Texas Road Trip Day 2

TexasSunrise

I robbed the front desk of an apple on my way out the door and climbed into the car with my backpack. We made it a whopping 200 miles before running out of fuel. We had just enough to turn around on the expressway before puttering to a deflating halt. Something was wrong. We have an 18 gallon tank and this car is supposed to get about 25 miles per gallon. We’re getting less than half of what we should be getting out of a tank.
Well, we start hoofing it back to the little town we just passed to pick up a gas can and some fuel. As we’re walking, fate would have a tow truck headed the other direction. We wave him down and lucky for us he turned around. His name was Joe and he was a real sweet, real honest guy. He rolled us up on his big flat bed and made room inside the cab for two new friends. We got to talking and it turns out he was on his way to Amarillo, too. So he turned around again. He said he wasn’t going to charge us any extra miles since we were going the same place he was and he said we would have a lot better luck getting auto parts should we need any in Amarillo. Even better, after we got to chatting a while he mentioned we could call AAA and get the whole thing covered by them and he would get some of his gas paid for picking us up. Neat when it’s a win win. So we stopped along the way and put fuel in his rig and a few gallons in the Camaro. Sure enough, it fired right up with fuel in the tank. We lost some time traveling in Joe’s truck the rest of the way, but it was neat to hear his stories and talk to him about the culture differences.
Once we were in Amarillo, we filled her up and got some food. Joe waved goodbye and I made a mental note to send him a postcard. I bought a few postcards at the travel stop and we resumed our homeward bound journey.
ALongWayToGoOpenRoad
I’ve driven through Amarillo a few times, but mostly at night and I never have caught even a glimpse of Cadillac Ranch, even during the day. This time, it’s like it hit me straight in the face it was so close to the road. I really don’t see how I could have missed it before. I’m not really one for crowds, and since there were so many people stopped, we elected to just keep driving. But now we were aware of our bad gas mileage. We spent the next few hours switching shifts at the wheel and hypothesizing why we were going through fuel so fast. Maybe it leaked out on the embankment of Texas Motor Speedway? Maybe someone siphoned the fuel as we slept? Perhaps we did way more idling than we thought?
We filled up in a hundred miles or so just to calculate current miles per gallon. We had fixed a loose MAF connection the day before, and thought we should be getting better than 16 miles per gallon. We weren’t. The fuel smell was apparent at the back of the car, and when you juiced it on the freeway, you could see a tiny cloud of unspent fuel in the rear view mirror. We discovered a hole in the headers from rubbing the ground and I figure the car had a intake leak somewhere. Carburetor cleaner didn’t seem to pinpoint it, but it seems odd for an exhaust leak to cause a 8 or 9 mile per gallon drop in fuel economy. (When I get to the bottom of that, I’ll make sure to post about it.)

ThePilotMileLongTrain

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NowTHATSRich

The next morning we snuck some items from the continental breakfast into our pockets and loaded up the car. It was an uneventful ride home. We slowed down a little as we got onto the 5 for fear of contracting a ticket, and rolled into town in the afternoon on Monday.

AltamontWindmills

It felt good to see the familiar windmills of the Altamont Pass and to get rest in our own beds and to unwind from the long road behind. The only lingering nuance was the extreme gas mileage hit from a such a small hole in the headers. We have yet to solve the mystery, but we’re planning to do some modifications and upgrades to the engine this winter, so maybe we’ll dig up the problem then.

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