~ The Cross-Country Saga
(and we're not talking CMS athletics here...) ~

It's now been over 3 years since our memorable drive in my cute, but elderly, little 1984 Ford Station Wagon from Upland, California to Washington, DC. Having finally acquired a scanner and stumbled across the photos I took during the trip, I remembered the saga I'd written up at the time, and thought it might be amusing to dredge it up, insert the photos and share. At this remove it of course doesn't seem nearly traumatic as it was of the time, but still, not something I'll be doing again any time soon... And now, onto the text as written in 1998...

For those of you planning a cross-country saga of your own in the next few months, and for those of you with a morbid fascination with everything that can go wrong on long car trips, and just in case some time in the future, having repressed or Disneyified the events of this week, I start thinking, hmm... maybe I'll do that again, I thought I'd break down, day by day, our break downs along the way to D.C. If you don't want the gory/boring details, they can probably be summed up by simply saying about our trip that we met more mechanics, highway patrol officers and good samaritans than most people do in a year, but we made it here safe and sound, if rather lighter on cash... Feel free to skip to the end for a list of first-hand experience recommendations hind-sight- is-20/20 caveats, as the first part is mostly self-therapy... and now, on with the adventure... it all started innocently enough, on May 28th...

PRELIMINARY: THURSDAY May 28th

• Loaded car & left Upland
• Arrived with no problems in Vegas (235 or so miles)

DAY 1: SUNDAY May 31st

• Re-loaded car (I let some things at home, and reorganized others) & set off around 9:30 am
• Took the 93 South down to Boulder City and over Hoover Dam, through to Kingman. It was hot. And sunny.
• At Kingman, switched over to the I-40 East.
• Just before the exit to the tiny town of Seligman (about 170 miles from Vegas) whose claim it fame is that the longest extant portion of route 66 starts there, the "check engine" light came on. So I pulled over. A lot of hills, hot day, so I hoped it had just overheated. We popped the trunk, didn't see anything obvious, waited 20 minutes and then tried her again. Engine light still on, so limped off the exit ramp and to the first garage we saw. Diagnosis: thermostat fried, and hand-sized hole in lower radiator hose. While those were fixed, we spent an hour sipping soda at a near-by cafe.
• By 3:00 we were on the road again. The car was, however, not happy. We could only squeeze 25 miles an hour out of it up those long hot grades. It became obvious there was still something wrong with it.
• Sometime that afternoon, I started smelling something weird (we had the windows down, air-conditioning off of course) and after a few minutes the engine light came on again. So I pulled over. This time, there was bright green liquid obviously fizzing out of an upper hose, were it met the metal part it was connected to. Soon, a highway patrol officer stopped and showed us how to cut the end of the hose off (to eliminate the cracked part) and re-attach it to the engine.
• Limped into Flagstaff around 7 or 8 at night (255 miles for the day), found a motel, walked to nearby McDonald's for dinner. Also picked up a new radiator cap at an auto parts store, because the Seligman garage had told us mine wasn't quite working right.

DAY 2: MONDAY June 1st

• Took the car to the nearest garage, a Shell station at 8 am. Left it there, went back to the motel to wait for phone call. He called around 10:30, to tell us in addition to the radiator problem, we also had a broken axle spring, which was why the back of the car was sagging so low (which we had noticed and attributed to over-loading). So at 12:00 or so, the second phone call told us everything was fixed: new radiator installed, new anti-freeze solution in the system & new rear axle springs. so we took off.
• After a few hours driving, started smelling that smell again, so pulled over before the engine light could go on again. Sure enough, another hose spraying green stuff. We waited until it stopped spraying, and then I duct-taped it the best I could (it was kind of hard to get at, even with my small fingers) and we limped on to Gallup, New Mexico, having made it a whole 180 miles that day.

DAY 3: TUESDAY June 2nd

• Re-duct-taped, checked out of the motel and limped to the Pep Boys across town. Bought each of the hoses brought up by their computer as being part of the cooling system. We made a half-hearted attempt to replace the duct-taped piece ourselves, but the screw was hard to get at with a simple screw-driver (which was all we had) so brought it to the Pep-boys service station, where they kindly put our hose in for a mere 30$. And so we were off, around 11 a.m. or so.
• About 65 miles later, smelled that smell yet again. Pulled over. Engine dripping with green, but we could quite tell where it was coming from. So we limped off the nearest exit to the hamlet of Milan, New Mexico, where friendly Guaranteed Auto Repair mechanic replaced the offending hose with the replacement we had while telling us of his legions of children. When we told him of the new radiator, and showed him the work receipt from the Flagstaff job, he pointed out that we had been way over-charged, and should try to see if we couldn't get a refund by lodging a complaint with triple A or the credit card I used to pay.
• At Albuquerque, we stopped at a mail-boxes etc & sent 45 pounds of stuff on by mail, hoping that by lightening the load, we might have less mechanical problems.
• We made it 20 miles into a long empty stretch of road before the last few New Mexico towns, and then around 5 o'clock, the engine started rumbling and bucking and I immediately pulled over. Opening the hood revealed that this time, the entire engine had been sprayed with red when the transmission fluid cooling line had somehow worked its way out of the radiator. A nameless man stopped to help us, and showed us how to make a temporary o-ring out of duct-tape to hold the line in. We emptied the bottle of transmission fluid I had into the tank and limped on to a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, from which I called triple A, who sent a tow-truck. By this time, it was 7 or so, so he towed us to a motel, in Moriarity, New Mexico (200 or so miles or so from where we started that morning)

DAY 4: WEDNESDAY June 3rd

• Called Triple A first thing in the morning, and got ourselves towed to a repair station recommended by the tow-truck driver. The mechanic poked around for a while, fixed our transmission cooling line problem in a few minutes, and then showed us how the water pump's main shaft was wobbling all over the place, and thus not doing its job efficiently, and thus not allowing the radiator to function properly. So we watched as he seemed to tear out the front half of the engine piece by piece until he could get a the water pump, and install a new one. And once again we were off, around noon this time.
• We had almost made it to Texas when the smell returned, and we found that the same hose whose end had cracked before had cracked again. This time, however, we had a replacement. We were debating what to do when a car pulled over, and a late-middle-aged Californian with a good stock of tools came to ask if we needed any help. Which, of course, we did, so he helped us to install our hose -- which was accomplished in a half hour or so -- and we were off again. The weather finally started to get cooler; it was very cloudy and we even got a few drops of rain. From then on, we didn't see much of the sun, and the highs remained mercifully under 60.
• Then, just when we thought we were going to make it Amarillo, Texas the smell returned, we pulled over and found that the one hose that we didn't have (Pep Boys' computer had not listed it) had gone. More duct tape. Texas highway patrol stopped to ask us if we needed help, and told us that there was a mechanic at the next exit that stayed open till 8:00. It was about 7:20 then, so we went on as fast as we could, arriving around 7:40. He replaced our hose for us very quickly (he was the least talkative mechanic we had, maybe that's why it went so fast) and we drove the 20-30 miles left to Amarillo and found a motel. So far, we had only managed 900 miles in 4 days, with 1,500 left to go...

DAY 5: THURSDAY June 4th

• Finally, we started a morning without having to wait for repair places to open and for the repairs to be made. We had just lost an hour due to crossing a time zone, so leaving at 6:30 for us was actually 7:30, but still it was by far our earliest start so far.
• We had noticed a small puddle of transmission fluid over by where the cooling line had detached itself before, so when we pulled over for gas later that morning at a station with a mechanic, we had him look at it. He tightened a bolt, charged us and sent us on our merry way. And merry it was, it was our first day without needing to pull over to deal with some crisis. But we pulled over every 50-100 miles anyway, and checked oil (which was dropping much more quickly all of a sudden, though we hadn't been able to spot a leak) and adding if necessary, and also checking transmission fluid to make sure that leak had been taken care of.
• We passed through Oklahoma city, where we switched to I-44.
• We stopped for the night at Miami, Oklahoma, just 20 miles short of the Missouri border, having covered 450 miles.

DAY 6: FRIDAY June 5th

• Left Oklahoma early, made good progress, pulling off the highway completely (rather than on the shoulder) every 50 miles or so for a quick check. We got rather good at it, like a pit-stop crew at a auto-race...
• Everything was going great until St.Clair, Missouri, 34 miles short of St Louis. We pulled off the high-way for gas; as I was turning in to the gas station (which was very steeply sloped up) the engine stalled. With my manual reflexes, I did what I would have done when the honda stalled (which it had frequently done, especially when I was learning to drive) which was to gun the key so that it would catch and I could continue up the hill. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that automatics don't start right back up again, and those seconds I lost before putting on the break caused me to roll backwards, in to a woman in a large dodge truck who was turning in right behind me. Her car was unscratched, I just cracked a red break light, and I assured her that I knew it was all my fault, but she insisted on calling the police and making an official report of the incident. Hello new insurance rates!
• After that, though, everything continued to go smoothly; we switched to the 70 in St Louis, and made it through all of Missouri and Illinois to Terre Haute, Indiana by that evening. Another 400 + miles for the day

DAY 7: Saturday June 6th

• We started early, and drove with continued frequent checks and oil additions -- that we were leaking had become obvious, but it was a small enough leak that keeping the level high seemed to be working well enough.
• We stopped a little earlier than usual in Washington, Pennsylvania, just inside the border, having crossed the rest of Indiana, Ohio and a 20-mile wide finger of West Virginia.

DAY 8: Sunday June 7th

• The end of the tunnel in sight, we started early, and made it through the rest of Pennsylvania, a small chunk of Maryland, and at last into Virginia, arriving at my Aunt's house around 1 or 2 in the afternoon.

VICTORIA's WORDS OF EXPERIENCE TO THE FUTURE CROSS-COUNTRY VOYAGER:

• Try to find another way besides driving your own car, especially if it's more than a couple of years old.
• If you do decide to drive, try to find some other way to get most of your stuff where you're going, like shipping it, paying movers, buying new stuff when you get there, whatever. Light car: happy. Heavy car: not happy.
• We averaged 300 miles a day, getting up at 6:30 a.m. stopping for a brief lunch, finding a motel around 6:30-7 p.m., going to bed around 10:30 and dealing with mega mechanical problems in between. If you were lucky enough to avoid problems like that, I still wouldn't count on getting much more than 400 miles a day with two people switching off unless you're really going to push yourself, not to mention your car, which might like a chance to cool down. You also have to consider what time restaurants and motels are open and available in the middle of nowhere. Of course for the truly adventurous, there's always camping, but I don't know, I found that after an exhausting day a shower and a clean comfy bed were more of a necessity than a luxury...
• Make sure that in addition to screwdrivers you have various wrenches. Other good tools/things to have: rags, duct-tape, flash-lights, bottles of water, anti-freeze, transmission fluid, oil (we used 3 quarts), power steering fluid, extra radiator hoses, spare tire, air-gauge, funnel. And a heat-gauge, rather than an idiot light. One mechanic pointed out that you can buy a heat-gauge kit for 15-20$ and then either install it yourself or pay a mechanic about a 1/2 hour's time to install it for you. Or, keep your climate control set to "hot" (though off) and occasionally put your hand up to it. If hot air is coming out of it even though it's off, than your engine is running hot. If this goes on too long, stop doing whatever's making it so hot for a while. Some sort of communication device like a cellular phone or CB would also have been helpful.
• Pray for cool weather; one of the reasons the last part of our trip went so much better was because we left the land of burning sun, entered into a greener environment and were lucky enough to coast along the outside edge of a major storm system. We didn't get rained on, but everywhere we went the highs were in the 60s.
• Don't accelerate or pass when you're going up a hill. Get above the speed you'll want to be on the hill before you get there. And then maintain or drop. Coast down hill as much as possible.

Things to have checked/ done to your car before you leave

• Unless they've been replaced really recently, get the hoses replaced, or do it yourself. Most of them are pretty easy to do, though it'll probably take a while.
• Park the car for a few days making careful note of what the ground under it looked like and watch for the tiniest leak. Get any suspicious drips looked at & fixed.
• Get the radiator cap tested, and replace it if necessary.
• Poke around inside the radiator well & make sure that the little openings that lead to the rest of the radiator are not all gunked up. Consider having the whole thing routed and cleaned out (cheaper than having it replaced like I had to, but it takes longer, because they take the whole thing out and let it soak in acid for 6 hours or so)
• Make sure the tires are good and inflated to the pressure posted on the plaque in your car.
• Check all fluid levels & battery; change the ones that haven't been changed in a while.
• Clean off the deposits from the inside of the distributer cap and the battery terminals.

So what happened to the car? Well, we drove it for for 6 or 7 more months around town, out to Manassas (45 minutes each way), etc. It worked okay for quite a while, and then there were a few "incidents" and finally around March or so we just had had it, not so much with it breaking down as with living with the fear every time we drove it anywhere, that it COULD break down any minute. So we stopped driving it. I walked to work, John took the bus, on weekends we walked to the grocery store about a mile away and back-packed a week's worth of groceries. Meanwhile we researched, and finally in April we walked down to the Dodge dealership in Springfield, took a look at the 3 or 4 late model Neons they had in stock, and picked one, a 1998 4-door sedan in "Black Cherry" with 12,000 miles. Plunked down the two largest checks either of us had ever written, and it was all ours. And we all lived happily ever after. The end. (Well, not quite "the end"... a month or so later, I donated the old car to the American Cancer Society; they sent a tow truck for it, and it was good-bye for good. Poor little thing, despite everything, I still harbor a fondness for it. It was so cute! )