Day 3 (Wednesday 5th October)
There were still 2 small things to check over on the car in the morning – one was a knocking that had developed from the engine mounts and steering being properly tightened up (it had all been loose before) which meant the exhaust was now sitting differently. The second was checking over the nuts on the gear change linkage which turned out were also loose. The nuts totally transformed the gear change. Where it had been tricky before to select the gears and would also jump out of second gear, it was now so easy and no more jumping out of gear.
And so, the trip began and we set off on the road for Niagara Falls! The plan was for my dad to come with us as far as Chicago over a couple of days so he could see The Falls and also see how the car was going, and then he was going to fly back to New York.
Off at last, we drove north away from Manhattan, along the Palisades highway towards Niagara. The Mustang was cruising great at 70 to 80 mph. All was going great but then after about 120 miles….. disaster!
My dad was driving and we were happily chatting when there was suddenly an almighty bang like a hand grenade had gone off. It was so loud that it sounded like something had come off the suspension. It was pretty scary….
We pulled over onto the hard shoulder and got out to see what had happened. It turned out the front passenger tyre had blown out, well not blown out completely just all the tread had come off but was still holding air, so in other words it had delaminated. The force of the tyre stripping had actually pushed in the sill, cracked and chipped the paint on the front wing above, pushed the side marker out, forced the front headlamp rim off and damaged the front valance and splitter.
Although we had some spares parts and tools with us, we didn’t have a spare wheel for the Mustang so we had to call to the AAA. In the USA all the documents for the car – insurance, registration etc have to be kept in the car, which is different from the UK. I thought I had been clever keeping all the documents together, including the AAA temporary paper card, in the glove box in an envelope… but as I was on the phone trying to figure out exactly where we were on the highway so someone could be sent out to us, the small square registration paper managed to slip out without me realising. Everything was turning into a nightmare! If the registration document was lost, it would mean returning back to where we started to get a replacement as we couldn’t continue without it.
After walking up and down the highway side in a mad panic trying to find the piece of paper, I began to think it was gone forever. Amazingly though, I eventually found it under the car on the driver’s side, which was most surprising because the car had been moved forward about 30ft onto the grass out the way of the fast trucks zooming by. Needless to say, I have since bought a sealed folder to keep all the documents safe together.
The AAA would only tow us 3 miles free and it was approximately 45 miles to the nearest town that would have some tyres. The recovery driver was brilliant though and tried to find us a tyre to bring to us at the side of the road but because of the odd size and old car it wasn’t that easy. We also tried phoning nearby tyre shops ourselves to try find a tyre. We had known that they needed to be replaced and my plan had been to find some white wall tyres in Chicago but I didn’t want the risk of another blow out so decided to replace all 4 before continuing on our trip, meaning we needed four tyres of the tricky to find size. The recovery truck arrived and quickly loaded the car and towed us to Midas Tyres in Binghamton. Fortunately, they had 4 tyres of the correct 205 70 14 tyres so they were all replaced with new ones. Once that was done, it was a quick visit to Advance Auto Parts for some universal reflectors and duct tape to replace the side light that had been broken off from the tyre as it is a legal requirement to have a light there. And so, once again we were off!
We arrived in Niagara at about 10pm. Although we had made it, when the car was on the recovery truck we had noticed it had quite a big oil leak and this was starting to be a worry. As we were pulling into Niagara the clutch had also started to judder and slip. It had been a long, shattering day, so we went to bed to get an early start and decide what to do in the morning. But not before connecting to the hotel wifi to find a rather intriguing message on Instagram…
Someone from Midas Tyres who had changed the tyres earlier in the day had somehow found the Mustang on Instagram and had sent me a selfie with the mustang while it was in the shop! Turns out it really is a small world…
