Saturday, October 27

Buick meets new friends (1933 Packard from Denver) in Brenham

Howdy Bloggeroos! 

We are back and speaking Texan since we've completed the Great Texas Trailride AAA Glidden Tour in Brenham. I can't do this tour justice right now -- except to say that it was one of the best Glidden tours ever.  About 180 prewar cars enjoyed wonderful roads, food, scenery, music, and points of interest around Brenham.  Check out some of my pictures, I do have a web album.  All the cars on tour were pre-war and there were even some brass (pre 1915) beauties to enjoy.  Buick felt rather young and vigorous in this crowd.  The tour organization was outstanding, imagine providing sit down lunches and dinners for this crowd of 350+ fussy geezers and geezerettes.  Lots of horses joined the horseless carriages on this tour -- lovely wranglerettes and their powerful steeds provided waving flags to direct all the critical turns.  And we all got genuine fitted cowboy hats to take home.  Bravo!
Buick ran great for the 450 miles of touring around Brenham.  The weather was warm at first, but cooled considerably toward the end of the tour.  I never fixed Buick's water leak.  There was not a lot of time to work on it and the leak wasn't growing.  There is always a risk of stripping a bolt or snapping off a stud with any repair -- I decided it was best to leave the car alone unless the leak amps up.

We had fun carrying passengers on this tour:  Rich and Charlotte Blake, Denny and Sue Holland and Jock and Sabina Finley joined us on different tour days. We also carried two AAA staffers Steve and Pat who had never ridden in a car like Buick. 

Saying goodbye to all the folks we meet and know from these tours is always difficult.  Finally, Ken and I got the car all loaded and cast off for the trip home at about 9 AM this morning. 

Then we had our first problem:  it was quite cold (about 45F) and Buick's battery only managed a few turns of the engine before groaning to a stop.  Hmm, no problem, we have a 12V starter pack.  Better yet, I came up with Buick's hand crank and proceeded to crank her huge engine to life.  Buick came to life after about ten strokes but left me nearly dead.  My arms burned and chest heaved with exhaustion.

I caught my breath and we motored out of town.  Then more trouble.  Buick started to stumble on hills and finally croaked with a gasp about 10 miles NW of Brenham.  After recovering from a fit of catastrophizing over our silent engine, we determined Buick was merely out of gas -- in spite of the gauge telling us four gallons remained.  A couple of cowboys stopped to help, but it was not necessary.  We do carry a gallon of extra gas.  We deployed our reserve and U-turned back to town.  She took 18 gallons.  We vowed to fill up more often, but that's been said before.

From that point on, all was well except for one loose wire incident with the electric fuel pump.  One more crawl under the car, one more encounter with sharp Texas gravel.

Ken shows his elation in finding this nice motel.

We rolled smoothly on beautiful TX 36 through lots of small towns with little traffic or delay.  This is a great drive for an old car.  We deviated near I-20, bending north toward Cisco, TX to avoid the congestion of Abilene and I-20.  We found the cheapest hotel on the tour, a $45 Executive Inn just off I-20 in Cisco.  It is small but very clean and comfortable and lots of rooms were available.  Dinner at Linda's corner cafe was top-notch, we both had a very tasty chicken friend steak.  The folks at the cafe were delighted with seeing Buick and treated us like visiting Martians. We should have worn the cowboy hats....  

Total mileage today, about 250.  We hope things keep rolling, see you tomorrow.