Day 1, Thursday- I left straight from Atlantic British at noon. Before long, the mildly-lifted Disco 2 was getting constantly buffeted by powerful cross winds. This dragged the trip out to a grueling 12.5 hours, finally stopping south of Columbus, Ohio just after midnight.
Day 2, Friday- Today’s goal was to drive to New Albany, Indiana for a rendezvous with a few more travelers headed west. We headed for lunch at a great pizza place after seeing a cheesy fork in the road (see pic). After lunch it was off to St. Louis, Missouri, to meet with the Saint Louis Rover Club for a pizza (yes more pizza) party hosted in the home of a club member. It is amazing how you can travel thousands of miles and the Rover bug draws people together.
From St. Louis, it was on to Kansas where we had to contend with the choking smoke of wild fires for well over 100 miles. They were amazing to see; nothing like it on that scale happens in the northeast. We stopped for the night just west of the fires.
Day 3, Saturday- Today we had a tight schedule. We had to make the Denver airport by 17:00 to pick up more travelers that were flying in. Everything was going great, until 175 miles outside of Denver when I get a call over the radio from the Discovery behind me. Their throttle was stuck and the pedal was just flopping! They quickly shut the vehicle down and we all pulled well off the road to investigate what has happened. After setting up safety triangles, we opened the bonnet and found the throttle cable was broken and stuck at 3/4 throttle. At this point, two things had to happen. We needed to quickly find a part as a permanent fix, and until then, we had to find a roadside repair that would get us moving again and back on the road to meet our friends at the airport. You would think being an employee of one of the largest Land Rover part suppliers in North America would make that an easy problem to solve. But when you're on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, that isn't always the case.
...stay tuned for the next update!
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