Sunday, June 11, 2023

HRPT Day 3 - Mobile to Atlanta

I checked the car out this morning and everything was in perfect shape.  The engine oil is still exactly and the full line.  The same is true of the clutch master and the power steering.  I added a little water to the radiator overflow this morning but not because it was empty but was just a little lower than when we left two days ago.  I've not checked the brake fluid mostly because it is a pain to remove all the allen head screws which hold the top in place.

We left around 8:10 in the morning. We took a small detour to Atmore, Florida.  We simply drove through but wanted to add a fourth state to our list of those we have driven through on the trip so far.  

We stopped a little before Montgomery as it seems a lot of the water in the floorboard is A/C condensation.   It also seems that it is leaking from the vent tube that should run through the little rubber tube to outside the car.  I kept the original hose but the exhaust was too hot to try to install it.  Instead, I reached up from the inside and put a zip tie tightly around the rubber host to seal it off better.  This isn't the best solution but I'm just wanting something that improves things.

We made it over three hours without the tires dragging on the rear fenders.  We stopped at Bucee's to fill up with gas and then hit several areas of construction.  They did not do much to fix the transitions from graded road surface to bridge road surface.  This was a bad situation for the rear suspension that was weighted down by the load of supplies and tools.  We drug the tires probably six different times.  I checked the tires later and found the driver side as a much larger gash in it than before.


There was a slight chance of morning showers and then a 75% chance on thunderstorms at 1 o'clock.  The chance of thunderstorms then dropped to 50% for the rest of the day.  As we drove, we kept driving through areas which seemed to just recently get rain.  This continued up until when we reached the Atlanta Motor Speedway as it had just rained on all the cars there.  Surprisingly, we made it the whole day with just a short sprinkle which is great news.  At this point, I'm still going to tell myself the water in the floorboard is all due to the A/C running for hours with a leaky drain tube.

Picking up our Long Haul credentials at the speedway was super easy.  We went ahead and picked up a few shirts and stickers since a vendor truck was setup.  We looked at a few cars and then headed to the hotel.  Once there, I decided to remove the 1" lowering blocks to provide some extra suspension movement.  It would not normally be needed but I've loaded down the trunk fairly well.  That took about an hour and surprisingly, the car looks normal due to all the weight.

The credentials consist of a small round sticker that goes on the windshield, a tag to hang from your rear mirror, a windshield sticker, schedule pamplet, small metal plaque, license plate, and two long haul name neck tags.  The neck tags are hole punched at each venue.  If you make it to all of the venues, you get a long haul plaque.  We are participant 1653.


After dinner at Steak and Shake, we stopped by O'Reilly and picked up a Dorman 85810 headlight plug.  I took my crimps and bag of spare wiring into the hotel room and made a headlight extension for the driver side since that one was removed when the Redline relay setup was installed.  This allows me to return to having two working headlights so we can drive safely at night.  Once that was done, Aaron and I walked the parking lot of the hotel looking at cars and then hooked up the driver headlight with my makeshift headlight extension plug.  It works so I'll call that a win and fix it permanently when I get back home.

I've been tracking mileage and gas usage.  Today, we got 10.856 gallons at 10:25 and had 5871 miles.  I then filled up at 7:36 this evening with 12.675 gallons and had 6098 miles.  By my math this is 17.909 MPG.

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