1,600 mi Road Trip (long)

[zsolt1 at telusplanet.net]

I have been down in Palm Springs from Calgary Alberta for a week and a half now
and I thought I should share my road trip with you guys.

I left home pretty late in the afternoon at 4PM. Originally I thought I'd go as
far as I can then I will find a place to stay for the night, but it didn’t
exactly turn out that way. Let me just say that 28 hours later I was already
here. The total mileage was 1,600 miles, and my car used 92 gallon of premium.

It was actually a fun drive overnight. I had my V1 mounted on the windshield,
and I only had one incident when a patrol car ahead of me suspected I was
speeding, and suddenly pulled over with his radar on to get a reading. He must
have been moving along pretty good since I was only slowly catching up to him at
speeds where most vehicles I passed appeared to be standing. Luckily the V1
alerted me just in time.

The car an (88 red 5k tq) ran beautifully. I had my some maintenance work done
just before I left including belts, lifters and the fuel pump (just to name a
few) and the 225/45/17 tires felt like they were enjoying the twisties in the
Montana mountains, until my engine suddenly died just before Blackfoot, ID. I
only drove about 290 miles since my last fill up, and I didn't think I could
have been out of fuel. I was quite sure it was the fuel pump again. This was at
1:30 AM. My cell phone seemed to have signal, but I didn't know where I was. I
recalled seeing a sign a while back but didn't remember the name on it. I
thought I might as well take a nap till the morning and I will call AAA to get
the car in somewhere.

I have an emergency triangle that I put on the road behind the car, I put on my
flashers (the last thing I wanted was somebody slamming into me on the freeway),
and I must have dozed off when somebody knocked on my window. To make the story
short, a trooper ended up bringing me a couple of gallons of gas, and the car
fired right up. I guess at high speeds the car guzzled way more than normal.
They led me to the nearest gas station, and wished me good luck for the rest of
my trip. I got lucky, and I also learned that my fuel gauge doesn’t work. Since
I was logging my fill ups and mileages I started using those numbers as a guide
instead of relying on my gauge.

I got to Salt Lake City around 7 AM and filled up again. The temperature was
going up and the traffic was getting heavier as I was heading towards Las Vegas,
so I slowed down a bit. I also took a nap for an hour or two when I got really
tired. I reached Vegas incident free at around lunch time. At my last fill up
before I got there I lost my gas tank filler cap, however Hank, a very nice
fellow Audi enthusiast I met had a spare one on one of his parts cars that he
gave me. Unfortunately I couldn’t see his car which is modified with Javad’s EFI
but we had lunch and had a great chat before I was heading down south to Palm
Springs.

The rest of the trip was also quite uneventful. The traffic was heavy, and I got
to P.S. at around 9PM local time.

Zsolt