An eventful weekend for the poor little Midget.
First, on Friday evening I'm driving home from work, sky looks very
threatening. I put the top up and the passenger side sidescreen in. About 5
minutes later all hell breaks loose. Horizontal rain, 3/4 of an inch in 10
minutes, lightning strikes within a few hundred yards, 50+ MPH wind, of course
this is coming at me from the drivers side and the sidescreen is in the trunk.
I bailed off onto a side-street to present a more-protected side to the brunt
of the storm when suddenly inch-diameter hail begins hammering down. I know
what it feels like to be inside of a drum. Good thing these old cars are made
of pretty stern stuff, as I only picked up a couple of dings, the storm passed,
then I dragged my dripping self home.
Then on Sunday, the local MG club is out for a rally. My lovely wife is
navigating, the sun is shining, I saw many friends at the start, seems like a
good day. Then an unpleasant, all-too-familiar noise starts up from under the
bonnet. Sounds like a generator bearing. The metallic dust on the housing
confirms this. This is the replacement for the one that earned me a mention in
Simon Bosworth's running report in MG World issue #3. Less than a year old and
it's got to fail publicly again, how humiliating. It's only noisy at low RPM,
so I drop out of the rally and elect to hop on the freeway for the four-mile
run home. Well, I've been considering an alternator conversion anyway.
On the freeway, Darcie suddenly, yells "look out!" An Altima, obviously
oblivious to my presence, is doing the "high-speed-three-lane-change" and is
about to crunch me into the guardrail. I jerk the wheel left (bad idea,
especially when applying brakes) and before you can say "snap oversteer" I'm
travelling backward on the interstate in the middle of Minneapolis on a Sunday
afternoon. Fun! I'm moving in the same direction as the rest of traffic, I'm
just facing the wrong way. The car is in fourth, clutch is to the floor, so I
back off the roadway, intact. Now I'm parked in the 4ft wide shoulder between
the leftmost lane and the guardrail, facing traffic. Since a Midget is a bit
wider than 4 ft, I'm a little more in the path of the onrushing trucks than I'm
comfortable with. I'm flicking the headlight toggle switch on the dash to alert
people that I'm there, and thankfully a large break in traffic finally came up
and I was able to make a U-turn into a more conventional highway driving
attitude. Yikes! Got to get out and Autocross a bit more, letting it get away
from me like that almost got us killed.
The REST of the weekend was without incident. : )
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