Day 12: Andrews, TX to San Angelo, TX

Surprisingly got some sleep at the rest stop, even though we were only about 10 yards from 80mph trucks flying by all night long. It's pretty funny to see where you end up camping when you wake up the next morning. A lot of times when I'm really tired and on the road and it's night time, I end up settling for a place to sleep where it seems like no one would notice you, then wake up realizing that I'm on a foot path or something. The man who is hired to take care of the rest stop got to take care of all of the area but ours, he was nice enough to let us be with our pup tents, and focus on the other parts of the lawn. We did some calling around to folks in San Angelo and found a fella who supposedly had a fan we could pick up. We drove on from Andrews to San Angelo, and boy what a bad drive that was. If you'd like some advice about driving a slow car on small four-lane roads in oilfield territory, basically, don't. People around the oil fields in West Texas are terrible drivers, I don't know if they are inexperienced, aggravated, ignorant, or just plain tired from working oil in the hot sun, but boy it was a rough drive. I even had to swerve over into the shoulder, when a big truck came roaring up right up to my bumper. I thought for sure he'd hit me, I'm not sure if he was trying to intimidate me or was just plain not paying attention, but I did send some words his way... Anyway, we finally made it into San Angelo, and the traffic was intense. It didn't help that we had arrived during rush hour. We met up with a gentleman named Scott, who was our fan guy. He came and met us at Walmart and we followed him back to his house, where he said we could use his garage to once again take the radiator off and replace our fan. Fortunately we had just done that the night before, so it was cake to do the fan swap. Scott was kind enough the hook me up with the fan, which I am very grateful for, as well as a place to sleep, shower, launder and have a good meal! Also, another fella named Roger came by in a beautiful '31 pickup and hooked us up with a generator, as ours was starting to come loose at the shaft. As soon as we finished putting the fan and radiator back on, I fired the car up and noticed it was missing, I grounded out the plugs and figured out that the 4th wasn't changing the idle at all even though it was getting plenty of spark. I checked the compression in all of the cylinders, and sure enough to our dismay, 4th cylinder had a low reading of 32psi. What a night! At that point we decided to just sleep and deal with it in the morning since Scott and his wife Jan were kind enough to invite us into their home for another day to fix the car up. It was great to find such nice people who were willing to help!

Deja vu!

Spankin' new fan.