We pushed the Charger onto the trailer, (for hopefully the last time ever in my life) and loaded everything up in the trucks. Dad gave Boone and I each a big hug, and said, "You boys be careful, and have fun, Ok?" "All right guys, you better get moving..." Darren said. "You gonna have that thing running when we get back here Friday?" Boone asked him. "Heck yeah..I'll be there, call me with updates!" and he headed back to the Dakota with Jamie. Boone and I watched them drive off, and then headed back to the Valiant when I got a phone call from Darryl. "Took my pics at the first checkpoint, and fueled up in Muskogee, good thing too because there isn't much out here once you leave there." I told him we were just leaving, and explained the added problems. "Wow, you better get moving or you won't get there 'til midnite!" He added Actually I was thinking to myself a midnight arrival would be a best case scenario at this point. We fired up the Valiant and jumped on 169. We passed back by the track and surveyed the pits, still a few guys not on thier way yet! A mile and a half later we were doing the stop and start, bump and grind of rush hour Tulsa traffic at the 3 large freeway crossings. Last year we spent a great deal of time at 210 degrees on the old mechanical water temp guage, this year's magic number on the electric guage seemed to be 215, which is where it locked in at even after we jumped on 51 and started moving again. The 51 morphed into the Muskogee Turnpike, and it was just plain HOT out on that stretch. At 2600 the temp would drop a shade under 215, 2800 it would hang right at it, 3K, it would start moving up, but Boone and I had window vent wings and life was good! One underpass featured a couple of Buicks and an early 60's Impala pulled over, but we rolled on figuring 3 was enough to handle it themselves. A couple miles later and the underpass featured the beautiful Orange Unlimited 2000 Mustang Cobra, with it's front-end removed. We pulled over and Boone ran back to check. He came back a few minutes later, "They've got someone bringing another electric fan, he said when it hit 225 he figured they better check it out!"
