Before we made it out of Paris, we were hit with a pretty good batch of rain, that had James and I down to 20-25 mph, but it was patchy so we pressed on. Boone decided to park and wait it out, and have us call back when we ran out of it, this pretty much summed up our approach for the rest of the night. I remember thinking the drive from Paris to Clarksville, then on to Russellville was probably quite scenic and enjoyable, if you weren't fighting rain, wet roads and pitch back night along the way! We stopped for one last load of fuel in the Satellite, and I called Boone to see how far back they were. "Well, quite a ways actually, we started losing oil pressure, so I pulled over", He explained. "What the heck is going on?" I asked. "It was three quarts low, after I filled it up, everything is fine, but it had us worried for a while." "Wow, are Lane and Michael still with you?" "Yeah, they've been following us the whole way, we told them they could go on, but they didn't want to abandon us like our brother did!" "Hey, I've got my phone!" "Yeah, yeah, I know, just kidding, call us when you get to the motel."
James and I had a great conversation the entire drive, and I was wondering why we hadn't traded off more often. In 2011 we had swapped cars, drivers, and passengers the whole trip, but this year we hadn't done it hardly at all. At one point he looked over at me and said, "You've got Dale driving this thing at the track because you say you don't have a good feel for shifting it, right?" "Yeah, pretty much, I had no seat time in this car before the trip." "So we've driven through four towns in the last two hundred miles, and you left it in drive the whole time!" "Yeah, it shifts out great when you're cruising around!" "That's not the point, if you manually shifted it every time, you'd have developed a much better feel by now. You've driven it six hours a day for the last 4 days, and you should have put that time to good use!" "Ok...you have a point." He looked over and smiled, "I hope I never get old!" "Your day will come... trust me!"
