The Trip Home

I left Cape Cod driving this truck. It had it's problems, probably the worst one it turned out was that it would not stay in high gear. It kept jumping out of gear and I was driving with one hand on the shifter and pulling it back into high gear when it would pop out. A few hours into my trip, while on the Mass Pike, I felt something weird. Stopped on the shoulder to check it out and discovered a couple of studs on one of the rear wheels had snapped off and the wheel was loose. Tightened the wheel and continued on my way, but no longer pulling back on the shifter. Some time later got a real weird feeling and pulled over again. Four out of the five studs on the wheel were gone. I sat on the guard rail behind the truck and waited. After awhile a State Patrol stopped and asked what the problem was. I showed him and he called a wrecker. While waiting for the wrecker, the cop said I was smart to sit on the guard rail where I could see the traffic coming at me. He said he had had to dive over the guard rail a time or two because of vehicles coming at him. Seems those videos you see about cars or trucks hitting cars parked on the shoulder are not a recent thing. Probably been happening since there have been more than a couple cars on the road.
Anywho, the studs breaking ruined a new chrome reverse wheel which pissed me off enough that I junked the truck for the tow charge. I could have fixed it, but figured if I didn't even make it out of the state then it would probably not make another thousand miles that I had to go to get home.

I got most of my stuff out of the truck(there were some car&truck parts left), called a cab and went to the bus station. Some things that I had boxed up, I shipped on ahead and bought a bus ticket to my brother's house. Spent some time at my brother's house as I was not in a hurry to get home because it was the middle of the winter and I knew the snow would be asshole deep to a tall giraffe at the 'Ranch' UP on the Tundra.

After several days I bought another bus ticket for the rest of the way home. On the way, I stopped in Detroit and visited my cousin for a few days.

Finally after two weeks or so of traveling I arrived home(or the town with bus service closest to home) and was greeted by a snowstorm.

The next day I went to the unemployment office to sign up. The woman at the unemployment office(the one who acted like the money came out of her pocket) said I couldn't sign up for 'x' number of days because I sold back 'x' number of days of leave. I said count the days since I got out because it has been 'x' number of days. She had to admit I was right and signed me up for unemployment. I was to get the handsome amount of $45 a week. My vacation had started!!!

Trucks

Like I said before I drove out to Cape Cod in my little Corvair. After driving around there for awhile, I realized that the Corvair was not a good vehicle to drive there. Other cars were always pulling out in front of me, seems like a little white car is almost invisible or just poses no threat to other drivers. That is why I bought the pickup in the picture below. Drivers on Cape Cod had a bad habit of creeping out until they were far enough out into the traffic lane that someone would stop to let them in. Whenever I spotted someone trying to creep out into traffic, I would downshift the truck to second gear and step on the gas. If they still kept coming, I would drift to the right and usually they would back up. Summertime was a miserable time to drive on Cape Cod and that was forty years ago. One town just off-base had about 10,000 year-round residents, on some summer weekends like July 4th it would swell to around 100,000.

Notice the broom sticking up behind the cab. A buddy said every truck had to have a broom and he stuck one there.

The other truck in this picture belonged to another guy in the shop. He followed me out to Cape Cod from K.I. and when he saw my truck, he bought one like it. Mine was a '56 Chevy and his was a '57 Chevy. He had a new Cougar that he bought with his re-enlistment bonus and had already wrecked it once while at K.I. and after seeing the traffic on Cape Cod, didn't want to take a chance on wrecking his car again.

I did a lot of work on the truck. It had a worn-out transmission and the rearend was shot. One of the wheel bearings in the rearend wore out and it was so bad that the axle wore a hole thru the top of the rearend housing. I bought a '56 Chevy car and put the entire drive chain from the car into the truck. There were some exciting moments during the process from getting the car to the base to finishing the project. While towing the car to the base, my buddy popped the clutch and started the car. It had a carburetor from a Caddy and the gas pedal linkage worked the opposite of the Chevy and after it started and he let up on the gas, it revved up and was running wide open. This happened to be on the bridge on to Cape Cod and there was a traffic circle at the bottom end of the bridge. He shut it down and didn't try again the rest of the way to the base.

Looking back, hindsight being 20/20, I might have been better off getting rid of the truck and keeping the car, but for some reason I preferred the truck over the car.