Day 1 -> Departure

Friday -> Friday 16th 2008

Departure Day



[Josh] So it’s Friday and we get started after work. The plan is to try to make it out of Texas by tonight. This is first lengthy trip so we’re both at high awareness levels – listening for odd engine sounds, feeling for any strange vibrations in the chassis, smelling for any coolant, burnt oil, or leaking gas.
We’re also getting our gear tweaked in. Chris picked up a CB radio and antenna. I put in an inverter to run laptops or our various chargers. We have Chris’s TomTom GPS for our main navigation aid – set on the English Lady voice - and also a GPS-equipped radar detector that continuously reports our speed and heading. The speedo on the fox doesn’t work, so we’ll be reading our velocity via satellite. We also have the normal load-out of cell phones, digital cameras, and I brought my little Garmin as a backup.



Heading up to Dallas on IH35, the car is running well. I’m finally starting to relax. The fox has a very smooth and compliant ride on the highway. The new skinny 13” discount tires are probably terrible in the twisties, but they keep the unsprung weight down which must be part of it.

Stopped for kolaches and to check the car out at the Czech-Stop in West, Texas. We also decide that we should collect stickers where we stop and put them on the rear of the fox. So the Czech –Stop is our first road sticker.





We make it past Dallas and are on to Texarkana. It’s pretty dark out there, and not much traffic on the road. We’ve noticed a “burnt electronics” smell periodically, but it doesn’t seem to be persistent enough to stop and check it out – time for watchful awareness.

We noticed a lot of trucker chatter on the CB during this road stretch. Most these guys are impossible to understand. We’ve making good time passing pretty much everybody on the road, when we hear somebody on the radio “Yeah, did you see that VW with the stickers all over it. There was fire coming off the back of it.” Chris and I looked at each other. Chris says, ”Did that guy say that we are on fire?” “Yeah. I think that’s what he said.” Chris keys the CB – “This is the East bound VW - - can you describe the fire? Is it a big flame or a little flame?”. We get some unintelligible responses. It’s hard to see in the dark. I turned around to see if there were any visible flames. We didn’t see any smoke. We eventually figured out that they were giving us grief for going so fast.

We finally get to Texarkana around 11:30pm and decide to call it a night. We stop at the motel 6 and check the car out. Right as we pulled in, the brake warning light came on. We also notice the positive battery terminal plastic cover as a worn spot where part of the hood must have been rubbing against it. If that works through to metal, there’ll be a shower of sparks and the car will shut down. Hmm. We’ll have some things to check out in the morning.

Drive Summary: Austin to Texarkana – 374 miles, 30.75mpg