Peace in Phoenix

 

10-25

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I find that after an extended stay in one spot, all my stuff tends to migrate… everywhere. It’s a bit like experiencing one of those expanding foam dinosaur toys – you know, the ones that are stuffed inside this teeny tiny egg, but then you put them in water and all the sudden they become these impossibly large dinosaurs. My gear is all tetris’d into the car’s various nooks and crannies with extreme precision, so it appears to take up hardly any space at all – but then give it a little air, and poof! It expands.

And much like those foam dinosaur toys, it is very difficult to re-condense everything back to where it fits back inside the egg (or the car, rather).

So it was that I spent the majority of the morning puttering around, cleaning and organizing and packing (and repacking) and slowly stuffing the dinosaur back inside the egg. I’ve been playing this packing game for a full decade now, and I’ve got it down to a science. So really most of my morning was not consumed with actual packing so much as it was with cleaning up my camping gear while I had the chance, before the next leg of my trip.

…And with cleaning eggs out of a stainless steel pot. Having an induction burner to cook on for the week has been a fun diversion and an interesting novelty, but god help me if I ever have to cook eggs in a stainless steel pot again. The sticking is unreal. By the end of the week, I had had the thought to cook the eggs in more oil than usual, but that mostly just gave me a resulting additional film of firmly baked-on oil in the pot. I think I must have spent an hour over the past week just scouring the thing. I really didn’t want to leave a bad impression with my AirBnB host – this being a place I’d really, really love to come back to – so I spent some extra time on the pot again and got it mostly partly somewhat a little bit pristine.

Eventually I got tired of playing domestic, so I called it quits and hopped in Jane for the short(ish) drive south to Phoenix. On the way out of town, I encountered a very interesting (and gross) pile of haze, which was apparently the result of dense Phoenix smog getting trapped in the adjacent mountains. Ugh. But it did look cool.

We thrummed on down the highway, scrublands and strings of low mountains giving way to arid desert punctuated by spatterings of small sharp peaked hills (the remnants of ancient lava flows, in case you were wondering). Jane hummed along contentedly the whole way, and I tried not to think about the valves eroding a little more with every rotation of the engine.

In a short time, I entered the distant western suburbs of Phoenix – although it appears that it’s not so distant anymore. The last time I was here was a full decade ago, and my destination was way on the outskirts of the city. Now, it’s been consumed by suburban sprawl – and the few remaining open tracts of land already feature carefully manicured roads ready for development.

I found myself a bit surprised upon successfully reaching my destination – sure, Jane is usually very reliable when out on the road, but man that was a prime opportunity to really ruin my day. Nevertheless, arrive we did, and she wasn’t even making any new, louder, or more horrifying noises!

So where was I? Well, I was at Bryan and Hottie’s house! They’re friends, but more accurately they’re family, not by blood but by long friendship. Bryan and his wife, Hottie (who has just always gone by that name, apparently) were my landlords when I lived up in Colorado, and we became close friends in the years I was up there. It’s been more than a decade and we still keep in touch, and every time we catch up it feels like no time at all has passed! They now mostly live in Phoenix, so naturally I had to visit while I was in the area. And, importantly, Bryan has his own stable of vintage cars, so his house is a trusted stop for repairs.

I pulled up and of course we got to chatting, and the time slid by effortlessly as Jane cooled peacefully in the shade of a desert willow. When we realized that afternoon was rushing headlong towards evening, we got to work on fixing Jane up. Bryan had retrieved a few new rocker arms from his local Autozone for me to install, and was fully prepared for a long, messy job. Imagine his surprise when I had them popped on and adjusted in 10 minutes flat!

Two rockers are clearly... well, off! Is this where the phrase "off your rocker" comes from???

Rocker removed, looking at the nice carved valve tip and the chunk taken out of the spring cap... yikes. Best ignore that.

New rocker put on, and now you can barely see the damage! Out of sight, out of mind.

The second one was even worse because clearly it had been having issues for quite some time, given the multiple wear marks on the spring cap. Can't say that I'm super observant sometimes...

End result: two new rocker arms as a patch until I can get home - and then I'll need two new valves since the tips aren't square anymore. Alas.

Each rocker arm cost $13, so my total investment was ~$30 (well, ~$50 considering I opted to keep a spare handy) and less than 30 minutes of time. Now all that remained was to put the valve cover back on, start the car, and find out of the repair worked. We both held our breaths as I turned the key and the starter spun to life, crabbing as it persistently attempted to rouse the V8. A scant couple of seconds later and the motor fired and roared throatily, bellowing its triumph to the suburbs of Phoenix – and doing so without a single suspicious tick. Success!

I love these kinds of jobs. The perfect satisfying on-the-road repair! Enough to make you feel very competent and pleased with yourself, but not enough to be an annoying time-consuming fix.

Jane now being back to ship-shape, Bryan and I decided that some fun was in order, and he had just the ticket. There was a cruise-in happening locally, and with a Halloween theme to boot. I thought about bringing Jane, but ultimately decided to let her rest in favor of taking out Bryan’s Yenko Camaro (a clone, but a good one). So off we went.

At the cruise-in, multiple people hit me with, “Well if you’ve got a classic Mustang, why didn’t you drive it here?! These cars deserve to be driven!”, so I immediately regretted not bringing Jane. Although my excuse of “Well I had to drive like 16 hours from home to get here in the first place” was impressive enough, I guess. Ah, well. We had a blast looking at cars and Halloween costumes, then headed off to a local brewpub for dinner when we got hungry. After that we returned home to watch Christmas movies (Hottie starts the Hallmark Christmas movies on loop in October). All in all, it was a fantastic little slice-of-life kind of day, a welcome brief departure from the usual drive-hike-drive-hike-drive-die flow of my road trips.

Tomorrow, I’ll get back on the road and continue south on my way home. But for now, this is perfect. Until then… Kelly signing out.