The final leg

 Why I chose a beach party hotel for the Corpus stop is unclear, but the bar closed at 11 PM and the downstairs party receded away and left us like driftwood on the beach. After some more planning and plotting to hit all the remaining checkpoints, we slept. When we arose, we found that heavy fog had rolled in overnight - the same front line that we had crossed several times already. We were (or at least I was) a bit stiff, but packed the car and got started on the last day of our journey. 

I was extraordinarily grateful the whole time that the Spider was shockingly comfortable to be in for such extended periods. The driver's seat has a pan that has collapsed from rust, but even with the cushion probably sitting on the floorpan, it was still fairly comfortable. The passenger seat without such disintegration was even more so, with the added bonus of the under-knee cargo space.  The floormats sure helped hide some of the rust, although they did like to slide around. 

The fog was getting thicker as we drove off, and the Harbor Bridge disappeared into a murky cloud as we crossed. The wipers were somewhat effective, and once the car warmed up we managed to decipher a combination of the climate controls that got the demister working well enough. But by the time we reached the first checkpoint, we were in some real pea soup.
 

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 We drove on and got out into clearer weather as we found the giant squirrel in Sinton. The next stop was in Cotulla. The road out of Sinton turned onto FM 624, and we fortunately fueled before we left town, as the next thing we saw was a warning of desolation ahead. 

 

This was in no way an exaggeration. FM 624 past this sign is a bumpy, uninterrupted stretch of scrubby nothingness. The desolation might have been magnificent if the road hadn't been so rough, but the asphalt appeared to have been buckling for decades into rolling hills which caused the Spider to bottom out more than once.  

This was, without a doubt, the most annoying part of the drive. In spite of the optimistic speed limit of 75, we were limited to 65 or so by the heaving road surface. The bumpiness meant one could not just snooze off, and we only saw maybe 3 vehicles pass us going the other way. No one ever hove into view from behind, which meant we were probably making a bad choice. 

But nothing happened except the occasional scrape of the undercarriage over a road hump, and eventually we began to see signs of civilization, with low buildings and parked truck. The the outskirts of a small town trickled into view, and this was Cotulla, where a statue of LBJ resides. We poked around a little, looking for the bronze statue, and finally found it outside the LaSalle County Appraisal District building.

It was getting on towards noon, and I began looking at our routes, since we had to be back in San Marcos at Harris Hill by 6 PM, and this was only our third checkpoint of 12, including the feat of stupidity and the Lemons Find-It, which was a rusty Renault 4CV on a pole. 

I did have a dogeared ace up my sleeve, however. The next couple of checkpoints were in Pearsall, a town with which I was extremely familiar since my mother grew up there and where some of my relations still reside. I knew exactly where the Renault was, as my uncle used to own the car wash where it sits atop a pole, and it is a familiar landmark from my youngest years, minus a window or two shot out by roving Pearsall youth over the years. The Pearsall peanut was also a very familiar sight, except they had refurbished and moved it (and in my opinion it was not an improvement). 

But the real ringer was that my cousin still lived out near town, and we rang him up and made a short detour down the old road to Tilden to see him. The feat of stupidity was to mount something on a pole on the car, and he hooked us up with  not only a pole but an awesome deer skull complete with antlers that we stuck on. We mounted it on the car and were mightily pleased with this, but decided not to leave it permanently as I had prescient visions of the chaos that would result if a fully formed deer skull crashed through someone's windshield on 35. In the end we only got 50 points for it, but agreed this was undervalued. 

 We also smashed the pumpkins we'd been carrying with us across most of the state, as there was a handy berm, and got the latest location of the peanut. It used to be on Oak Street south of town, but apparently had recently been moved in front of the HEB (and to my eyes, reduced in size). 

 I also took a picture of the old Mercedes that has been on the property since, well since always. It's a 1960 220sb, which my uncle always said he drove in a parade in Pearsall once. 

It was nearly 1 PM and we said our goodbyes and got under way into town. We found the Renault and the peanut, and then headed towards Hondo for the next stop.

 I began calculating via the AI what our schedule for the remaining stops looked like. We were only a couple of hours from San Marcos, but after Hondo the route took us back out into the hill country through Bandera, Medina, Ingram, Comfort, and back across to Canyon Lake. I began to realize this was still a rather diabolically long way to go, and it was after 1 PM. I got an opinion from the AI, with a healthy margin of error added, that if we didn't fool around we'd get back to Harris Hill with 45 minute or so to spare. The margin was wide enough, we felt, to stop somewhere for a late lunch, and we sped on to Old D'Hanis and the checkpoint of St. Dominic's. 

open world boundary

 As Day 2 dawned, we popped energetically out of bed (not really), packed up our stuff, and rescued the Spider from where it had been parked in the nice garage out of the drizzle that had rolled in overnight. (We were to cross the boundary of this front a few times more.) The green turtle shell tied to the luggage rack had now been hanging out in the wind for 528 miles, but seemed ok, as did the rest of the car. I checked fluids and the oil was down a little but not much, still sitting at about 3/4 the way up.  The 53-year-old engine lit off just fine (twin cams go brrrrr) and we finished solving the packing jigsaw puzzle while it warmed up. It was still fairly cold and sprinkling some, so we left the top up and started out on the second leg of our journey, only to hit a looooong slow train at just about our first intersection. Laredo really moves at a different pace, and we were there a while, during which time the copilot expressed a mighty need for breakfast tacos.  We hit the remaining checkpoint from the day before, and then a somewhat lengthy stop at Los Jacales occurred, but it was worth it as they provided some good tacos and filled my thermos flask with hot chocolate. 

We reached the first real checkpoint of the day, the Jesús Treviño Rancho in San Ignacio, where we saw the biggest saguaro cactus I've probably ever seen in my life.

 I had been worrying about the state of the shifter ever since it lost touch with reality the day before, and I saw a nice flat empty parking lot near the rancho and decided it was much easier to stop and check than to have to cram all those silly pieces back together a second time. Instead of cranking away with the hand ratchet on the jack, we used the impact on it to raise the car, which was noisy but satisfyingly fast. After bracing up with a jackstand (actually the jackstand, since only one would fit in the trunk), I got the lower cover plate off, retorqued the offending nut (which appeared to be just fine), screwed the plate back on, and we repacked while talking to another team who had stopped their 90s Corvette near us to check on us and eat their own tacos. 

 

This was really the last time I had the tools out, and the only remaining maintenance I did on the car for the rest of the weekend was adding a little oil just for peace of mind. (One might think this is a spoiler, but it really is not.) As we hit checkpoints throughout the day, the car really seemed to improve in the way of power. At some point it started developing passing torque available in 5th gear, which was a novelty. It idles a little too high and there is a slight bog on acceleration, not to mention I smell a little oil burning on deceleration from worn valve seals. But it really ran astonishingly well. I theorized that the rubber plugs in all the unused vacuum ports on the 1979-ish peak-of-the-malaise-era carburetor were just vulcanizing themselves into place and sealing all the vacuum leaks. It's also possible there was a dead rat or something in a pipe somewhere that got blown out. This is not unprecedented  but I did not ask myself too many questions about it.

We headed west out of Laredo along 83 that runs near the border, hit the checkpoints in Zapata and Roma, saw the border wall and Mexico southwards across the fields and the Rio Grande, and stopped for tacos at the checkpoint of La Barquita in Roma. We accidentally ordered four taco meals instead of two, and tacos were thusly breakfast, lunch, and dinner this day. The bartender at La Barquita was squeezing limes for margaritas, of which she invited us to partake, but we recalled Rally Master Jeff's admonition about not upsetting the Lemons experience by drinking and driving, and politely declined. 

Carrying the large load of tacos in the handy space under the passenger's knees, we headed on to the big detour for extra points, from Roma to the beach at South Padre. This was a ~135 mile leg through a lot of border towns into the Valley. 

We arrived at South Padre and drove onto the beach (after being charged twelve bucks for the privilege of making my car rust faster). The challenge here was to build a sand castle, and there were more points for building it off the beach, but we did both by building one on the boot lid and driving off with it. The castle stayed in form for a surprisingly long time as we drove off down the beach road, and the sand never would blow off. I had to take it off in heaping handfuls and contribute it to a gas station lawn in Port Isabel. Sand remains on the boot lid to this day, which says something about the poor aerodynamic design choices. 

We were running into the late afternoon by this time. We decided to skip the checkpoint in Falfurrias, and headed another ~135 miles back up to Kingsville to find a jet mounted on a pole. On the way we hit another border patrol checkpoint, where this time the agent was obviously somewhat new and completely confounded by not only the car but the pile of beach sand on the trunk and our confusing statements of our origin and recent destinations. But they let us through, sand and all, and we continued on to Kingsville. 

The sun had long set by the time we arrived, and we were in a hurry, but the Kingsville checkpoint turned out to be a hard nut to crack. We came in on the north side of a big expo center and drove around the rough roads in the dark, looking for the landmark, but in spite of driving as slowly and looking as suspicious as possible, we neither found the pole nor attracted police who may have directed us (or not). We finally found the plane on the Google Maps satellite view, but it was in the back of a park, adjacent to the expo center.  We extricated ourselves from the vast parking areas of the expo grounds and drove west on Escondido Road till we found the park entrance. 

It was by now pitch black, and the park was not well-lit - in fact, the only light came from about four streetlights placed along the main park road that looked like they'd had the same bulbs since LBJ. We drove along the badly maintained road, trying to make our way east to the back of the park in the darkness, and had a surprise when the headlights picked out the figure of a man walking along the verge through the park, wearing a hoodie. He seemed uninterested in our shenanigans and we felt the same, so we gave him a wide berth and continued on into the impenetrable darkness.  I was quite grateful for the big Cibies I had installed to augment the headlights. 

We passed the soccer fields and I found another rocky road that appeared to go further west, and took it. It led around past what looked like ball fields and then curved south, right to the jet mounted on a pole. We lit it up with the headlamps and got our picture.

The road we came in on remained a two-rut track past the airplane and I assumed it connected back to the slightly larger road we had come in on past the ball fields just west of the plane. So we continued on, and the track got smaller and smaller and petered out completely a hundred yards or so past the plane, except for what looked like a mown swathe of slightly shorter grass. I kept on, but the woods were approaching and I thought I saw where the mown area ran along their edge, still going more or less the right direction. Not giving up, I followed the short grass until it disappeared too and we were driving through tall grass. The ball fields were still there to our north, and I knew the track past them was still ahead. We kept on, drove across some kind of rocks or concrete rubble that felt suspiciously like a drainage area, and found ourselves back on the actual track upon which we had come in with all four tires still holding air. 

This search consumed a pretty solid 45 minutes, and we still had five checkpoints to go. These turned out to be a little easier to find, being an old mercantile in Alice, a church in Robstown, and then three close together in Corpus Christi ending with the Lexington, with the trip meter turning over to zero about a mile short of the ship. It was by now after 10 PM. I realized I had made a strategic error and booked the hotel that was on the beach about 30 minutes south of the Lexington, so we had to suffer through 26 miles of Saturday night Corpus Christi traffic. But we made it, with the odometer reading 1,028 miles from my garage Friday morning. Some of the other teams had arrived well before us and were being raucous in the beach bar. We joined them for a short period but then retired. I had to return to the Spider for my toothbrush, where I found the party continuing in the parking lot where they were drawing rude pictures on the Lemons cars' windows in the mist forming from the heavy drizzle moving in. 

deep in the heart of Texas

I packed the car Thursday night. The trunk was an exercise in fitting together irregular objects inside a squarish space, but I got that figured out and the boot lid closed. 5:00 AM Friday morning rolled around, cold and dreary, but dry. I pried myself out of bed, showered, and put on some warm sweats and the pair of blue Dickies coveralls with which I transformed myself into Mario, also which I would wear for the next three days, and they were actually awesome for driving in. I had to wear the wool socks for the next three days too, because I forgot to pack any. I started the car and let it warm up while I finished packing, then zeroed the trip meter (or maybe I had done it the night before) and off I went. 

It took me a little while to remember how the heater controls worked, and I saw the new fog lights were somewhat misaligned, but otherwise all was well. I picked up my brother from his house, and we spent some small amount of time trying to jigsaw all the various things into the back parcel area of the Fiat. He also had the souvenir cookies from my sister-in-law. We finally got it all in (turns out there is a rather large usable space under one's knees in the passenger seat) and made it to San Marcos right about 7 AM in the cold dawn. 

I did not know what to expect. There had been only a few people posting in the Lemons forum about this rally, so I anticipated a rather small turnout. We came up the hill at Harris Hill, turned into the paddock, and after a somewhat confusing exchange with the cone guard, we turned into the back paddock where about 30 cars and a ton of people were all milling about. We joined them, handing out some cookies, receiving loads of stickers and little souvenir things (NB: we brought freaking awesome cookies, but not enough, and need to think of better stuff like car magnets next time), and got judged eventually for a nice little sum of 225 starting points - 100 for a 70s car, 100 for an Italian car, and I guess 25 for the cookie bribe and the costumes (and I had tied the green turtle shell to the luggage rack). There were twin brothers driving identical Volvos (a '59 and a '61, I believe), and they turned out to be absolute maniacs in the points scoring department, but more on that later. 

Drivers' meeting, some hilarity, and we decided it was time to go, so we did, but apparently we were in a little more hurry than most as we heard some grinning comments about it being our first rally. We wondered if we had violated some obscure Lemons tenet, and dawdled at the gas station a little until another team driving a 1973 Volvo 144 with a very amusing James Bond theme arrived and assured us we were on the right track. I also laid down the rubber floor mats to keep from being robbed by the rust holes in the floor if we dropped anything.

Then we were off, and the whole weekend started with a long drive out to Old Tunnel State park which took a little time that I used to set up the electronics. I whiled away the rest sewing the sweatband back into an old felt hat that had seen a lot of Fiat wear - mainly just to see if it was a good way to pass the time (it was not). 

We hit the first two checkpoints pretty easily, ate lunch at the second where we watched one of the teams pulling out a wrecked bumper with a tow strap around park rocks and were constantly surrounded by a waddle of ducks who thought they were going to get some of our charcuterie.  

After finding a randomly designated road sign in Harper, nailed to a tree in company with a Buick Regal driven by a couple of guys in banana suits, we drove into the Twisted Sisters toward Leakey. The Twisted Sisters are a pretty fun drive through the hill country, up and down and around, and the Spider was running well and the wheel bearings were holding up. We found the next stop, a fancy ranch sign on the outskirts of Leakey. Collin took the picture, and I made a joking gesture holding up the top of the shifter which is missing the plastic retainer and just sits on top of the shift rod. One of these days I'll fix that, but it works fine, just rattles a little at speed. 

 We pulled out of there, I shifted into third, and the entire shifter including the loose top just uselessly flopped over onto the console. I tried to get it repositioned for a second, but it was obvious it had come unscrewed from the shift selector in the transmission, and we were stuck in third. I knew what had happened, and was confident I could fix it if I could find a flat spot, so we drove on into Leakey in third gear. I found a nice flat field near a Carquest and we stopped and started unpacking tools, immediately attracting attention of the Lemons cars behind and a few curious locals. I jacked up the car and put the one jackstand I had brought beneath it and got to work. 

The shifter passes through an eye in the shift selector rod, upon which it acts as a lever with its bottom anchored to a cup in the bottom of the assembly by a nut. The nut had fallen off. There is a large spring, a plastic cup and then another metal cup which forms a ball joint for a smooth pivoting action by the shifter. All these were just rolling around on the bottom plate. The complicating factor is that the driveshaft is just under all this and the clearance is very tight.

 

I got the cover plate off and all the pieces, and then spent about 30 minutes in various cramped positions with Collin holding the shifter in place trying to get the stack of cup, plastic cup, spring, bottom cup on and pushed against the spring pressure far enough onto the threaded bottom of the shifter so I could thread the nut on. Everything would just slip and fall out. I finally cottoned on to the idea of reattaching the cover plate by the forward bolt and rotating it around to hold the bottom cup. However, this only barely worked, as I still had to hold it against the pressure of the spring to thread the nut on, and the bad angle meant I couldn't get a thumb in there. I was basically having to balance the nut and washer on the tip of a finger and sneak it into a tiny space and twist it on. But finally after agonizing effort, the nut somehow hung on the tip of a thread, and with Collin holding stock still on pain of death, I got it on enough to dare to wedge the shortest socket I had on an elbow and tighten the whole thing down. This got us back on the road with the sun headed to the horizon, and we hurried on to the next checkpoints. One of these was the giant Matthew McConaughey sign in Uvalde, which loomed up out of the darkness like some kind of grinning troll. 

 

 The LED headlights and the Cibie fog lamps on the car worked wonders. I do not think we would have been as successful without them, as we were in the dark a good portion of the time. We found all but the last remaining checkpoint in this manner, and decided to leave the Market in Laredo until the morning. We pulled into the Doubletree in Laredo about 11 PM, a little shell-shocked but alive. We were processing too much cortisol to sleep straight away, so we made a minimum effort for the Make a Giant Sign challenge using AI to make a funny picture of me playing bongos a la McConaughey, and then hit the hay.