Go East Old Man

This is the fourth in my quartet of road trip posts. The previous three took place in the 1960s and 70s. The fourth just happened, which proves I’m still up for adventure and also that I have not learned from experience. 

My friend Alex had a 1994 Ford Ranger, a dandy little pickup with a topper. When he and his wife Nancy moved to a condo, he said he would not be needing the truck and asked if I wanted it. I didn’t really need another truck, but knew our son Joe out in Massachusetts could use it. 

Joe’s brothers Matt and Ned also live in Massachusetts and we figured we could load the back of the truck with all the stuff the boys have left behind at our place and let them deal with it. 

On July 25, we loaded all these treasures into our car and drove to Alex’s place in Apple Valley south of the Twin Cities. Upon arrival, the first thing we did was transfer all the stuff into the back of the truck. The locks for the topper did not work so Alex and I went out and bought some chain and a lock so we could secure the back. 

The Ranger is twenty-six years old. It has 144,000 miles on it and it’s 1,400 miles from Apple Valley to Marshfield, Mass. where Joe lives. But I knew Alex had taken excellent care of the Ranger and always had it in the garage, so I was confident it could make the trip. 

The last few times Teresa and I have driven to Boston, we’ve set the phone maps to avoid tolls and Interstates and we let the phone guide us along a network of back roads. It takes an extra day or two, but the trip is much more relaxing and interesting. 

So on Sunday morning Alex put our car in the garage where the Ranger had been and we said goodbye. We headed south into Iowa. The plan was to drive through Dubuque and cross the Mississippi into Illinois which would get us far enough south to avoid Chicago 

The temperature began to rise and we were glad we had gotten the air conditioning fixed. As we got closer to the river the country got hilly. Then twenty miles north of Dubuque, trouble struck. 

I noticed blue smoke coming out the back. I pulled over and saw the smoke was coming from oil dripping from the engine onto the exhaust pipe. I checked the engine oil. It was fine and the gauge showed good pressure so I decided to try to get to Dubuque and get the truck checked out. 

I didn’t get too far before the transmission started acting up. So it was transmission fluid that was leaking out. We weren’t going to make Dubuque like this. I remembered passing a gas station and I just managed to get turned around and back to the station. If I could get some transmission fluid, I could make it to Dubuque. 

But thanks to Covid-19, the station was “Closed Sundays.” It looked like the owner lived behind the station. I knocked but no one was home. There was a cell number for emergencies, but that went to voicemail. Time to call AAA. 

AAA was experiencing longer than average wait times for a representative. Fortunately there was an awning over the pumps, but now the flies found us. The gas station was in the middle of nowhere and only circling vultures could have intensified our feeling of desolation. 

After 30 minutes we got hold of a representative. They always ask if you’re in a safe place. Physically, yes. I told the rep I did not need a tow, just a few quarts of transmission fluid and a funnel. After an extended period on hold, the rep told me Pam would bring me some fluid as soon as she found the keys to her husband’s truck. The husband was an AAA associate but he was up in Michigan. As soon as she found the keys she’d bring the fluid. 

After another wait, Pam roared up with seven quarts of fluid and the all important funnel. I put in three quarts which seemed to fill the transmission. Did I want the other four quarts?  Yes I did. Pam threw in the funnel. 

The truck was now shifting fine but we kept our speed down. We were past the biggest hills. We stopped after a few miles to check and the leak had stopped. We reserved a room downtown figuring that’s where the repair shops would be. I was hoping the leak was in one of the external lines which would be an easy fix. 

Monday morning I started calling transmission shops, but none could see us for several days. One suggested a tire place which also did light repairs out by the mall. I got an appointment for one pm and drove up the hills to the edge of town with the transmission working fine. 

It didn’t take long for the shop to give us the bad news. The leak was from the front seal which would not be an easy fix. He suggested we call another transmission shop about a mile away. I called that place and the guy said they were very busy, but if we came the next morning he could take a look sometime during the day. 

You may be wondering why we were traveling at all during this time of pandemic restrictions. For one thing, my parents house in Massachusetts had been on the market for a year and had finally sold. My siblings had been cleaning the house out and there would be a final gathering of the family to say goodbye to the old place of so many good memories. Also, we hadn’t seen our three kids and four grandchildren in over a year. With this truck breakdown I felt like fate was telling us to go home. 

But we had too much momentum to go home. We found a motel in the area and began working on options. The guy in the tire shop said the transmission could lock up at any time. I looked up costs for transmission repair or replacement. It was a lot. Should we junk the truck and continue our trip in a rental?

We arrived at Precision Transmission at nine the next morning. Luke the owner was an affable chap who confirmed that our truck, even though it was a very nice truck, was not worth a transmission repair. He felt sorry for us and said we could leave the truck on his lot for as long as we liked while we decided what we wanted to do. He’d ask around if anyone was interested in a ‘94 Ranger. 

Luke told us the fluid had leaked out because it had gotten overheated. He said a possible solution was to drain the fluid and replace it with synthetic oil which can take more heat, but there was no guarantee everything would be fine. I called a car rental place and reserved a small SUV to continue our trip. I asked Luke if the truck would make it to the rental place and back. He said yes, just put it in Drive and not Overdrive. 

Hmmm. I hadn’t noticed there was a specific overdrive setting. Twenty-six years ago Ford put an Overdrive setting right next to Neutral. One more click over was regular Drive. So on that hot Sunday, going up and down those steep hills, I had forced the truck to stay in Overdrive which naturally caused the oil to overheat. Ford quit making that Overdrive option because people like me kept wrecking their transmissions. 

This overheating scenario gradually revealed itself to me as we drove our rental loaded with the boy’s treasures out to Massachusetts. We arrived safely on Thursday and made it to the house’s farewell party on Saturday. Everyone wore masks and kept their distance, mostly. 

We talked to Luke and asked him to change out the transmission fluid. We’ll be flying to Minneapolis on August 10. We’ll drive home and sometime later Steve Reynolds and I will take a little trip down to Dubuque to retrieve the truck. It will be good to see the fine people of Iowa again.