This chapter is mostly uneventful, but I think it nicely illustrates how people who enjoy cars find themselves easily getting attached to them very quickly.
Still no big breakdown though.
Mysterious blue smoke that can be verified not from the crankcase is the sort of thing you want to look into. Particularly when the thing is dripping a constellation on someone else's driveway. That's where you go "I'm losing fluid I'm not supposed to lose and I have 1500 miles to go. Perhaps I should get the undercarriage steam-cleaned, drive it a mile back to the driveway, jack up the side and take a gander to see what liquid I'll really wish I had more of at some point in the next few days." Yup. Spot on.This moment is the pinnacle point of any good cross-country drive—when all is good and happy, there are only positives in the moment, and you realize that you’ll remember this very second for the rest of your life.
I really need to learn to work on cars. One of my friends' boyfriend just had an Acura Legend go tits up on him and he's gonna use it as an excuse to start fucking around with it. I'm gonna shoot her a text tomorrow, see if he wants a second pair of hands to help out.
Honestly? An Acura Legend is probably not where you want to start. It'll be all OBD II codes and proprietary wrenches and shit. Modern cars can be worked on but they respond best to a large, clean, organized work area with a serious back catalogue of esoteric tools. Put it this way - I drive a '95 dodge and other than replacing the ECM that one time[1], I don't work on it. Too much of a pain in the ass. You wanna learn to work on cars, get a Beetle. Or, barring that, '60s American iron. I'll point out that the chucklehead did get Amazon Prime to ship him a set of points...
Oh hell yeah! Great car to work on. I also have a lot of fondness for it because my uncle autocrossed one for like a decade. Won IMSA nationals twice. I also have a soft spot in my heart for the 1600 and 2000 'cuz they're a lot of fun. I didn't have a lot of cars I took care of for money in high school, but I was the mechanic-of-record for a couple 2000s. In my opinion they are the perfect blend of Italian quirkiness and British bass-ackwardness with some added funk thrown in.
I've driven that stretch more times than I can count. I-70 really is THAT brutal of a climb. In fact, I regularly see Michigan plated cars in full camouflage with laptops riding shotgun. It must be some kind of real world proving ground that they can't replicate in the lab. As hard as it is on your car... It really is an amazing stretch of road.
I've never had the chance to see a real world test car. I hope to one day see a car in dazzle camouflage in person though, just to see how crazy it really looks.