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)