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Date:         Fri, 6 Oct 1995 13:35:25 -0700 (PDT)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         "Tobin T. Copley" <tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca>
Subject:      Big Trip Report [part 12, long]

Part XII: Into the Heartland (or, "Grandma, could you help us push this thing?")

This week: Tobin and Christa drive 850 miles in one day. Christa spends some quality time with the camper, and learns to change the oil. And our camper gets a bath while driving through a mid- western thunder storm.

Hey kids! See a collection of fine photographs of Tobin and Christa on their Big Trip at --> http://www.teleport.com/~des/vw And why not join us and other list members on a road trip to the Beaufort Sea (on the Arctic Ocean) next August? Check it out at --> http://www.chaco.com/~coyote/trek

March 16, 1995 Hamilton, Ontario.

We'd crashed on a fold-out couch after arriving at our friends' place the night before, and we awoke to the clatter of breakfast preparations in the kitchen a few feet away. Things seemed not to have improved in Hamilton very much since we'd left nearly three years before, and may have actually gone downhill. Liz still hadn't managed to find a worthwhile job, despite nearly-constant "job training" programs. She was now working as an in-store shopping "detective" at the Shopper's Drug Mart: she like busting snotty-nosed teenagers ripping off eye-liners, but it was hardly a satisfying job. At least her partner, Graham, liked his work: he was a paramedic on an ambulance crew, which gave him no shortage of good dinner-time stories.

It was unseasonably warm in Hamilton; no, it was almost hot, pushing 21 or 22 degrees. We made a day trip to Niagara-on-the- Lake, and wandered around in shorts and tee shirts. Glorious.

Christa and I had lived in Hamilton for two years while I went to graduate school, so we both knew that the warm weather could disappear at any time without notice. The camper was overdue for an oil change and valve adjustment, and we had the small problem of a non-functioning starter, so we made a date for some quality time with the camper the next day.

The gods were still smiling on us, as the next day was warm and sunny and generally wonderful. The stink from the steel mills wasn't even too bad. I explained the oil change procedure to Christa, and she rolled right under and got down to it. She worked like a pro, carefully, confidently, and double and triple checking that things were as they should be. I set about checking the valve adjustments, and was pleased to see the only a couple valves were even in need of a tweak.

I rolled under the camper with our Idiot's Guide, and proceeded to diagnose our starter problem, shorting across different terminals on the starter. Ten minutes later, I had confirmed my suspicion: our starter solenoid was baked. We'd probably finished it off when we overheated it so badly trying to start the camper in the freezing cold in New Brunswick a week earlier. Oh, well, I'd just find a FLAPS and get us a new solenoid.

Wrong! After spending over an hour phoning around, I found several places willing to sell me an entire starter, but only one place that would sell just the solenoid: a VW dealership that wanted nearly $100.00 for a rebuilt solenoid. Forget that!

I decided we'd just push-start our camper all the way home. And never mind that home was over 2800 miles away.

We'd decided that Christa would fly to Winnipeg for her grandmother's funeral. And because we wanted to do as much of our Big Trip together as possible, she'd fly back to Toronto, and we'd continue on directly from there. So Christa left to spend a couple of days in Winnipeg, leaving me to hang out with our friends and revisit old haunts around town. I cajoled Liz and Graham to come to the gas station with me, to push-start the camper after I'd filled up with gas. They thought we were crazy to head off across the country in a vehicle like ours, but I knew that the starter problem was just a little idiosyncrasy, and that our camper wouldn't let us down after all we'd been through together.

The morning I left to pick Christa up at the airport and head west involved hectic re-packing of the camper, hurried farewells, and a frantic team push down Charlton Street. I jumped in, let out the clutch, and (of course) our camper fired right up, excited to be on the road again. Swinging down the on-ramp to highway 403, I checked my watch: 10:00. I had an hour to get to Pearson airport outside Toronto.

Our camper and I cruised along the highway, passing mile after mile after mile of light industrial, commercial, and residential developments, which were often indistinguishable from each other. A lot had changed in the past three years, and it took major landmarks to reassure me I was on the right road: the Ford plant, the 401 interchange, the spectacular tract housing development in Mississauga.

At 11:00, I rolled in to Terminal 3 and picked Christa up. It felt good and proper to have her sitting next to me again, and I realized how much I'd missed her, even though she'd only been gone for a couple of days. As I wound out of the airport and joined in with the stream of traffic heading west on highway 401, Christa recapped the highlights of the funeral and all the inter-personal sparring surrounding it, like a slo-mo replay. We chatted all the way to London, where we pulled over and went to the CAA office to change some Canadian money into American. We topped up with gas, and we pulled back on to the 401.

Christa fell asleep, and slept all the way to Windsor. She awoke with the change in engine pitch as I worked through the city streets towards the tunnel to Detroit. We paid our toll, drove under the Detroit River, and arrived at American customs. This was the fifth border crossing of the trip, and it took about 15 seconds to clear. Must have been because I told him I was going to visit my grandmother.

We worked our way on to I-94 and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. We passed the 200 foot Dunlop Tire just outside Detroit (one of my favourites), but didn't stop for pictures--we just had too far to go. We were getting sucked into the interstates again, passing the uniqueness of places by, moving along like drones on some sort of conveyor belt from point A to point B and missing all the neat stuff in between. We hadn't planned on driving like this; then again, we hadn't planned on Christa's grandmother dying either. Christa slept.

In western Michigan, we pulled over in some anonymous freeway development town, and made dinner in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It was nice to not drive for a while, sitting back and relaxing with my sweetie and a hot bowl of soup. We soaked the feeling in until, all too soon, it was time to roll again. We push-started, found a gas station, filled up, and push-started again. It was already well into the evening as we headed toward Chicago.

We blew through Gary, Indiana and the outskirts of Chicago, where we jumped from I-94 to I-80. We drove on through the night, our camper humming along steadily at that familiar 57 mph pitch. Rest areas and signs to towns or tourist attractions glided by in our headlights, and the traffic dwindled as the night wore on. Finally, I had to pull over and ask Christa to drive for a while. As soon as we were rolling again, I actually fell asleep in a moving vehicle for perhaps the third time in my entire life. An hour later, Christa woke me up, and asked me to drive again. I was refreshed enough to carry on, and we made it to an RV park in Davenport, Iowa at about 3:00 in the morning.

We plugged in our electric heater and fell instantly to sleep.

The next morning we overslept, got up, showered, push-started, filled up with gas, and push-started again for the drive to Marshalltown, in central Iowa. We spent a few days with my grandmother there, and stayed in the guest room at her retirement home. We borrowed her Taurus to drive to Des Moines for an overnight visit with my aunt and uncle. Boy, that Taurus is one BORING car! And the cruise control let the speed vary by a couple of miles an hour over the gently rolling hills, kicking the throttle noticeably on and off. I found it hard to believe a cruise control like that could increase gas mileage. I turned the cruise off and drove the rest of the way smoothly, at a steady speed, driving the car the way it should be driven: with my foot.

Christa and I had a great visit with my aunt and uncle. My aunt is the Governor's secretary, so we got the whole behind-the-scenes tour of the state Capitol. When we met the gov and told him what we were doing, he clearly thought we were crazy, but said so diplomatically. We drove grandma's Taurus back to Marshalltown and spent a very nice evening with her while she totally sharked us both at pool. Amazing trick shots for a woman in her 80s: if C and I had put any money on those games, we'd be seriously hurting.

The next morning, we loaded up the camper, said our good-byes to grandma, and coasted down a convenient hill to start up. We took our time putting along highway 30, back on secondary roads, and spent the rest of the morning cruising along beside beautiful Iowa farmland.

It was little cool, so we used the gas heater off and on, until it unexpectedly quit. We stopped for gas, and I started checking the heater out for blown fuses. After nearly 20 minutes of fumbling around, I found and replaced the offending fuse, and we had a working heater again. We got a push-start from a yahoo in a big Detroit Iron who accelerated our bus to nearly super-sonic speed before backing off and giving me room to let out the clutch. When I had asked him for a push, I thought he'd push on foot, not with his front bumper. By the time I felt the thump of his bumper on mine, it was too late, and our camper sustained a small dent in the rear apron where his bumper rode up over ours. We apologized to our camper, and patted it reassuringly. We promised ourselves that if we needed another car to start us, we'd get pulled, not pushed.

We turned on to highway 141 at Dennison, and eventually met up with I-29 which sped us through Sioux City. We could see black storm clouds gathering in the west as we cruised northward on the interstate into South Dakota, being passed by a constant procession of cars and big trucks.

We were going to head west on I-90 for the next 1000 or more miles, but I wanted to put off interstate driving for as long as I could. So we pulled off onto highway 50 which follows the north side of the Missouri River. We were also heading directly for the storm squall, which now had lightning flashes every few seconds.

We drove only a few miles before tons of rain hit the pavement all at once. I slowed right down, as rain and huge hunks of hail careened off our camper, making a horrible racket. We passed a big sign welcoming us to Gayville, and I lamented the intense rain, knowing how much my cousin and his partner would have loved a shot of the sign. The lightning strikes, which were very near, also kept us in the camper.

We pushed through the storm for well over an hour, watching the lightning all around us. At times I had green slashes persisting in my vision from the brilliant bolts that had touched down very close in front of us. After many miles, we succeeded in pushing through the storm, and the rain began to let up and I could see the lightning in our rear-view mirrors. At Wagner we turned north on US 281, and joined up with I-90 at Plankinton.

I had really been enjoying driving the back roads of South Dakota, but back on the interstate the familiar urge to floor it and get through the interminable prairie threatened to return. We were back on the intercontinental conveyor belt again, driving a strip of homogenized divided highway that disappeared in the distance, the monotony of the drive broken only by the barrage of road-side billboards, and a freeway overpass every five or ten miles. Convoys of trucks blasted past in both directions, and Christa and I settled in to a cycle of chat, snacks, and having her sleep as I chipped away at the miles.

Finally, at Murdo, we pulled over and grabbed a dirt-cheap motel right across the street from the Murdo Auto Museum (World Famous!). The auto museum was closed, so we made dinner in the camper and brought it into the motel room to eat. We ate. We drank. We watched TV. And then we fell to sleep.

[Next week: Christa and Tobin visit Wall Drug, discover the best- ever interstate short-cut, crash at list-member Will Self's house with no warning whatsoever, and drive across Montana's Rockies on a closed interstate highway through an incredible blizzard.]

Tobin

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tobin T. Copley Only Somewhat ============= (604) 689-2660 Occupationally /_| |__||__| :| putta tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca Challenged! O| | putta '-()-------()-' Circum-continental USA, Mexico, Canada 15,000 miles... '76 VW Camper! (Mango)


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