After going to bed about ten last night, we got up at 3:30 am, showered, packed the car, and left in an hour. Memphis was 18 hours away, and we wanted to get there before midnight.

Looking for breakfast in Lamar about three hours later, we missed our turn to Kansas and instead found ourselves in Oklahoma. No problem, it wasn’t any further to go our new alternate route. (After traveling this route three times in a week a year ago, you would think that I would wonder why it didn’t seem familiar. That’s because we had taken that route on a “short cut” on our way back to Norman, OK that would have been fine except that the county road we took was horribly maintained.) The advantage of our new route was that the rising sun wasn’t in our eyes as we headed due south.

Following Street Atlas’ directions on a gravel road circumventing Boise City, Oklahoma, we turned east and joined US64. A few miles down the road, Berck yelled and immediately pulled off onto the shoulder. He had looked down to find the temperature gague all the way past H. As soon as we stopped, we could see the steam shooting out from under the hood. Berck opened the radiator cap (because he knows what he’s doing and isn’t going to hurt himself–kids, don’t try this at home) and poured what remained of our two bottles of drinking water inside. The steam, which had stopped, started up again. Apparently, he had noticed we were out of coolant right as we went bone dry. It was also pretty darn cold, so we may have been riding in an air-cooled car for a while. Either way, it looked like we had avoided seizing the engine by a hair.

Lucky as we are, we were still stranded on the side of the road in the middle of The Panhandle (read, the Middle of Nowhere). Berck’s new phone doesn’t have analog capability, but fortunately, my phone still does. I called AAA, not really sure if my mom had renewed my membership for this year. Nope, my membership had expired in April, but they were kind enough to MapQuest the nearest wrecker service… which was 50 miles away.

We figured we could do better with Street Atlas, and sure enough, Berck found the number for a wrecker and repair service in the town we had just bypassed. I called the number, and a woman answered the phone, “Hello?”

I was worried I had a wrong number. “Are you open?”

“No,” she replied. You might think I would be dismayed at this answer, but I was actually elated that I seemed to have the right business. I launched into an explanation of our coolent leak, where we were, and that we needed to be picked up. “Hold on,” she said, then in the background, “Mike, there’s a lady stranded.”

I told Mike where we were (I knew exactly, thanks to Street Atlas–I could have even given him coordinates), and he said he would come pick us up but added, “It’ll be hard finding a place open to fix your car on a Saturday.”

Then we waited for the tow truck to come. There were very few cars on that road on a Saturday morning. Since we were in Oklahoma, I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone stopped to help, but only about five cars passed us in the twenty minutes or so it took the wrecker to show. Sure enough, a middle aged man in a suit stopped right before the wrecker pulled up.

Mike pulled the car onto his flatbed with one hand on his cell phone, trying to get in touch with a mechanic who would work on Saturday. He found a fellow towing company in Guymon, the nearest “big” town away, who said they would. Unfortunately, Guymon was fifty miles away. It was that or try to find a place in Boise City until Monday.

$256 and a very bumpy ride later, a fellow in Guymon was trying to find our coolant leak. Berck thought it might be a plug in the back of the engine, but it turned out it was a hose at the back and bottom of the engine that doesn’t exist in the ’91 Miata but does in the ’94. Berck had checked all of the other hoses in the car to see if they needed replacing when we first got the car but not the ones he didn’t know about.

A couple hours and $110 later, we had a new hose and a coolant system that didn’t empty itself immediately anymore. We stopped at Yesterday’s Diner that was serving excellent black Angus bugers and finally got our breakfast. It was around 2 o’clock.

So much for getting to Memphis in a day’s drive, and so much for getting up at 3:30 am. We decided to stop in Enid for the night.

At a gas station in Woodward, the temperature gague suddenly rose again as we pulled up to the pumps. Berck spent the next 45 minutes putting water into the radiator and revving the engine. When we got to Enid, the radiator was low again. This is bad news. It means that the head gasket is busted or we’ve got a cracked or warped head and coolant is leaking into the engine. Berck can replace a head gasket himself, but he’s not so sure what to do when he doesn’t know exactly what the problem is. The good news is that we can probably keep driving if we keep the coolant level high.

The other good news is that we are settled into a motel room in Enid for the night. The great thing about Street Atlas is that it will not only tell you how to get to Enid, it will also tell you where all of the hotels are, along with their phone numbers. So I called through the whole list (it being Saturday and mobile phone calls free) and got rates. We decided to check out the cheapest one first, $35 pre tax.

It looked decent. I opened the door of the office and was overwhelmed with the scent of curry. Uh oh. My dad swore never to stay in a place run by east Indians or Pakistanis
after my family had a bad experience once. But the place looked neat and clean, and we really couldn’t beat the price. Berck walked in after parking the car and said, “Something smells good!”

The young man who had hurried into the office from the back room (in which I could see squealing kids playing on the floor and grandparents looking after them), wiped his hands on his pants and said, “Yeah! We just finished eating enchiladas.”

Berck and I looked at each other after we walked out of the office, “Curry enchiladas?”

The room turns out to be just about our speed: dated furniture, well worn carpet, a slightly cracked bathroom mirror, but neat and clean, although Berck swears he saw a roach in the sink. We even have a microwave and a fridge.

Berck was worried about the temperature dropping tonight and the car not having enough antifreeze in it, so I found the nearest auto parts store with Street Atlas. When we got back to the motel, I found the Weather Channel on the TV and discovered that the forecasted low tonight was only going to be 36 degrees. That made Berck happier, but so did putting more antifreeze in the car. Actually, he’s not very happy right now at all, too worried about the car.

Now we’re going to go out and try to find some dinner. Street Atlas has a whole list of most of the restaurants in the city, but unfortunately, it doesn’t say which ones are good. So I suppose we’ll have to go back to the method of driving around and looking.

Tomorrow: Memphis?