St. Louis Trip
So in July of 2016 I was approached by my good friend Sam while working at Philmont to travel with him to his home so he could download a game to his computer. This was before I started taking tons of pictures on my adventures so this will be a story without them. The internet at Philmont has always been trash and he needed a good connection to efficiently download the game. It turned out that he lived in St. Louis, MO, which was a cool 900 miles away. That’s where I came in! I would be helping with the driving. The plan was simple: a 4 day trip. One day to get there, two days to have fun, and another day to get back. It was to be my first major road trip.
It was initially tough to get 4 days off in a row for both of us. Lining them up to get them off together is harder than you think. Once that was settled we started off later that week. We both went to work for 9 hours and then I took the first driving shift that night. I drove from 9pm to 4am and wew was it long. This was before I started driving in my own car so I had basically no stamina. The longest I had driven was for Enterprise so maybe 50 miles during the day at the most. Now I was doing more than 400 miles at night!
Let’s talk about the the truck for a bit. It was a 1994 Ford ranger pickup truck. You know, the one with no adjustable seats for tall people. That was the case because my friend had stuffed so much junk into every crevice, which made adjusting the seat impossible. The driver seat was so cramped that every time the car hit a big bump my knee risked shifting the clutch into neutral while driving. The seats were just a bit more comfortable than airplane seats. If any of you own a pickup truck you’ll know that some come with a back window that slides open. We stacked the gear in the bed of the truck in such a way that by positioning the 24 case of Mountain Dew we could reach through the small sliding back window from the driver seat and grab a can of soda. Mini fridge in the back! Another cool feature was that if you had the headlights, radio, and air conditioner running at the same time you would blow a fuse. So we either had to sacrifice one of the three or drive with just the running lights. I actually did that with the help of the moonlight, but after almost hitting a deer we decided to sacrifice the air conditioning. I think thats a good summary of the car.
My shift was great up until about 4am when I started getting super tired. I had seen a small wildfire while driving. (Don’t worry the emergency trucks were already there). I’d also narrowly avoided the lightning storm that caused it. (When I say narrowly avoid I mean that we were about 45 minutes behind it.) That was good because we had no pickup bed cover so all our stuff would’ve gotten soaked. The only thing was that the engine light had come on for a few hundred miles, but we had ignored it because we were under the impression the truck was fine and the light was just broken. It was a $400 truck after all. When Sam took over I was a bit nervous to be honest. To help him stay awake he would veer into the right hand rumble strip and then into the center one then back tot the right one. I’m not easily nervous, but that got to me and after a big fuss he quit doing that. After about 16 hours in the truck we arrived in St. Louis and went to sleep. (Quick note that it was a suburb near St. Louis and not the city itself.)
I’ll sum up the middle 2 days at once. The first day we went to the 6 flags in St. Louis all day. I bought us fast passes and I remember we rode the Batman roller coaster 9 times in a row. We did the go carts and since we were over 18 they boosted the speed. Sam is super afraid of heights so he screamed on the Superman ride hahahaha! I’m luckily not afraid of heights at all so I can ride all the rides with ease. The only thing I’m afraid of is losing my glasses. The most sketchy part was skipping the line at the wild rapids ride. The line was absurdly long. We had gotten to the front rather quickly because of the fast passes. I remember there were 8 seats on the ride and there was a family of 8 that had waited 1 hour 30 min to ride it together and we ended up kicking 2 out of the group to ride first. I can tell you right now that they were not pleased. Unlike a normal ride where you are seated in rows one behind another, the rapid ride had you sit in a circle facing each other. We had the pleasure of looking at every face of contempt for the whole ride. The third day was the download day so it was shorter. The first thing we did was tour the St. Louis zoo. It was about 100F out and super humid so not many animals were out. I’ve discovered that at nearly all zoos it’s really difficult to see all the ‘cool’ animals. All the lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) are all hiding in the back rooms trying to stay cool in the hot sun. That was exactly what was happening that day. This was also at the peak of the hype behind ‘Pokemon Go’ so most of the exhibits had a ‘pokestop’ at them. The rest of the day was spent downloading the game and preparing for the long drive home.
The drive home was going well up until the last 300 miles or so. The check engine light came on again and then I kid you not all the gauges went from normal to “wow you are screwed!”. So we pulled over, opened the hood, and found steam just billowing out of the engine bay. One motorist stopped to try and help, but he didn’t really know what to do so he just drove off again. I appreciated the thought though. Luckily we were only 5 miles from the closest town. The town of Hugoton, KS.
When our truck staggered to the edge of Hugoton I swear the whole town became alive. I’ve found that if something supremely exciting happens in a small town everyone comes out to see what all the hullabaloo is about. We were next to the first house in the town and the people inside were the nicest people ever. After I called Triple A, Sam and I attempted to fix the problem. It turns out that trying to fill a super hot radiator with garden hose water is a bad idea. The family who came out to check on us helped keep us company until the tow truck came. They also offered us their second home for the night for less than the hotel down the road. People in Kansas are by far the nicest people when I go out on road trips. See I thought we would lose our jobs because we were potentially missing a day of work with the truck out of commission and us being stranded 270 miles away from Philmont. After a few stressful calls to my parents and my boss at Philmont my Aunt came to the rescue and secured us a taxi back. The longest taxi I’ve ever taken to date.
Ok so I’m skipping over a few details, but essentially the first engine light on day 1 was to tell us the back up coolant reservoir was out. The second time it came on was to say that we were completely out of coolant everywhere. The coolant system in the truck was destroyed sadly and it cost a ton of money to fix, but the good news is we got back to Philmont and only missed one day of work, which we made up the time for. The other piece of good news is the game download plan went flawlessly (with the exception of the return trip). We also bought train whistles at the zoo and proceeded to annoy our coworkers with them. Toot toot! Overall this was one of the most memorable adventures I’ve ever been on.
See you next time!