Leaving Carrollton

WOW!   Carrollton is a half hour behind us now, and I am feeling safe enough to believe I will never have to go back there.   We pulled in on Friday November 22 evening after only having left home that morning.

Here it is American Thanksgiving, six days later and we are finally heading out.

While they were putting Myrtle back together, they put a few holes in her radiator.   Admittedly, the rad is the original from 1988, and with 25 years on it, it surely doesn't owe us anything.    However, search as they might, they could not find a rad anywhere.   We were worried we would be stuck in Carrollton until after the Thanksgiving weekend.

The eldest son Keith took over from his brother.   He found a retired radiator repairman who was willing to open up his shop and fix our rad for us.

Meet Gerry from S & S  Automotive in Trimble County, Kentucky.    He found 8 holes in our radiator for us.  It took him two hours to fix it, and he only charged us $50.00.   We didn't have the exact change, and since he is out of business we certainly couldn't expect him to keep a float around.  We gave him $60.00 and felt like we got one heck of a good deal.

He was quite certain that the holes in the rad were caused by putting too much pressure into it when they were pressure testing.   His exact words were "I wouldn't say that they did this on purpose, but that's what it looks like to me".    hmmmm   I don't think they did it on purpose either.   I think the rad is old and they were not very careful.   Regardless, we will have to get a new rad as soon as we can find one.  I am sure that will be sometime after the Thanksgiving weekend.

We took the rad back to Carrollton and they put her all back together.   This time they didn't put any pressure on it.   They said they didn't pressure test it, they put a vacuum on it, but that would essentially do the same thing if they put too much negative pressure on it.   The rad still had a small leak, but we had a bottle of radiator stop leak from Gerry which seems to have clogged it right up.

It was almost 5:00 p.m. by the time we got Myrtle back.  So we pulled into the campground down the street.   It was a lovely night knowing we would be all set to leave first thing in the morning.

First thing turned out to be 8:15 a.m.    Gerry saw a deer walk right past Myrtle this morning.

 We were trepidatious as we left the campground.  Were we actually on our way?    

  We didn't think we would really be out of there until we actually saw Carrollton in our rearview mirrors.     We did it!   The Twilight Zone is behind us.