The drive across the continent was just one big shove, drive drive drive, sleep, wake, drive drive drive. That is no way to experience either the planet or the car.
Shove Number One - Salt Lake City UT to Kearny NB.
(wind turbine blade as rest area sculpture - blade tip speed at 25 rpm is 180 mph):
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2012.jpg)
Shove Number Two - Kearny NB to Verona WI.
After I got my silly AFM adjustments squared away, I had to go back and "tighten" the valve adjustments that I had slackened after 430-441* Day. Also had to re-torque the exhaust system after 441* Day over-expanded important metal around the exhaust copper rings. One new stud location may be a problem child, but the BigSert repairs seem to be holding up. Don't run your VW at 430-441* It doesn't like it. So, I had surmised with Jivermo that my high temps were because of a paper towel sucked into the fan and making its way to to the footwell vents. Jivermo, remember? It was not. Only hours later, I threw on the heat at 70 mph in an effort to see if the paper towel remnants had cleared and a huge friggen clot of fiberglass insulation, mouse crap, and more paper towels just blew out of the defroster vents all over the interior. Can you believe it? I was appalled. Had the front stripped out in an hour:
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2013.jpg)
(original VW seat assembly decal "05/77")
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Stripped out the middle area in the next hour. Cleaned everything with Chlorox and Dawn. When did this mouse nest occur? Where did this mouse nest occur? If I find the time, I will take down the heating system ducts and cabinets.
My starter has been fine since I got the head temps back down to 400-410*. The fuel pump has been healing itself over the past few days. How? I don't know. It is screaming less and less. Perhaps the precise dimensions of the rollers and the end plates had just swelled up and begun to touch each other when the nearby exhaust components were at 700*+. Now they maybe have worn themselves in to a new homeostasis.
Iowa was very pretty, but I was too grumpy. Panicky really. I could not bear to drive into stifling humidity, onto heaved concrete roads, into tighter and tighter population centers, and I was unable to take in the day as I usually do.
Mississippi River at Dubuque Iowa:
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2018.jpg)
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Wisconsin, I am sorry, creeps me out a little. Not the people! Not the countryside! The developments do. The infrastructure is too tidy. The roundabouts are springing up, the ugly apartment/condominiums are gobbling up the Wisconsin farmland. Actually, the farmland is gobbling up the farms land. The family farms are dying away:
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2020.jpg)
We have agribusiness making these huge fields that are not anchored by a nice barn and house any more. There are just galvanized steel box buildings and chemical depots and irrigation stations and huge fields of plants being commanded to grow higher faster. The cows too! The pigs! It is terrible. The industrial scale of animal husbandry has devastated the lives of so many cows and pigs. This traverse had many more assaults against the nose than I ever remember. I'd see a huge brown stain gashed across a rolling hill, and stacks and stacks of cows just sloshing in their own excrement, no trees, no grass, just steel bike racks with cow heads sticking out. Now, I don't know about you, but I do not think/feel/believe any creature on Earth should be subjected to that hideous indignity of being forced to wallow in their own excrement. Who are these PEOPLE who not only allow this, but make the scale of it ever more noxious? Seriously, miles upon miles of smelling What Should Never Be Allowed. No animal naturally marinates in their own urine and feces. Then we eat them after a perfunctory shower on the way in to the slaughter houses. Something is terribly wrong here, and I can't say it is "dehumanizing" because though it is, it is de-living-creaturizing, too. It damages the definition of what it is to be humbly aware of Life, to use it so contemptuously.
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2021.jpg)
Yeah, so anyhow, my God, hold your nose when you drive past low buildings with big fans and bigger piles of manure.
Arrived outside of my Happyfolk appointment. Drove straight into the local car wash. Got ogled, the car did, and I sprayed wildly to keep the oglers at a safe distance. Discovered that my day long touch up of the front end (with that tedious paint match process) looks to have been erased with a new collection of pits and dings from all of these wandering drivers on the interstates kicking up the growing piles of rocks and tire detritus that crowd the shoulder lanes.
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20TRVS%2022.jpg)
Camped at a nice out-of-the-way "day park". How do I know it was a "day park"? Because the nice police man told me at 2:30AM.
"This is a day park . . . what are you doing here?"
Amazingly, I was unable to come back from whatever dream state I was in, and I had no idea what I was doing there.
"Just passing through?"
Couldn't quite answer this one either. I did not know what state I was in*, what state I was in#, or what state I was in^.
Key:
* state, as in "state in the United States"
# state, as in unconscious, hallucinating, merely dreaming, actually awake
^ state, as in well-dressed, poorly-dressed, undressed
Eventually I came to and remembered Happyfolk, I must be in Wisconsin, therefore I am now awake, and I am not dressed enough to leave my sleeping bag.
"Can you show me your license?"
"It is in the glovebox, and I need to slither to get to it."
"Oh sure, I see that, take your time."
After he radio'd in, "I didn't want to disturb you, but we need to check strange cars, maybe you are a chicken thief or something."
I explained that I drive around the country trying to keep every old air-cooled Volkswagen alive.
"Oh man, that sounds like the life, so anyways, go ahead and camp here, just leave before all the day people come in, they like to walk their dogs, and they'll call about you, sorry."
"Oh, I plan to, my stolen chickens would kick up a fuss if there were dogs about."
I was in utter despair as I smashed over the stupid broken concrete of Wisconsin's picturesque little town that is exploding with development but not infrastructure improvement. Arrived at Happyfolk for a fine cup of coffee that looked like it was made in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory, beautiful glass flasks with percolating liquid that woke me from the dead too.
It was a relaxed start that heated up towards the end of the day. We eradicated some lurching and bucking, hooked up the Dakota Digital Gauge for real (no sticking the thermocouple end in a cylinder fin "it runs at about 275*" (no sir, if I am going to suffer big numbers, you are going to suffer big numbers), and rotated the front caliper pistons to correctly engage with the shim plates. That was a big job. THall stopped by to give me a fuel pump as back-up for 'Ol Quarryman, the Pierburg pump. At least . . . I think it is a fuel pump:
![Image](http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x133/73VW1800/IAC%2018%2007/07%20ILINMI%2011.jpg)
Enjoyed seeing his bus looking so fine, so fine, and I enjoyed having a successful day of buckstopping, sliding door lubrication, engine hatch adjusting, quiet braking (will need a report, Happyfolk), and catching a tie rod end going bad. The shower was a blessing, and dinner was too and so was the company (Kelly! Excellent article in that paper you gave me, "How Wisconsin Lost Its Progressive Tradition").
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Drove to Illinois . . . getting used to this heat n humidity n buckeled roads, n incessant traffic. Locoqueso in the morning!
Colin