Halloween and the Big City

After a few days relaxing, and catching our breath, so to speak, out at Lake Arrowhead, we headed into Dallas to visit family. Seems like a simple thing, drive 100 miles or so. I’m at the dump station adjusting the idle on the carburetor because it was running a little high. I do this in drive because if I pull the idle screw out too much I stall at lights. I get it where I want it, then I reach over and move the shifter into park. The shifter goes into park, but the transmission definitely does not. Sigh.

I shut it off, chock the wheels so it won’t go anywhere and finish dumping. I need to get out of the dump station in case someone else comes along to use it, but I’m in gear, so I can’t just start the engine. I jump the relay with a screwdriver to get it going and limp over to an empty campsite. Take a deep breath, get to work. Everyone stood around and watched as I unscrewed the shifter from the dash.

Once I got it off the dash I could see what had happened. The cable runs from the shifter to the transmission inside a sleeve, the sleeve clamps into the back of the shifter. A piece of metal had broken and the sleeve had slipped out so that when you moved the shifter, everything moved. All we needed to do was get the sleeve to stay in place again. The kids started offering ideas on how to hack it back together to get to Dallas. It was Halloween and they wanted to trick or treat with their Aunt and Uncle. If they had to figure out how to get the bus running again, then so be it.

After playing around with it for a bit, I found that if I held it in place with one hand, I could shift with other. Not ideal, but it would get us down the road to Halloween so that’s what we did. It’s an automatic, so it’s not like I shift much. We made it into town without incident. I shut off the engine and we got down to the important stuff, visiting with family, and of course, carving pumpkins.

This wasn’t arbitrary carving either, there was a plan and then they went out and executed that plan.

The area Corrinne’s sister lives in does Halloween at a level we had never really experienced before. Decorations all over the place, crowded streets. I went in the house below and can honestly say it was better decorated than any amusement park I have ever been in. At one point later in the night it was so crowded the kids had to get in line at each house just to get to the door to say tick or treat. It was fun, but that was about when we called it a night.

“Can we do one with less drama?”

After Halloween I got busy figuring out how to fix the shift cable. It had obviously been welded once already. What broke was a piece of metal someone else had bent over and drilled out many years before. Redoing that would have been the way to go, but I didn’t have access to a welder. I ended up cutting a piece of aluminum and screwing it in on both sides. So far, so good. When we stop later this year to pull out and rebuild the engine and transmission I’ll probably weld up something more secure.

We spent the week hanging out with family and visiting some friends, lots of swimming too. Somehow there always seemed to be a dog or cat around for the kids to play with, which was nice. I think this is the hardest trade off for them about living the way we do, they’d really like to have a dog. At least they get to visit with plenty dogs.

After a week in the city, we said our goodbyes and headed south, bound for beaches and warmer weather.