Once again, I am making an attempt to return to blogging. And, given the title of this blog, it seems appropriate to start with a post on the return of Theseia.
A bit of background is in order. Theseia, my second wife, and I have been sadly separated for longer than we were ever together. It's all my fault, really. I replaced her 258 some years ago with a 304. The oil pump housing was cracked, so I replaced it. Unfortunately, I forgot a needle valve bolt and blew out all her oil across the backroads of McMinn County on the test drive. The engine promptly seized, as engines are wont to do when they have no oil, and my beloved jeep turned into a giant paperweight. That was 2011.
I never was able to squeeze the funds out of my Tennessee pay to replace the engine (again), and so she sat. In 2013, we moved to Montana. In 2014, my parents were kind enough to haul her in their dump trailer to their cabin in Munising, Michigan, where again, she sat.
Over the years, we got our finances in order, but still never managed to get the funds to ship her to Montana or the time and funds to get her ourselves. Until now.
The old saw as I heard it is, "a good friend will help you move a couch; a great friend will help you move a body." Somewhere between those is the kind of friend that will help you move a 1976 CJ-7 across the country.
Said friend, in my case, recently purchased an early 2000's Ford Econoline 350 ambulance with ye olde Powerstroke diesel. We put in to our respective employers for time off and worked on getting it ready for the road trip.
The first task, of course, was debadging, which, it turned out, went much more smoothly than feared. It only took about an hour at a shop with a heat gun and a plastic scraper.
The real trick was getting a receiver hitch installed. Those, shockingly, are not standard equipment on ambulances. The original plan called for taking it to the local Uhaul, but, when my friend went to schedule the appointment, it turned out that the local dealership was shutting down due to lack of volume. As my friend was on the phone with a local car dealership, I happened to look over to his other van, a gas one that he had used to haul his own CJ Scrambler the previous year.
"Hey," says I, "What model is the Vanbulance based on?"
"Ford Econoline 350."
"Hmm," I muse, "And what model is the Free Candy Van?"
"Ford Econoline."
"You know what I think might be worth a try?"
And so, about an hour later, the hitch problem had been solved. Unfortunately, during the install, we found no exposed wiring to tap for the light hookup, so that did have to be referred to a professional the following day.
And so it was that on October 9th, my friend pulled up to our house in the Vanbulance at 0500. After about 10 minutes of loading my travel gear, we pulled out into the early morning headed east on US 2.
The trip out was largely uneventful. We took shifts driving, buckling in to the bench in back for naps. About the only real issue was rescheduling the Uhaul car trailer pickup. We were making great time, so we decided to prepare for a possible through the night push by rescheduling the trailer pickup for my parents to get it and have it on site in the morning. Unfortunately, rescheduling messed up the pickup location. It took several calls, but I finally secured a trailer at a close-ish location to my parents.
The Shieldmaiden and I have driven through the night to Michigan once. It was a white-knuckle adventure dodging deer through two states, and we swore off ever doing it again. That said, my friend was on a tighter clock than I, and it was his rig to risk, so while I offered my cautions to pushing through, in the end, it was his call. In good news, apparently the deer in Wisconsin and da Yoop only prance across the roads in July. We saw a whopping three deer and one corpse the whole way. We arrived at about 0200 local time and promptly passed out.
We were up at 0600 local time. We hitched up the trailer and ran into the first real problem: the hitch we'd brought was too low. The problem with small towns is that nothing opens until 0800, and most places until 0900, but we headed in to town anyway to see what we could find. And also get breakfast at Falling Rock, the greatest coffee shop/used bookstore ever. A quick trip to NAPA, and we had a straight-mount, 7500-pound-rated hitch in hand.
Back to the cabin, hooked up the trailer, backed it up in front of the jeep, and ran into problem two: a jeep sitting in Upper Peninsula soil for 6 years makes quite the holes. But, with the appropriate use of leverage, a side-by-side with winch, chocks, and a whole lot of elbow grease, it only took...the better part of an hour to get it on board.
Finally, though, we were good to go. I said my goodbyes to my parents, and we hit the road again.
It only took about an hour to realize that we were not getting as good of fuel mileage as the 24 mpg or so we got on the trip out. Unlike Northeast Montana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Eastern Minnesota have these things they call "hills." With that kind of load, we had to turn off the overdrive, and watch the needle drop depressingly fast. That said, the drive was beautiful. I'd never actually been in da Yoop for the fall colors.
We still managed to make it through da Yoop on the first tank. I dropped the windshield and pulled the doors in the hopes of cutting drag. More on this in North Dakota. We fueled up on the western edge of Wisconsin and drove through the first half of Minnesota. Once the ground leveled out, we were able to reengage the overdrive, and fuel economy improved substantially.
Eventually, we reached North Dakota. We stopped to fuel up.
Now, the attentive eye will note something here. Didn't I put that windshield down in Wisconsin? Let's take a closer look:
Why, yes, that is a broken hinge. And the other side is fatigued. Unfortunately, I did not have an attentive eye after that much time on the road and we continued to drive. Fortunately, God loves idiots, drunks, and children, and we did not put the jeep's windshield through somebody else's.
We continued to drive, and this time, I was the one who wanted to push through. My friend was pretty well tapped out, so I took over the final leg in Williston, ND. Again, there was a remarkable lack of deer, though there was one hitchhiker outside of Poplar who thought he should get out into the lane to make sure I saw his thumb. I managed to dodge him, and was very awake for the rest of the trip.
We rolled into Glasgow just shy 0400. We parked at my place at just under 47 hours from our departure. I drove my friend to his place and returned to find the door to my house locked. And I don't exactly carry keys. I had to call the longsuffering Shieldmaiden to let me in. I promptly passed out in bed, with an alarm to get up at 0800 so I could victoriously go to church the following morning...which I slept through.
And that was the adventure, with the short epilogue that a few weeks later, I took the Vambulance and a utility trailer and engine hoist on a much shorter road trip down to Billings and picked up a pair of AMC V8s for both Theseia and my friend's Scrambler. I hope to have her back on the road under her own power sometime in January.
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