NOT PASS" sign kind of makes it funnier.

Eventually Carlos from Ortega's Wrecking Service came to pick me up, and Jane and I took the Tow Truck Ride of Shame the last 20 miles into Santa Rosa. Boooooo.

They were able to store her in a shop for the night, and even more fortunately, one of them was headed to a nearby town to pick up parts the next day! He offered to pick me up a new coil, since all of the parts stores here in town are closed on Sundays. Amazing service and a really great dude.

So that's where I'm at now. I'm hanging out waiting on Carlos to appear with some parts, and hopefully I will get a new coil in Jane that will last long enough for me to go to Albuquerque and pick up a spare. And then... onwards!!

Kelly signing out.