Post
by Steve Jelf » Wed Sep 06, 2023 9:08 am
From Doolittle the road continues north and east through Rolla, Saint James, Cuba, Bourbon, and Sullivan. These towns are about fifteen miles apart because when they were established a steam locomotive would need to stop very fifteen miles or so to take on water. Rolla is a big enough town to present a navigational challenge. I stopped at a convenience store to ask for directions. The car next to me had the window open, and I asked the driver how to get to the old highway. He said, "Follow me," and he led me right to it. It seems that wherever I go in this old car there are people who want to help. When I got to Sullivan I stopped to gas up. For some time I had been getting water on my windshield. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, so it wasn't rain. Watching closely, I noticed coolant bubbling out past the radiator cap. Why would that happen? I figured the overflow tube must be blocked and building pressure in the system. So at Sullivan I set about fixing it. A piece of mechanic's wire would go down the tube only to the first bend, so I tried thinner wire. It was at this point that help arrived in the form of a woman who noticed me working on the old car and asked if she could help. Julie is into muscle cars, but she appreciated the old T. I found that I could get the thinner wire past the first bend, but not the second. Julie is ten years younger than me, and not clumsy, so she could see what she was doing and was able to feed the wire up into the tube from the bottom. I had poured water into the tube and none came out the bottom. Shoving the wire up the tube got it flowing. I don't know what the blockage was, but I suspect it was the work of a bug or a spider.
By this time it was late afternoon, and Julie's modern phone showed a big storm coming. So she phoned a friend and got his permission for me to shelter at his business. The friend is an undertaker, and I camped under the portico on the front of his building. The rain came down in buckets that night, but I slept dry and comfy.
The inevitable often happens.
1915 Runabout
1923 Touring
Safe travels to you and safe overnights. Thank you for these multistate Model T blogs 
