Indiana and getting on the road.
Flying into Chicago, then Indianapolis, meeting my son, working on the pickup to get ready for the long drive ahead.
12.04.2022
Janet mentioned that she had her toothpaste confiscated...
In Sydney her carry-on bag inspection revealed she had a toothpaste tube that held more than the 110 grams allowed ("It's half finished!" she protested, to no avail). She also had some hairspray, not aerosol, but pump action. Both were too big for the regulations and she lost them. Pretty soon I had to relinquish my 90gm tube of Aim, but the hair spray would require her to make a fresh purchase!
Caught the ‘red-eye’ to Chicago, about 4 hours. I had taken a tablet to help me sleep because I only got about half an hour of sleep between Sydney and LA. I was dead on my feet. I slept a few hours.
We arrived and stayed at O’Hare airport in Chicago (the busiest airport in the world), it was very ‘cleanliness-aware’ and there was a constant announcement about covering one’s mouth when coughing and washing hands after using toilets.
They had plastic covers over the seats which, by waving your hand over the back of the seat would automatically put a clean cover over it. Amazing. The hand towel dispenser had to be levered down to use. I changed clothes, had a wash.
11pm was the departure time from LAX with a flight time of about four hours to Chicago. What I thought was going to be a 6-hour flight was reduced by the crossing of time zones, so potential sleeping time was sadly reduced. I got to sleep okay, I believe Janet had at least a couple of hours. It was raining when we got to O'Hare some time before 6am on the Wednesday.
As our luggage had been taken care of, we simply had to take it easy around the airport as we awaited our Indianapolis flight about three hours later. I recall that we got something to eat and chatted with a few people, but little else. Outside it looked very chilly and uninviting and we were pleased we'd packed with the knowledge that our trip was going to take us into very cool weather.
Flying on to Indianapolis unexpectedly took us across another time zone, so what appeared to be an hour and a half in the schedule was down to about 35 minutes. The weather was improving:
My son knew our schedule and was to pick us up and take us into the city to while away the hours as he completed his working day. He wasn't exactly awaiting us as we got our bags from the carousel... actually, they never were on the carousel as they'd flown in on an earlier flight and were waiting for us in the attendant's office. I tried to find a phone to call my son.
Eventually he arrived. We didn't even know what sort of car he'd be in, but we knew when he turned up as there was very few other cars around.
My mother used to say to him, "Justin, the apple never falls far from the tree!" as she explained he was like his dad. Well, in many ways he's not, but the way he had to rearrange his vehicle to fit us in was just like I might have to do at times!
He gave me my cellphone and drove us for what seemed to be some distance and left us at the Greenwood Park Mall. There Janet was to investigate all the Sears, Macys and J C Penneys and many other stores after we'd sampled a bit to eat from Chick-fil-a. This was a fun little chicken shop with some edible food, strangely enough we never went to another in all our travels.
Took a short flight, 35 minutes, from Chicago to Indianapolis. Justin picked us up from the airport, he still had to work for the day so dropped us off at a shopping centre in Indianapolis for about three hours.
I was not feeling too well by that time so had to take painkillers, my throat was really sore and I was feeling quite exhausted. We had something to eat, everyone seems to notice our accents even though my voice is still really croaky.
I looked for summer tops as I didn’t bring any summer stuff. It was hot in LA when we were there and I heard it could be hot at the Grand Canyon. I went shopping, Ray slept on a lounge in the shopping centre – rather embarrassing.
As I tired I sat down on a lounge somewhere in the mall and Janet awoke me about an hour later when she'd done looking around. I went to the Sears blokes' section and looked over some of the tools, I had to buy some as I had a pickup that needed a few jobs done on it. Ultimately Justin phoned to say he was coming to get us, we clambered into his Toyota once again and headed for Bloomington.
Justin picked us up at about 5pm, driving us to Bloomington...
...about 80kms – a beautiful drive, like you see on ‘American Pickers’ territory, rolling green hills. Unbeknown to us, Justin had booked us into a motel, we’re not staying at his place.
It was a big shock to Ray – the motel stinks of cigarettes but is clean. No refrigerator and only a coffee-machine which takes forever to boil.
There he'd booked us in to the Plus 8 motel on the edge of town. This was a total surprise to Janet, but I was aware of it all (and hadn’t told Janet) as my daughter-in-law had kicked up a huge stink about the pickup landing at their place (nobody had told her!) a few weeks earlier and wasn't keen to see me at all. We registered at the motel and took our bags to the room, almost totally overcome by the stale cigarette stench in the place. Even though it was a 'non-smoking' motel, years of exposure to tobacco smoke left the carpets foul with the odour. Here's the motel:
Giving us time to settle in, Justin went home for a while and returned to take us out for dinner. His wife was working late (another issue complicating the prospect of us staying with them...) so it was nothing for him to take us for a drive at 8:30pm or so and do a little tour around the university section of the town before we went to a pizza place popular with the students. The huge pizza was his shout, but we took a couple of the leftover bits back to our room.
Justin took us out for tea for pizza. It was the yummiest I have tasted. Justin’s wife, Lora, is working all hours till late a night for the next couple of weeks at Bloomington’s university, hopefully we will meet her.
Thus far I've not said much about my pickup, the central part of the journey. This 1975 Dodge D100 longbed was powered by a Slant 6 which drove through an A727 Torqueflite. It had been lovingly repainted a year or two ago by the son of its long-time owner after the father died, I bought it through an advertisement on a forum and was told it ran fairly well. "But there's a bit of a miss up high, I don't know enough about carburettors to fix that."
I had not hurried the seller, who lived in the Indy area, to get it delivered to Justin's place as there was plenty of time, and in some of that time he might have had a chance to get someone who did know about carbies to fix it. He always assured me that he would work in concert with Justin in relation to delivering it to him. Great.
Except that he dropped it off without advising Justin, who in turn had not told his wife at all, and so there was hell to pay. On top of that, it was too near to their mailbox for the mailman to deliver their mail and Justin couldn't move it. As weeks passed, it transpired it wouldn't start either. It was a non-runner!
I noticed on yet another forum that one of the members, who clearly had an inkling of what makes things tick, lived in the same vicinity. I e.mailed Bill and asked if he could help, he could. First he ran some checks to see why it wouldn't go... establishing basically that either the carby was no good (most likely) or the timing chain had jumped a tooth. Then he had it towed to his place so I had somewhere to work on it when I got there. And so it would be safe.
I toyed with the idea of taking a carby over, but logistically I couldn't arrange it in time. Bill didn't have any 6-cylinder stuff at all, so I contacted Jon in Spokane. I buy axles from him and I know he frequents wrecking yards, so I asked if he could help. "Sure!" he said. Jon borrowed a slant-powered pickup and put one of his carbies onto it to make sure it worked right, then he despatched it overnight to Bill in Indiana.
Bill, meanwhile, ordered in a timing chain set on a 'use or return' basis from the local NAPA store. So everything was in place for me to get the truck going on the Thursday. Justin arranged to work from home for the two days so he could run me around any time it was necessary... while I was waiting for him to pick me up I saw this go by the motel:
Hmm... something is different here, I thought. Justin drove me to Bill's, winding around rural lanes past churches bigger than warehouses and whisking by mailboxes on the edge of the bitumen. The sights and sounds of the differences in the USA were starting to multiply in my mind as I met Bill and took my first look over my pickup.
Ray is waiting for Justin to pick him up to take him to try and fix the car so we can get going on our ‘adventure’. I slept well last night so that is good, I will have a quiet day and stay at the motel.
Ray has gone to ‘fix’ the car up. He says it will probably only take a couple of hours. We’ll see.
As I looked around, I saw that I had absolutely found the right person to help me with my Dodge, his collection included:
My first job was to change the carby... that done, and with some help from Bill's battery charger and 'starting fluid' we got it to run. Flushed with success (it was still quite early) I started looking at other things that needed doing before I hit the road. Bill pointed out that I'd need the special socket for the wheel nuts:
I checked thoroughly and couldn't find it on or in the truck, I tried phoning the seller but got no answer. Bill, who was on a day off to work on his wife's PT Cruiser, also at that time noticed brake fluid lying under the fuel tank... a leaking line needed replacing. So we went in to Elletsville where O'Reillys and NAPA are side by side. Tubing and fittings were obtained for the brake line along with more tools for me... oh, yes...
...a new headlight and a couple of other minor things. We checked out the wheel nut socket situation and decided that buying a complete set of nuts just to get the socket wasn't the right way to go. Instead we would get them off somehow and replace them with standard nuts. We ordered a much-needed tie rod end, but that wouldn't be in until Monday - it would have to wait until we'd done our Eastern loop.
Back at Bill's he flared the tube and we fitted the line, then the long task of getting off the wheel nuts began. We found that we could, using a long metric socket (17mm?) hammer the socket on and get enough grip to undo the nuts, then we had to hammer the nuts out. Along the way I'd mentioned to Bill that I'd like to find a canopy for the pickup, he pointed to one down the yard and said, "Would that one do?" I was flabbergasted! He had one!
At this stage the truck looked like this:
The hours were passing and we still had to establish whether or not it was fit for the road. With all the wheel nuts changed we took a drive around the block. Past those letterboxes etc...
The transmission showed signs of needing fluid so we made another trip to Ellettsville. With this topped up and the filter changed we were pretty much ready to go, which was a good thing as the day was about to expire. We’d checked the tie rod ends in the front end and a couple needed replacing. Neither NAPA or O’Reillys had stock nor could they get them the next day. They were to be ordered for when we got back from the first stint of our journey.
Justin had turned up ready to take me back to the motel if necessary, it was well past sunset when we got there.
I watched TV most of the day and found there are so many TV stations, incredible. But still hardly anything decent to watch. The ads are strange, a lot of them for lawyers trying to drum up business by people suing – mainly – medical institutions for problem operations and ‘mesh’ that’s deteriorating inside people. Fun!
Ray didn’t get back to the motel until very late – about 10pm – says the job is done with the car. We will go with Justin to get it registered tomorrow.
Janet stayed in the room that night while I went off to have dinner with Justin at Dennys. I learned here how the tipping game goes in the US.
At this stage I knew I would not make Virginia International Raceway by Saturday, one of my 'contingency plans', but I knew we would be on the road by Friday afternoon.
Bob once decided to do something to our truck (which was a crew cab long bed 1971 Ford) and he had the wheel off when I needed to haul a horse up the road. I had to borrow a car and trailer and just barely made it.
by greatgrandmaR