The Indianapolis Off-Road 500
I hit the road early and by the middle of the second day I was nearing Indianapolis. I figured it would be cool to run a few laps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but there were all these guys from NASCAR practicing for the Brickyard 400. As much as I thought the Avalanche could have kept up with them, the security guards knew better and kept the truck and me behind the fence. Maybe next time I'll get to show those speed racers what us off-roaders can do.
Crossing Indiana, I stopped at the Badlands Off Road Park near Attica. This is a great place to wheel your rig, with 700 acres of trails for trucks, quads, and motorcycles. Plus they have a fabrication shop where they build custom tube buggies. I didn't stay long since I didn't want to break anything on their trails, though I should have stuck around.
Badgers in Smalltown Iowa
This is a badger. While driving across Iowa around midnight I noticed the shifter knobs for the transfer case starting to vibrate very loudly. I slowed down and the vibration went away, so I decided that I should probably stop at the next exit. After coming over a small hill, I sped up slightly and was rewarded with a loud explosion of parts under the truck. Something came loose and by the time I coasted to the side of the road, the transmission had a broken housing, the transfer case was destroyed, the rear driveshaft was missing and I was stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I called Pw to tell him the situation and then called a tow truck. And while I waited I walked up the median looking for some of the parts. This is when I found a big fat badger. He didn't like the looks of me standing there with two flashlights, but unlike a raccoon or friendly bunny he decided to chase me down the grassy knoll and eat me. Imagine driving down Route 80 in the middle of nowhere at midnight and seeing some nut running backwards in shorts and sandals while being chased by a big furry critter, and you can see just how crazy this trip was becoming. Luckily for me the badger could sense my new radioactive strength and crossed the road before disappearing into the woods.
About this time Scotty Harkins showed up and towed us into Adair, Iowa, where we would spend the next three days. Little did I know that within 24 hours, half of the population of this 900-person town would know about me and my big red pile. Word travels fast in smalltown America and it was great. I found a couple fellows to help me go find my driveshaft and a few parts of the transfer case along the highway, and everyone was happy to talk to me about my big broken truck. Lucky for me I had picked the best weekend ever to get stranded in Adair.
For you history buffs, Adair, Iowa, is the home of the first train robbery by Jesse James and his band of outlaws back on July 21, 1873. And for the past 40-plus years the locals have celebrated that fact by having a big party, aka Jesse James Days, on a certain weekend every July, and I happened to make that event. I saw some local bands play on the main street, watched some kids ride a mechanical bull, and even got to see the water fights where teams of firemen and firewomen compete to push an empty beer keg suspended on a cable back and forth using only the water from a fire hose. It was cool and I will most likely never see that on the streets of Los Angeles.
Then after three days in Adair I had organized for an auto shipper to pick up the Avalanche, ridden a borrowed bike to the next town to go swimming, and contacted a friend to pick me up so I could make my flight home out of Omaha. It turns out that Dave Knight of JP Off Road, an attendee of Ultimate Adventure, was heading across the country with his wife and four kids and they were willing to pick me up on their way to see Mount Rushmore. They stopped, we all got ice cream cones for the trip, and within a few hours I was on a flight to Los Angeles. The Avalanche will hopefully be rebuilt by the time you read this, and we will fill you in on what changes we did to get it back up and running even better than before. Once again, the trip was way more fun than the destination.