I expected to wake up this morning and find it raining but it had stopped about an hour earlier. It was raining all around Tulsa but not in Tulsa itself. The car show was somewhat on the way out of town so I decided we would stop for a while. If it started raining or there were no cars to see, we would just hit the road.
The car show was at the Southern Hill Marriott. We parked and made our way to the car show area at about 8:15 and cars were just starting to find their spots. The rain no doubt impacted the turn out as I think many expected it to rain and likely left town already. However, as the morning progressed, the clouds lifted and more and more cars arrived.
Aaron and I looked at the cars for a while and eventually decided we had seen what we needed to see. Cars were still arriving but we would be here all day noticing ones from a distance which seemed to have just arrived and walking over to them. At 9:30, we decided it would be best to leave and get an early start.
We headed south on 75 which is a decently smooth road with few of the potholes we found everywhere else. We cruised with the morning sun shining and the A/C running. It was starting off as a much better day than the weather suggested. This continued until we made it to a few miles north of Durant, OK.
Just outside of Durant it began to storm like crazy. The kind of rain where everyone is pulling off the highway and you can't see anything. I've driven the Mustang while it sprinkled but never in the rain before. There was no avoiding it this time.
It was not long before we noticed numerous leaks in the Mustang. I don't think I put rubber gaskets back on the wiper arm brackets so there were some leaks there. What was more surprising is that I think I must have a bad windshield gasket or rust holes at the top of the window as it was literally pouring water in from around the top and down the sides of the front window. I certainly did not expect that.
We stopped in Durant and I pulled under the covering of a gas station. Aaron dried inside the car some while I dried off around the windshield frame and put duct tape on it to seal up the area. I did not want to but we still had five hours of driving ahead of us and the weather showed there were many storms still ahead.
We ate at a Sonic to wait out the rain a little. When we left it was not raining but it took only minutes for it to start raining rather hard again. Thankfully, the duct tape was doing a good job. However, we now had no radio as I turned it off out of fear water was getting on it. I tried turning on the headlights only to find they no longer worked.
We drove for hours home hitting rain sporadically. We must have been driving in rain for a least and hour of two of the trip. On several instances, it was hard to see the road but we continued on working our way back home. We had old shirts from our bags in the back seat soaking up water in the floorboard as we drove but we made it home.
I was a little frustrated at the rain, other drivers, and that the trip was ending on what seemed to be a low point but I tried to stay upbeat. In reality, we will likely look back on this and laugh in the future. I guess I could not have prepared much for this as I would not have even considered the windshield would leak. I suppose this was the point in the road trip where you earn it as mechanically we had no troubles.
We made it home at 6:30 in the evening and had Father's Day dinner with my wife and daughter. It was a good trip.
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I don't know exactly how it is possible but I tracked all of my mileage and the gallons from each refuel on the trip to check my gas mileage. It seems that I was able to average just a little over 20 miles per gallon on the trip. I drove a little slower than I normally would (65 or 70) but was still mostly going the speed limit unless the road was bad. I'm impressed.
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