I’m back in NY. I still haven’t unpacked the car and so forth – I’ll post an update later on.

Total mileage on the Atom now: 29,324. 8,106 miles from this trip.

Today I decided to stay over in Chesapeake, because the weather was supposed to be bad from here through Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey.

Around 5 PM it was still sunny out (of course!) so I decided to drive a couple miles down the road for Chinese food. While I was in the restaurant waiting for my take-out order, the heavens opened. The restaurant put my food in a garbage bag for me to keep it dry, and I drove back to the hotel.

I parked the car under the hotel’s canopy, figuring I’d move it later on when the rain stopped. Instead, it just got worse. The TV did a “we interrupt this program to bring you the following emergency bulletin”. I went downstairs around 15 minutes ago to see how the Atom was doing (answer – full of water from wind-driven rain) and lightning just struck a tree across the parking lot.

The National Weather Service (link will probably go bad shortly) says:

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…
SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS PRODUCE DAMAGING WIND IN EXCESS OF 60 MILES PER
HOUR…DESTRUCTIVE HAIL…DEADLY LIGHTNING…AND VERY HEAVY RAIN. FOR
YOUR PROTECTION MOVE TO AN INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF YOUR
HOME OR BUSINESS. HEAVY RAINS FLOOD ROADS QUICKLY SO DO NOT DRIVE
INTO AREAS WHERE WATER COVERS THE ROAD.

Yikes!

Tomorrow I’ll have to bail the water out of the Atom and try to blot the seats mostly dry. Fortunately, I have a bunch of unused towels that housekeeping at the Embassy Suites in CA gave me to clean the Atom after arriving in Seaside.

Update: The TV weather is saying 2400 lightning strikes/hour, 6″ of rain, and several funnel clouds were sighted.

I’m in Chesapeake tonight. I had another day of good weather (though a little warm and humid) despite forecasts to the contrary. Everybody says it is going to rain here tonight and tomorrow, so my luck may run out.

I stopped in at TMI today and spent a couple hours chatting with Mark and Brent there. I’ll post a recap later on.

Here I am arriving at TMI:

Leaving TMI and VIR, I discovered just how rural this area is:

Had another great weather day today, despite the forecasts. I’m learning to ignore them and just stick my head outside each morning and look up…

I’ll be visiting TMI at VIR (how’s that for some TLA’s *) tomorrow, so I’m staying in Danville tonight, about 15 miles away.

There are some really good driving roads here – I took US 58 from I-77 to Danville (90 miles or so). The first half of it was mostly rolling hills and nice curves, with a few spots of 2-lane divided highway and some slow spots through towns. About halfway, the road got into some higher elevations where clouds came drifting across the road. This is at Lover’s Leap:

And this is a few miles down the road (literally – the sign says “9% grade next 5 miles”):

TMI – TMI AutoTech, Inc.
VIR – VIRginia International Raceway
TLA – Three-Letter Acronym

Tonight I’m in Knoxville, on the other side of Tennessee. I had good weather for most of the drive, but about 50 miles out it started drizzling (it had apparently rained harder earlier on).

I don’t know if I’ll be stuck here for another day or more – I’ll have to look out the window in the morning (I’ve learned not to believe the Internet weather sites).

Did 450 miles today, landed in Memphis.

I’m hot, tired, and irritated. I’ll probably post more tomorrow (when, hopefully, what I post will be less of a rant).

Update: Nope, I didn’t like Memphis. I probably saw only one of the neighborhoods, though.

I only made it as far as Shawnee, Oklahoma today (I had wanted to get further, to Fort Smith, Arkansas). That’s because I visited Eddie Hill’s shop:

We talked for hours about Atoms, cars in general, and so forth. For those who haven’t met him, let me just say that Eddie is an incredibly generous person. Eventually, I had to let him get back to business and head out on the road.

I think I’m going to get held up by rain in the next day or two – stay tuned.

I’m in Wichita Falls tonight. Apparently there is a rattlesnake problem – at a rest area on the way here, there were “Watch for rattlesnakes” signs all over, including one on the men’s room door. Probably the oddest juxtaposition is combining that with a “Pet area” sign:

In Wichita Falls, I dropped in at Eddie Hill’s Fun Cycles and photographed his award-winning car and boat:

I missed Eddie as I arrived late in the afternoon, but I exchanged some email with him and arranged to meet up tomorrow.

Tonight I’m in Amarillo, TX – 430 miles or so from where I started today.

The weather was wonderful all day. A storm paced me around 2 miles to the south of I-40 around Wagon Wheel, NM but didn’t rain on me at all. Not too hot, not too cold – a perfect counter to yesterday.

My good deed for today was to help a driver explain what the problem was with his 18-wheeler to the repair service he called. I pulled into a rest area around 15 miles into Texas for a break, and rolled past the aforementioned 18-wheeler with its hood up and a huge cloud of steam drifting up into the air.

I walked back to it from where I parked and asked if I might have any tools or anything he needed. He said he didn’t know what was wrong, it just overheated all of a sudden.

I looked at it and discovered that the alternator had locked up (probably a bearing failure, as the shaft was out of line) and that it had thrown the main belt (crankshaft, alternator, fan, etc.) somewhere back along the road. He asked me if I had a lot of experience with these, and I replied “Nope, first time I’ve ever seen one”. I told him what to tell the repair people, and he called them back.

Part of the conversation went “Some guy in the strangest little car I’ve ever seen tells me that I need to tell you…”. After making sure that repair service was indeed coming out, I left him to wait for the repair truck and headed on down the road.

Footnote: I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t have any grasp of the fundamentals of engines. Maybe my surprise comes from growing up in a family that always had oddball imported cars – MG, Austin, Alfa, Fiat, etc. and being told I needed to rebuild an engine in a car before my Dad would put me on the family car insurance.

I’m in Gallup, New Mexico tonight. Today’s forecasts along the route were “scattered thunderstorms” along the route I was taking (I-40). What they didn’t mention was that they’d be over my head much of the way.

Not too far into Arizona, there was a brief thunderstorm which wasn’t bad at all – I got wet, and the breeze cooled down what was otherwise a hot day.

I stopped for gas and lunch in Flagstaff, AZ and not 15 miles out of town, the skies darkened and the weather looked very nasty up ahead:

It got a lot worse very quickly:

This is just before both of my cameras quit working. Maybe 2 miles past this, it got to the point where visibility was less than 50 feet. I took the next exit and took refuge under the canopy of a Shell station in Winona.

I left the Atom under the canopy and walked inside the station, still wearing my helmet, jacket, and driving gloves (all of which were soaked, like everything else I was wearing). There were a lot of people taking shelter in the station. Among others, we were joined by a highway patrolman and a sheriff. I had just completed the purchase of a roll of paper towels (to dry the inside of my helmet) and was wringing out my gloves over a garbage can when the power went out. Fortunately, the power came back in about 5 minutes or so. The station staff sent us all back to a normally-closed dining area (with formica furniture) to sit out the storm. I shared the paper towels with a pair of motorcyclists (a husband-and-wife team, I believe) who were also soaked through. Most of the other people just got somewhat wet when running from their enclosed cars into the station.

I struck up a conversation with one of the station employees, and said “Correct me if I’m wrong, but a) isn’t Meteor Crater about 25 miles from here, and b) in a desert?”

She replied that she’d called home (about 6 miles down the road) and it wasn’t raining there. The storm hovered over the station for about 45 minutes, with nearly no movement of the clouds in any direction. Eventually it died down to a drizzle and a bunch of us got going again.

It continued to rain on and off, but was warm enough that I could get mostly dry. By the time I got to Gallup, NM (my planned stopping place for the night – 400 miles from Needles, CA) it had just started raining heavily again.

I asked the manager of the hotel where the restaurants were, and she said “Get back on the interstate and go 4 miles to the next exit…”, and I replied that I didn’t want to risk that in an open car, given what I’d been through. She was very nice and took pity on me, and had me call in an order to a Chinese restaurant and then she drove down there to pick up the order and bring it back to me.

Depending on the weather, I may be stuck in Gallup again tomorrow – stay tuned.