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Midland Part 1
April 07, 2006This is not good.
It is 10:17 a.m. At the moment...Andy's car is being towed to the Firestone Auto Repair shop. We are waiting for a rental car to show up to pick us up.
All of the makings of a very bad/long day, and we're almost 280 miles from home....in Midland, Texas.
It all started last night......
We just rolled into town when his car started acting up.
We were 1 exit from the hotel. The Plymouth had made it about 278 miles of a 280 trip, and the electronics systems started going goofy. Lghts and gauges flashing, then the lurching and dying of the engine on the side of the highway.....it was about midnight.
I literally push it off the highway down the exit ramp where we coast into a parking lot and juuuuuuust happen to catch a nice guy with jumper cables to see if we can revive the car.
Now, I'm no mechanic or anything....but I know a little. But it was dark out there, and didn't realize that we didn't have the cables hooked up right.
They started smoking almost instantly......it's about 12:10 a.m. I reach to pull them off the battery, and the cable literally melted away from the clamps.
After walking to the nearby 7-11 (about 2 blocks) and making it there about 2 minutes before the sweet old lady was going to lock the doors for the night....we had a new pair of cables.
Charging the battery, and getting the wounded car started was easy...getting it to the hotel wasn't. We had to pull over and jump the car again before we made it.
Left yesterday at 6 p.m. from Wichita Falls, and the head finally hit the pillow about 1:30 a.m.
I think there's a soccer game somewhere we have to cover in about 3 hours.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
