This is the last post about my trip to El Paso. For some reason, my memory of this part of the trip is very fuzzy. So I called Ron to see if he had a better recollection of the events than I did. When he started talking about the migraine headache I got when the car broke down, I knew his memory was faulty, too. When I told him that the way I remembered the trip just didn't make sense, he said "well, that's the way we did things back then."
Rather than take that nice air conditioned Greyhound bus back to Georgia, Don, Ron and I hooked up his 57 Chevy to his 59 Chevy convertible and towed it back to Georgia. As Ron explained it, the 57 Chevy was to provide parts for the 59 Chevy to make the trip. That turned out to be exactly what happened.
I was driving and it was dark. We were in the middle of the Texas desert and I could see the lights of a town way off in the distance. Ron and Don were asleep and I noticed that the headlights were getting dimmer. Ron is the mechanic, so I woke him up and told him what was happening. By this time, the lights were almost out and if I shut the car off, the battery would not be strong enough to restart it. But we didn't have a choice. Ron said the generator was bad and we had to take the one off the "parts" car and put it on the one we were driving. So that's what we did. During all this time, only one or two cars had passed us. Now with the generator installed, we tried to flag down a car to jump start the 59 Chevy. We had a few near misses when cars veered around us as we stood in the road trying to flag them down. I suppose they thought we were banditos trying to rob them. We eventually got a car to stop and got our car running again.
We drove the rest of the night and we were getting close to Georgia the next day when the rearend of the 59 Chevy started making a noise. We stopped and Ron got the tools out and he and Don started taking the rearend out of the 57 Chevy. This is when he claims I had a sudden migraine headache. If I did, that was the time to have one. This was a big job. Eventually we were on the road again and we made it to Moultrie. What a trip! Then Ron took all the scavenged parts off the 59 Chevy and put them back on the 57 Chevy and drove it back to Texas. Or did he drive the 59 Chevy back to Texas. I don't remember, but when he got there, he learned that he was going to Viet Nam for sure. Apparently, he wasn't sure he was going before then. So he drove his car back to Georgia, left it with us and took the bus back to Texas. Then he went to Viet Nam. We made an unnecessary trip to Texas, wrecked a car, had a miserable trip back to Georgia, and had a falling out the Ford dealer and never did get that new Mustang. On the other hand, we had an adventure, bought some priceless art in Mexico and got to see Ron before he went to Viet Nam. Well, that's the way we did things back then.
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