I was worried Rachael would try to run off and leave us again, but she handed off the Belvedere driving duties to Dad, and he wanted to be the caboose. I ended up as the leader again, with Dale in the Gremlin behind me.

We pulled onto I-70 for another boring, uneventful twenty miles, but Dale started spicing things up for me pretty quickly, and I found myself watching my rear view mirror as much as looking out the windshield! The Gremlin appeared to be spending quite a bit of time on the rumble strips, as it became clear Dale was struggling to stay awake, but that wasn't the only problem. When drivers are fighting fatigue, speed control is one of the things that suffers first, and usually they slow down, but Dale kept speeding up when he would drift off. One minute we would be cruising along at 3K rpm with the Gremlin two hundred feet behind me, then the next minute he would be gaining speed, on a collision course with the Valiant's rear bumper! Each time I would whack the throttle to get away from him, and it seemed he would hear the change in the Valiant's exhaust note, and then back off, but I found the whole ordeal quite unnerving!

The Hot Rod Drag Week route planners really like to avoid the big interstates as much as possible, but the first foray onto I-70 had allowed us to skirt around the metropolitan area of Dayton Ohio, and this latest twenty had allowed us to avoid driving through Springfield Ohio. Their discretion was appreciated, as my appetite for stoplight to stoplight driving had been satiated by day two. With Springfield behind us the route returned to US-40, a much smaller divided four-lane which runs roughly parallel with I-70 from Indy all the way to Columbus.

At this point in the early AM hours we had US-40 to ourselves, and with Dale's erratic driving, that was a blessing. On the open sections between towns he was doing OK as we cruised along at 50-55, but when we would enter a small town and the speed limit would drop, he would nearly run over me. We made it through South Vienna and Brighton, but in Summerford there was an actual stoplight for the intersection with OH-56, and as we approached it, I realized he wasn't going to stop so I pulled the Valiant over into the left lane. As I suspected he drove past me and a car length into the intersection before he brought the Gremlin to a stop. A cloud of oil smoke enveloped the Gremlin as it sat there with the 572 searching to maintain a semblance of an idle.
"Good grief" I thought to myself, "That thing is really hurt!"
When the light turned green, I pulled up beside him, and he motioned me ahead with a sheepish half-grin on his face, his eyes glazed over.
I called Boone to come up with a game plan.
"We have to get him off the road, he would have plowed right into me if I hadn't moved over!"
"I'm with you", Boone agreed, "He's been keeping me awake, just hoping he doesn't end up in the ditch, so if you find a spot, we'll pull over for a while."