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 73 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 shift rod 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 transmissions, 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.