Ilsa, the Wicked Wideload

Of course, now we can laugh about it. At the time, it was less than funny. The photo here shows Ilsa basking in the beautiful downtown Beaumont sunshine. Note the gathering storm clouds.

I drove over 1100 miles in Ilsa with:

• No air conditioning


• Bad alignment


• No left brake light or left turn signal until Beaumont


• A broken gas gauge


• A faulty gas overflow protector


• (discovered while we unloading) a leaky cargo compartment


• No air conditioning

Did I mention that we ran out of gas?

I've only run out of gas once before in my life. Once. This was more than ten years ago in the Buick (some of you faithful readers may remember the Buick Skylark) while I was at LSU, and I had the car a block away from the gas station going to fill up. You know how it is as a starving student- gas lives lower on the priority list than books, food, and entertainment.

We filled Ilsa up in Austin. The Beast had a sixty (60!) gallon tank. This was, I believe, the only time that the gas gauge worked, as we picked her up with a quarter tank showing on the meter. I don't recall how many times we stopped for gas, but the important thing to note is that we carried two five-gallon cans in the back, just in case. We didn't know the situation in the city, but a lot of us have been living by the three-quarter-tank rule: Don't drive with less than three-fourths of a tank, and fill up when you have the opportunity.

After passing several U-Hauls in Houston, we decided to stop at the next one we saw and see if they could help us out and swap the equipment for one that worked. This next one happened to be in Beaumont, Texas. Now, whatever I've said about U-Haul in the past, Jose and his guys in Beaumont were extremely helpful, courteous, sympathetic, and professional- extremely notable since they had to pick up their own Rita-damaged location. Explaining the situation, they quickly replace the left bulbs, and viola, we've got blinker and brake lights. They decide to take a look under the hood and see if anything can be done about the air- after all, it's blowing, just not blowing cold. It's immediately obvious that there is no belt between the engine and the air compressor- so they should be able to kite a belt from a down unit, and we can be on our way in cool luxury.

But it was not meant to be.

As soon as they had the belt in place and started the engine, we heard a great loud screech from under the hood. Evidently the compressor clutch was shot, and Wonder Man or one of his cohorts had removed the belt and not fixed the compressor. So we could do nothing. They also had no other truck available for us as a replacement, so off we drove. At this point we get the great idea to get some ice so that we can at least keep cool with chunks of ice. So far, we've had to drive with the windows down, making conversation impossible. I also start wearing a bandanna to keep the wind from whipping my hair into my eyes while driving.

About a hour and a half into Louisiana, we're merrily cruising along when suddenly the gas pedal stops responding. I mean nothing- I couldn't press down on the pedal at all. So I find myself in an out-of-control multi-ton electric and gas death machine of steel and glass speeding down a dusky highway at a mile a minute.

...to be continued...