I’m in Cheyenne, Wyoming tonight. So I’m less than a day behind my original schedule. If the weather holds, I’ll probaby be caught up in another day or two.

Speaking of weather, it was quite warm today – until I ran into a hailstorm in the west of Nebraska. I had been driving under massive dark clouds with no bad weather, but when I got to much lighter clouds and a lot more sun, the hail started falling. I stopped under an overpass to put on my jacket and decide if I needed to put my luggage into the heavy-duty plastic bags I brought for this purpose. While I was under the overpass, the hail rapidly changed to rain and became much lighter – almost as if there was one defective cloud that sprang a leak. About 50 miles further on, there was a brief period with just a few raindrops.

I’m in Lincoln, NE tonight – still 1 day behind schedule. That’s not bad, though, because I was exhausted last night (mostly from the “Atom not working” emotional roller-coaster) and didn’t actually get on the road until nearly 5 PM today.

Hopefully I’ll get a good night’s sleep and get going relatively early tomorrow. That should be pretty easy – the hotel I’m in has beer in the vending machines!

And Nebraska seems to be a 75MPH state, so I should be able to make up some lost time.

After a day and a half of having the Atom refuse to start (which eventually turned out to be a bad connection up in the nose), I made it to Walcott, IA today. That puts me a little less than a day behind schedule. If I’m not delayed by rain I should arrive in California on the 7th as planned. My schedule has a bunch of 350-mile days except for one 235-mile day where I’d planned to pose the Atom in front of the Bonneville Salt Flats sign. I can skip that if I need to make up time.

I’d like to thank the entire Atom Club community for all of their support and offers to send parts and help troubleshoot things; to the folks at Andy Mohr Chevrolet outside Indianapolis, who took the car right away and worked non-stop on it even though they had no shop manuals or wiring diagrams for it; to Tom Smurzynski, a true friend of the Atom and an all-around great guy for helping with the troubleshooting and supporting the dealer; and especially to my friend HJ who dropped everything he was doing in order to get replacement parts ready for FedEx in the 15 minutes before the cut-off for pickups.

1150 miles so far on this trip.

You may remember that I was unable to get the Atom started in the morning when staying in Indianapolis. I posted a brief summary at the time, but now that I’ve been home for a week, it is time to tell the full story…

I went out to the car, took the cover off and stowed my luggage as usual. A fellow walked over and asked me the usual questions about the Atom. After chatting for about 10 minutes, I said “I have to get going” and started the car – or at least I tried to. All I got was the starter motor – not even an attempt to run. That was embarassing, and set the tone for the rest of the day. I also noticed that the throttle body didn’t cycle when the ignition was switched on (you can usually hear this on an Atom, but not in the Cobalt SS this engine comes from – in the Atom the throttle body is right behind your head, while in the Cobalt it is out of earshot).

I checked all of the fuses and relays (swapping relays) with no change. I didn’t have Tom Smurzynski’s phone number with me (silly) so I called my business partner and had him look it up on the web. I then called Tom and he talked me through a number of troubleshooting steps, but nothing got the car started. Tom then suggested I take it to a GM dealer, since the shop computer (Tech 2) “should” make diagnosing this easy.

I went back to the hotel and got a phone book. The closest dealer’s phone was disconnected – I guess they’re one of the ones that was closed as part of the restructuring / Federal bail-out. The next closest one answered their phone, and after I explained the situation they said “Sure, we’ll be glad to look at it – how does a week from today sound?”. They had no other appointments available, so I asked them if there was another dealer they could recommend. They suggested Andy Mohr Chevrolet, about 11 miles away.

I called that dealer and explained the whole story from scratch. They said they could look at it right away if I brought it in. I asked them if they had a flatbed tow truck, and they recommended an outfit that they use all the time.

I called that towing company and they said they could do it, but their driver was having lunch. After a series of increasingly frantic phone calls on my part, the driver arrived (about 2 hours after my first call). We loaded the Atom and drove the 11 miles or so to the dealer, arriving there around 2 PM.

The dealer had us drive the flatbed with the Atom on it into their service area (which was quite large – 36 service bays or thereabouts). As usually happens when an Atom is in sight, all work stopped as everyone came over to look at it. We got the car unloaded and as I was paying the tow truck driver, the dealer techs hooked up the diagnostic computer to the Atom. I showed them how to “start” (in this case, just crank) the engine.

The computer didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. I gave them Tom’s number and left them to work on it (insurance rules prevent customers from hanging out in the service area, and besides there is nothing more annoying than having a customer hover while you’re trying to work on a car).

Around 4:30 PM the tech came out and said that they weren’t getting any spark. The tech asked me if I thought it could be sabotage, and I said I didn’t think so – it was under a car cover parked right out front at a good hotel (Hampton Inn). Little did I know… They said that they’d need to work on it tomorrow, so they had an employee drive me to a rental car agency so I could get a rental. I called Tom back and told him that the dealer suspected someone had sabotaged the car and it was kind of freaking me out, and he said that this was a very unusual problem and if it wasn’t something intentional, he wasn’t sure what else it could be.

While I was waiting in line at the rental agency, the dealer phoned me and asked if I had a spare PCM (engine control computer). I obviously didn’t – while I had spares, they were at home, 750+ miles away. Of course, the software in the PCM is from GM Racing and dealers don’t have access to that, so they couldn’t put in a standard PCM and reprogram it.

I called up a friend of mine back home to go over to my house, pull out a pair of spare PCMs, and pack them for FedEx to overnight them to me. Of course, this was a complete panic because it was about 15 minutes before FedEx stopped accepting pick-up requests for the night.

The next morning the PCMs arrived at the hotel and I drove back to the dealer with them in the rental car. I spent the morning in the customer lounge at the dealer wondering what the heck was going on. I made a few trips back to the service area, and discovered that the PCM wasn’t the problem and that they had the back of the Atom in pieces (necessary, but upsetting nonetheless). They were tracing the wiring, one wire at a time, with an old-fashioned indicator light probe (since the Cobalt wiring diagrams don’t match what is in the Atom).

A little after noon they asked me to come back to the service area. One of the 2 techs working on the car explained to me that for some reason, the powertrain control relay wasn’t engaging, which was causing the no-start problem. He rigged up a jumper wire to bypass the relay, but that meant that I needed to shut the car off with the master disconnect switch. He said he normally wouldn’t give a car back to a customer in this condition, but since I was planning on meeting up with Tom at Laguna Seca, the tech felt that Tom would have a better chance of finding the underlying problem.

They got the Atom re-assembled by 1 PM and I handed in the rental car and drove the Atom back to the hotel to pick up my luggage (which I’d emptied out of the Atom when I discovered it wouldn’t start). Part of the delay in finishing up at the dealer was their computer refusing to accept the Atom’s VIN. They finally managed to override the computer somehow and got my VIN and other info entered.

Tom had offered to look at the car at his shop in Oregon and then bring it down to Laguna Seca in his trailer. I told him I’d consider that – I wouldn’t have to made a decision until I got to Utah (turn north to Oregon or south to San Francisco).

After I got a couple hundred miles down the road I noticed that my GPS wasn’t on. (I’ve driven this part of the trip many times as I have a friend who was attending med school at UIUC, who I’d visit often, so I wasn’t using the GPS as I had the route memorized). I hit the power button on the GPS and it powered up, then immediately said “low battery” and shut down. I thought that was odd as it was hard-wired into the car power (by me). I pulled into the next rest area to look into the problem, and I then noticed that my on-board video cameras weren’t recording (the indicator lights were concealed by my luggage). I thought that this was all very odd, but that perhaps the dealer had pinched the wire to the rollbar camera when they had the rear deck off – the camera gets its power down the same cable it uses to send video to the recorder.

I checked the fuse box I’d installed for all of my add-ons, and the fuses were all Ok. I moved to the passenger side and looked up under the windscreen panel, and noticed that the GPS power adapter’s connector was unplugged. I said to myself “that’s strange”, since it is a locking connector and you have to press two tabs while pulling the connector apart to get it to release.

I looked around under there and discovered that the power plugs for the two video recorders were unplugged as well. At this point I was wondering what the heck was going on, since the dealer didn’t work on this area of the car. Looking around, I noticed that one of the push-on connectors for the master disconnect switch was also unplugged. I plugged everything back in the way it was supposed to be.

At that point I was getting pretty irritated. I decided to remove the jumper wire the dealer had installed and put the relay back, just to see what would happen. The car started right up – apparently the 2 smaller wires on the master disconnect switch disconnect the powertrain relay.

I could believe that I knocked the wire off the disconnect switch with my luggage, since it is piled pretty high in the passenger footwell. But there is no way this could have happened to the other wiring, since it all uses locking connectors and is held tightly against the windscreen panel, well out of the way of any luggage.

Apparently someone went to the Atom that night at the hotel, un-clipped the front strap that holds the car cover on (the clip is right at the spot where all the wires were unplugged), and disconnected everything they could see. Why someone would do this, I don’t know. I’ve got nearly 30,000 miles on the Atom and have never had a problem like this – in fact, I usually don’t even bring most of my luggage inside – there was about $10K of camera stuff in a camera bag on the passenger seat. (I thread the seatbelt / harness belts through the carrying handles on my luggage, but that’s just to avoid a “grab and run” opportunistic theft at gas stations, etc. – not for any real security).

All together, this escapade cost me over $700 – $450 at the dealer, $125 for the FedEx overnight shipping, $100 for the tow, and $50 for the rental car.

(a few miles west of Indianapolis)

Today started out as a dreary, drizzly day (so much for the weather report). But as soon as I got out of Pennsylvania, it turned into a beautiful day and was sunny and not too warm for the rest of the day.

I’m in Brownsburg, IN now. That’s about 90 miles past where I had planned to stop, but it was such a nice day I decided to keep going.

The only bad spot in today’s trip was construction west of Indianapolis. Over the past few years, they tore up the east side, but I guess they ran out of things to do there, so now they’re on the west side. In addition to having 465 and 74 in a state of disarray, apparently they decided to move their airport.

I’ll be heading on to Davenport, IA (or a little bit further) on Wednesday.

I’m in Somerset, PA again today. Last night the weather forecast for today was very poor, and the Weather Channel was reporting tornado and hail alerts along my route west, so I decided to stay in Somerset another day.

When I went out for breakfast this morning, rain started coming down as I was walking back to the hotel, and the sky was grey all the way to the west, so that’s when I decided to stay.

Of course, the rest of the day here was nice. But the various web sites say that there was rain to the west, so it is probably a good thing I stayed over.

On the way here, I stopped in Carlisle (just before the PA Turnpike) for a break. On the way out, there were a large number of GTO’s lined up at the gas station. They were behind me from there onto the Turnpike, and snapped some pictures. Here’s a sample:

Photo credit: SK360 via Atom Club

It is only fair that I return the favor:

I’ll be moving on to Richmond, IN on Tuesday. So far, the weather along my route should be good until at least Friday.

For those keeping track of mileage, 370 miles so far on this trip.

Just a reminder – I have a dedicated Atom Across America phone number – 551-580-0100. I’ll be updating the voice message there every night or two (except when I’m in an area with no phone service). The message will tell you where I am and where I’m likely to be stopping the next night. If you’re lucky, I might actually answer that number in person when you call!

I’m going cross-country again – to California and back!

Here’s a map of  the trip out (click on it to view a live version in Google Maps):

And back (likewise):

If you’d like to look at a larger view of the map, click here and here.

Here’s a PDF calendar for June and July. Note that only dates marked with a [*] are guaranteed to have me where I say I’ll be – figure on a couple of days of slack either way for weather on the other days.

Stay tuned for more updates!

As I was leaving the Dragon, I made one more trip over it from the TN to the NC side. I passed this house going the other way (click on the image for a larger version):

Fortunately, the movers had arranged for a “pilot fish” to drive ahead of the truck to warn oncoming traffic (and, presumably, to warn the truck of tight turns):

Another day of great weather. I decided to explore some of the other roads and mostly stay off the Dragon today. I headed out to the Cherohala Skyway:

While the Skyway isn’t high by western standards (it’s only about a mile high), the road is high enough that in some spots you can see clouds moving across the roadway.

Coming down off the Skyway, I stopped at Bald River Falls, which is a few miles on back roads from the Skyway. This is one of the few waterfalls in the area that you can drive to within sight of the falls – most of the others require a hike of anywhere from 1/4 mile on up from the nearest road: 

If you climb down the trail from the road, you can actually cross stones to the middle of the river and photograph the falls from the base. Unfortunately, the only pair of shoes I have are my driving shoes, which aren’t really optimal for this sort of work.

Here’s the obligatory shot of the Atom and the falls:

Cheoah Dam and its powerhouse are at the Robbinsville end of the Dragon. This is one of the powerhouses I mentioned yesterday, and this dam is also where the famous scene with Harrison Ford in The Fugitive was filmed:

Here’s what the water looks like at the bottom of the dam:

In other news, the rumors I heard about the accident yesterday are apparently true – one rider was killed and another hospitalized in serious condition. Today, as I was driving past Chilhowee Lake, an ambulance came past, heading up the Dragon (this is the other side of the Dragon from where yesterday’s incident happened). The police had the road down to a single lane, directing traffic past the emergency vehicles. Again, best wishes for the rider(s) involved.

The Dragon isn’t usually this deadly. Perhaps it is the small amount of traffic and a few days of good weather after a solid week of rain that’s making people want to go out there and push the limits. Be safe out there – you can always go faster next time as you learn the road.

Update: My Atom made Killboy’s front page again. You can click on the pic for a larger version: