8/13
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Now we’ve gotten to the depressing part of the trip. The
part where I’m just driving… and driving… and driving… until I get home. You’d
think that by now I would be better at finding interesting ways to break up the
west Texas monotony, but I just haven’t.
At least this year I opted to break up the drive into a
day and a half to reduce my misery a bit. The plan was to spend a leisurely morning
in Santa Fe, drive 6 hours to Snyder, stay there for the night, and then leave
the remaining 4.5 hours for the next day.
There’s a couple reasons I did that. The first kind of
makes sense at least: I didn’t feel like driving 11-12 hours on the last day,
because that’s a long drive and I get tired. But the second reason (which is
actually kind of the real reason that I opted to do this) is much dumber: it
always rains horribly on my last day headed home, and I wanted to find out if I
could only get rained on for 4.5 hours instead of the full 11 hours.
A spoiler: I had no such luck limiting the amount of rain
I had to endure.
But I’ll start at the beginning. I’m rolling the 8/13 and
8/14 posts into one another, because the long drive across Texas is really not
remarkable at all. And quite frankly, very little of note happened to me on Friday
the 13th, which was a little surprising!
I took my time getting going in the morning, like usual,
opting to go to a nearby breakfast diner (the Pantry) for a huge and
all-too-filling brunch. You really have to fill up on food when you’re in New
Mexico, because the green chile just isn’t the same anywhere else in the
States. So I had a gigantic chorizo and green chile omelette, which of course came
with pancakes and fruit and bacon and all kinds of other stuff. Once I had
polished that off and was feeling suitably bloated, I hit the road! Nothing
like driving when you’re imminently about to be in a food coma.
Fortunately, it was a gorgeous day, with those beautiful
giant fluffy New Mexican clouds drifting across the sky. I spent the first few
hours of driving thinking that I was, indeed, going to successfully avoid a
large part of the rainstorms that usually plague me on the last day of driving.
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| Boy, this is what you call "big sky" |
But you all know that that’s not how this works. I always
encounter blazing heat on the way out of Texas in early August, and hit massive
storms on the way back in. And apparently, that applies no matter how many days
I take to get back to central Texas.
So, here’s a couple photos of what my view looked like
for a couple of hours of the drive:
 |
| Wow, traffic barrels, semi trucks, AND rain! A trifecta of grossness! |
Wow! Terrible!
Fortunately, Jane and I have endured many, many terrible Texan
rainstorms, so it’s not too much trouble. But less fortunately, this year my
tires are on their last legs, and wouldn’t you know it, old hard tires are not
the greatest for hydroplaning resistance. So, things were a little more white
knuckle than I would have liked.
The storms cleared up in late afternoon, just in time for
me to pass by some massive windfarms. I know that some people find the wind turbines
terribly unappealing. But I just don’t. I think they look like giant minimalist-modern
pinwheels, lazily spinning away their days in currents of wind far above my
head. Pristine white, they are picturesque in their gleaming uniformity,
scattered across the landscape in such a way as to appear both arbitrarily planted
and systematically placed. There is something just truly beautiful and
completely alien to them. They seem like something that couldn’t possibly have
been built by humans – rather, they are sized for giants, behemoths that must surely
stride the vast landscape when we aren’t looking or when we’re fast asleep.
I always find the windfarms out here to be particularly enthralling, as they are built to share land in tandem with a myriad of oil wells. The turbines tower over the landscape, reaching into the skies to harness the power of the heavens even as pump jacks peck at the ground methodically beneath them, hard at work extracting what lies beneath the surface. It is a fitting juxtaposition of the old and new, a perfect cross-section of the continuation of humanity.
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| Turbines overlooking some old dinosaurs |
My old dinosaur and I did finally pull into Snyder, TX in
the evening. Not much to do in town, but that’s okay; we were just there to
find somewhere to bunk for the night. I did catch myself considering the fact
that if I pushed on to Austin that night, I could be home by midnight. But the
point of splitting this run up into two days was to find out if it would rain
on both days! And knowing this drive like I do, I knew that more rainstorms
would inevitably whip up if I decided to keep moving – and driving through extremely
rural west Texas in a pounding rainstorm at night is not on my list of fun
things to do. So, I picked a reasonable hotel and bedded down for the night.
-----------------------------------------------
Saturday, 8/14
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The following morning was another slow one, mainly due to
the rainstorms in the region (of course). The radar showed them clearing by
late morning, and I saw no reason to drive in the rain any more than I had to,
so… I didn’t! I only had a “quick” 4.5-hour drive to get home anyways.
I took off at about 11 AM and everything was sunshine and
butterflies. I had timed the rainstorms perfectly and it looked like I was
going to successfully miss all of the big storms on the way home. Awesome!
You all have probably noticed the odd wording of that
statement, and deduced that Something Happened. Which, of course, is true.
I made it about 30 minutes down the road and got just on
the other side of Sweetwater, TX, when disaster struck! And by “struck”, I
mostly mean that actually I hit something, not the other way around. There was
a big ole pile of roadkill in the middle of the road and I attempted to straddle
it instead of swerving. Turns out that was not a good plan, as it was a bit…
sturdier… than expected. After passing over top of it, Jane very unexpectedly (well,
truthfully somewhat expectedly) sounded like a very loud straight-piped diesel
truck.
I pulled right over on a convenient gravel driveway and
crawled under Jane to investigate. And wouldn’t you know it, but that stupid
driver’s side muffler had gotten yanked right off. AGAIN. This happens about
once a year, because that particular muffler always wants to hang a little low
and I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly well-connected. Some of you may
remember that several years ago I managed to yank this very same muffler off
the car by hitting a puddle, of all things. And it has certainly been off
several times since then!
Anyways, normally the fix is to just stuff the muffler
back onto the intermediate pipe and proceed on with the day. But apparently the
exhaust system had REALLY had enough of me doing this, as this time the exhaust
hanger rearward of the muffler snapped right in half. I quickly discovered that
without that hanger, the muffler hung about an inch off the ground when
reinstalled. Given the number of obstacles in the road on any given paved piece
of west Texas, I figured that proceeding with the muffler this way would be a
great way to hook it off the car AGAIN very quickly. Quite frankly, I’m
surprised that the pipes and muffler have never wadded themselves up under the
car, and I wasn’t about to push my luck on this one. So, the problem was that I
needed to figure out some way to patch the hanger up or jerry-rig a replacement,
and it needed to be good enough to get me several hundred miles without me
worrying about it.
Eyeballing around the interior of the car didn’t yield
any good materials for a confidence-inspiring fix, with the best candidate
being a short length of wire hanger. That hanger ended up not being long enough
to wrap around the exhaust pipe, so that was out. So, time for Plan B, which
relies on me using some good old Southern sweet-talking charm to convince
someone to bring me what I need.
I called the local Ford dealership first, as sometimes
they can be persuaded to help a classic Ford in need. No dice. Then I tried a
local wrecker, then Autozone, then Carquest, then NAPA. At NAPA I had some
success, as a local mobile mechanic happened to be in the store at the time
that I called. They handed the phone over to him and I was able to get his
contact information, but his response was not inspiring – something about “he
could bring me the parts I need after he does some stuff on his project car”.
Hmm, I guess my sweet-talking skills are rusty.
So I called AAA to see about getting a tow – shamefully,
my second of the trip – the entire 2 miles back into town. All I needed was a
roll of exhaust strap, which could be found anywhere, but sometimes you just
have to do things the hard way I guess. I was still pretty peeved about having
to do this though.
Well, AAA contacted a local wrecker, who then called me
to confirm my location. I asked him if he could just bring me a roll of exhaust
strap and be done with it, to which he replied that he couldn’t do that without
losing his job. Fair enough. But then he finally came through with a ray of
hope: he said he “had a guy” who could probably help.
Let me tell you, everyone has “a guy” for some things,
and they are always exactly the person you need.
This particular fellow’s “guy” was named Brady. The
wrecker gave me Brady’s contact information and said he’d hold on coming by to
pick me up, as I was still kind of betting on the NAPA mobile mechanic. About
30 minutes passed with me going back and forth with this mobile mechanic,
getting progressively more pissed off, when a guy showed up in a truck. It was
Brady, and he had come straight from O’Reilly’s with a roll of exhaust strap
and some spare hardware. Bless the man. I told the mobile mechanic to go kick
rocks, and Brady and I got to work.
Now I told Brady that truly all I needed was the parts
and that he was free to go, but he insisted on staying to help out. So the two of
us wriggled under Jane, stuffed the exhaust system back together, used the
exhaust strap to hang it back up in place securely, and then gave everything a
good shaking to make sure it was sturdy (it was). Thankfully, none of the
roadkill I had hit was plastered to the underside of the car, so at least we
didn’t have to deal with that adding insult to injury. Nevertheless, we did end
up quite covered in dust and rocks, but Brady didn’t seem too miffed. He was
just happy to help out. And that, my friends, is why Brady is “the guy”,
probably to quite a lot of people.
After we got Jane all patched up, we paused to shoot the
shit for a while - an essential component of any hot rod repair experience.
Eventually we both realized we had places to be, so I promised Brady a beer if
he ever finds himself in Austin, we shook hands, and off I went, ready to run
over more piles of roadkill.
Well, I didn’t run into any more piles of roadkill. What
I did run into was… yep, all of the rain bands I had been trying to avoid.
For the most part, the rest of the day was spent inside a rainstorm of varying magnitudes. So my view looked like this for a few hours:
 |
| This photo actually taken during one of the light points in the storms, and you can tell because you can actually see the road and the lines on the road through the windshield! |
At one point the storms got to about the worst I’ve ever
been through, and I pulled off at a Whataburger to sit them out for a bit. Normally
I would try to push through, but the problem was that I was getting stuck in
the same rain band for long periods of time and because road conditions were so
bad, it was nearly impossible to escape them as we were traveling at similar
speeds. Jane is a trooper, but the roads were very seriously flooded and visibility
was somewhere around 10 feet at best. Not a good situation with a muscle car
with no safety/traction systems to speak of, especially riding around on old
questionable tires. And ESPECIALLY with an exhaust system already known to be
easily removed by standing water! Sitting in peace with a milkshake and a book for
a half hour waiting for a gap in the storms seemed a small inconvenience in
comparison.
Eventually we did get back on the road for the final leg
into town. The rain had mostly subsided into drizzle, which is wonderful to
drive in. And then, an hour outside Austin, we hit “the bubble” – the point
where storms seem to disappear in the Hill Country, leaving behind nothing but
sunshine and beautiful weather. And that was even more wonderful to drive in.
 |
| Ah, Hill Country, how I love thee. |
Jane and I finally arrived safe and sound early in the
evening, some two hours later than anticipated. But hey, not bad for a day so
fraught with pitfalls. Just like always, Jane ran me home faithfully (well,
more or less) despite the circumstances. And just like always, I trusted her to
do it. It wasn’t a peaceful, relaxing last day of driving, but sometimes that’s
just how it is. We made it through anyways. And hey, I found out that even if I
split the long last day of driving into two days… it’ll still rain both days,
not just the second. I can’t say I’m surprised by this revelation at all.
Now, Jane is ensconced in the garage, and I’m ensconced
in the house, sorting through all of my gear and unpacking. There’s quite a lot
of melted trail mix in my stuff, it seems, and I’ve just found the bag of
clothes that I was looking for for the past week. It’s pretty incredible how
much stuff fits in Jane, despite her small size.
Although this trip was shorter than my usual yearly jaunt,
both in length of time and distance traveled, it is just really good to be back
on the road and feel “normal” after being all cooped up for the past year. I
was so glad to be able to attend my friend’s wedding in person in Denver, and
to get to visit with all of my other friends in the area, many of whom I haven’t
seen for years! And truthfully it was actually very nice to get to take my time
going places, too – usually I have a mad dash to Reno and back that leaves me
with little time to mosey around and hang out if I feel like it. I much prefer
a more lackadaisical free-form style of traveling whenever possible, and I
think I have lost sight of that in recent years. It is getting harder and
harder to travel spontaneously, without reservations ahead of time, but going
to smaller lesser-known attractions, as I did on this trip, helped mitigate
some of those issues. That’s something I’ll have to keep in mind in the future –
I’m sure I’ll keep going to Reno to see friends, but maybe I’ll make it an
every-other-year thing so I have more time to explore other nooks and crannies
in the country on off years. I’ve seen many incredible things over the past 7
years of traveling with Jane, but I have an entire continent to explore and
there’s always more to see.
For now, though, I will return to everyday life, feeling
refreshed and ready to tackle whatever comes my way. Tomorrow, I’ll deal with
the coolant problem – it seems like a very long time ago that I blew that core
in Lubbock, but I know the coolant is still lurking in the carpet. I can smell
it! Ugh. I think I’ll powerwash the carpet to see if it can be salvaged. It
sounds like it’ll be a fun endeavor, at least. I’ll throw my flip-flops in the
mix too, as they are still woefully saturated and starting to smell very odd.
And so starts the next Kelly-Jane adventure. It’s always
something around here.
**End 2021 Road Trip Blog** (and apologies for the extended delay in posts)
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