War and Peace

Sorry to leave y'all hanging so long, just got back after two and a half weeks on the road, driving right around 8,000 miles in 17 states, and frankly, I'm a little bit fried! I'm going to write separate posts for each of the vehicles I drove, to break the story up into digestible pieces...

To take up the story from where we left off, on Thursday, February 4th I drove from Maryland out to South Bend, Indiana, where I once again stayed with my Uncle Tom (he's given me the key to his house!). Friday morning, bright and early, I drove the thirty miles over to the depot in Goshen, where I was directed to Martin Welding, which turned out to be located way out in the Indiana countryside at a Mennonite farm. The guys who did the work were all German-speaking Mennonites, and it was fascinating to me that they did this kind of work (and took Mastercard!).

The welding to convert my car into a tow car took from 10am til around 4pm, and I got back to the terminal just in time to get dispatched to drive a truck from Indiana to Atlanta, Georgia. I got the rest of the tow equipment, including the device that clamps onto the frame of the truck that has the receiver that holds the gooseneck with the ball hitch. I went out into the lot and found my truck, a very large International box truck with a lift gate on the back. I did my pre-trip inspection, and then drove the truck around to where my car was waiting to be hitched.

I should note at this point that it was starting to get dark, and was about 15 degrees F with a bit of lake-effect snow falling. My employers provide a kind of a drive-through garage, but even so, it's not a particularly warm, comfortable place to work.

I then started to try to figure out how to hook the gear to the truck. The first problem: where the heck do I attach this thing to the frame? The lift gate meant that I had to clamp it to the frame considerably forward of the usual spot (at the back of the truck), and to get it there, I had to get under the truck and lift it up from underneath. I quickly discovered that I had to attach the gooseneck attachments first (there was no room to do so once the thing was up on the frame).

At this point, I ran into the first roadblock: the pins that attach the gooseneck attachments to the clamp device were missing. And, being as how it was now well after 5pm, there was no one in the office to supply the needed pins. So I drove over to WalMart and bought a couple.

So, returning to the truck, I crawled back under, and frankly, after putting all that together, it was all I could to to lift it up, much less attach it properly. I had to take a breather, and then approach it like an Olympic powerlifter, and I'm glad to report that I was able to lift it up and into place without crying like a little baby. I might have sobbed once or twice, but hey, it was cold!

Then I was confronted with a new problem: how to hook up the lights. The welders had also wired my car's lights to a plug that was supposed to let me hook them up to the truck's lights. But of course, there was no obvious place to plug in anywhere that I could find. And trust me, I looked! At this point, I was extremely lucky that another driver happened by and told me that, for that particular truck, I needed to get some special light bulbs that they make for that purpose, that replace the 1157 bulbs in the truck and provide wires that I could attach to the plug. Said bulbs were available, he added, at the local NAPA auto parts store. So I again got in my car and went out shopping.

Finally, I was good to go, and it was 8:30pm! And snowing. I slowly drove back to Tom's house in South Bend, utterly spent.

Bright and early Saturday morning, I headed over to the local Panera for a bagel and some coffee, and took this picture:



Here's a closeup of the trailer hitch setup:



I was fortunate, pretty much for the whole trip, to miss the worst of the snowstorms pummeling home, and this day's travel was part of that, a huge storm that was then hitting the East had the previous day passed to the south of Goshen, dumping pretty good on Indianapolis. By the time I was passing there, the highways were clear, thank goodness! My drive south was uneventful, and I made it almost to Tennessee, stopping for the night in a motel in Franklin, Kentucky. Sunday morning, I got up and headed down through Nashville and Chattanooga and on down into Georgia to Atlanta. I had called the folks at my destination to see if I could drop the truck off Sunday night and come back Monday morning to complete the paperwork, and they were fine with that, so I dropped the truck off, disconnected my car, and headed over to my friend Stephen's house in Woodstock, Georgia (an Atlanta suburb about a half hour from my dropoff point).

Stephen is a musician who I know from our association on the Telecaster Discussion Page online, and we had never actually met in person, but he turned out to be much as I imagined him, a great guy and a damned good guitar player, and we went down to this great blues dive in Atlanta, The Northside Tavern, where his band, Uncle Sugar, was throwing down after the Super Bowl was over. I got to sit at the bar and watch the Saints pull out their victory while the band set up, and then listen to three GREAT sets of what can only be called Atlanta soul, a mix of blues and country and folk and whatever.

I enjoyed it immensely, even more so after a stunningly lovely young lady, Erica, came in and sat down next to me at the bar. I'm ordinarily a pretty bashful fellow, but she just glowed (and, as she was wearing a Colts shirt and was visibly annoyed that her team had lost the Super Bowl, easy to engage in teasing conversation!). Alas, I was 30 miles from my car (and had to be at the truck dealer at 8am), so I didn't have a chance to get to know her as well as I'd have liked to (or gotten gloriously shot down). I still sigh, thinking about how she just shined...