I answered Boone's phone call and he quickly explained that he had caught up with Darren and Dale at a wide spot in the road-gas station in the middle of nowhere Illinois, and they were trying to find someone with a welder.
"I saw them pull off and head down a side road...what was that all about", I questioned.
"They were bottoming out the Gremlin on every little bump in the road, so they pulled off the beaten path to transfer all the stuff from Dale's rack into Darren's truck."
"So, they were cheating!"
"It's only cheating if you get caught, which is why they drove up a side road to do it. Besides, once I caught up to them, we stuck everything in the trailer behind the Barnyard, so we're legal again!"
"I told him that rack was a bad idea, but why are you completely stopped if he unloaded all the excess weight?"
"I had the floor jack in the trailer, so he really couldn't check out the problem until I caught up to them. Once we got it in the air, Dale realized that one pair of the lower adjustable shock mounts had been beat up so bad that the bolt had ripped free and they were essentially trying to drive across US-67 with one 130 pound coil spring holding up the back of the car!"

As soon as Dale had finished building his custom trailer hitch rack and set those two totes, and two five gallon jugs on it, it was clear to me that he had created another problem, but he refused to change course. The first couple of days, he had crawled under the Gremlin and screwed the bottom spring mounts a couple inches up the shocks in order to allow for more play while driving down the road, but since we had left Cordova in a rain storm, he tried to get by without diving under the car.

Boone and I compared the math on our route sheets, and decided we were a good twenty miles up the road from them, and he assured me there was no need for any of our group to turn back.