Throughout our time in this friendly North Dakota town, Kim and I developed an annoying joke routine of peppering all our conversation with lines from the 1996 Coen brothers movie, Fargo. 

“How’s your breakfast?” I asked.

“Pretty darn good, ya,” Kim responded in her best impression of Frances McDormand’s character. We were staying at a rock-lined local hotel. When we’d checked in the night before, we’d both noticed that the place smelled strongly of chlorine. Now we knew why: there were nine (9!) hot tubs in the lobby.

What a country. Where but in America can one check in and get a waterborne fungus at the same time?

Still, the inn was actually quite nice, despite lacking a bar. I asked Kim if she’d slept well on the comfy beds.

“Oh ya, you betcha!” she said.

“What do you want to do first this morning?” Kim inquired.

“Put the Cadillac in a wood chipper, Marge.”

Instead, we drove it over to an ABC interview on WDAY. The Brougham started well and ran okay, but had a slight hesitation, a momentary pause about six or seven times on the way there. It was the kind of hesitation that made the car feel like it might conk out. Unnerving, that.

Thankfully, it didn’t.

An ABC interview in Fargo for Motorpool.com

After the interview, I decided to stop and have the dwell and timing checked. Maybe that was why the car felt sluggish? Sure enough, the dwell was 37 degrees instead of the 30 suggested by Cadillac. That required us to retard the timing by 7 degrees. The Brougham really appreciated that tweak: she began running smooth and strong. 

We motored out of the shop and went to the nearest auto glass store to get a rock chip filled on the windshield. The manager, Neil Krueger, had been recommended to us by another shop. He collects VWs and is an absolute pro. He and the good people (and real car enthusiasts) at Advanced Auto Body & Glass, filled the chip to where it’s near-invisible, and didn’t even charge us. That’s a first, Marge.

The falls of Sioux Falls

At 2:30, we began our jaunt South. First stop: Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sioux Falls was named for, surprise, the falls in town. We’ve noticed that a lot of place names here match what one would expect from straightforward  midwesterners. For example, we drove through places called “White Rock,” “Great Bend,” and “Lone Tree.”

Wisely, we avoided “Crooks,” ND.

A dinner at the charming Phillips Avenue Diner, yielded an awesome basket of fried dill pickles and vanilla malts. 

Back on the road, we quickly made Sioux City, Iowa. Unfortunately, it was dark as we drove through, so I have just blurry pictures from Iowa. I apologize to the Hawkeye State. But I was tired and, as Kim pointed out, grumpy.

This is Iowa. At night. Blurry.

Why is it that women assume men are grumpy if we don’t talk? I had been talking to Kim, continuously, for 14 hours. We’d started our day with a chlorine breakfast at 8 o’clock. It was now 10 pm. My throat was sore. I’d run out of stuff to talk about. The Cadillac was acting up. And I’d been driving down a straight road with heavy construction, no lights, and pungent barnyard odors for 420 miles.

Seriously, I think I made three turns while on the highway. Not that they were big turns, mind you. We’re talking 5 degrees or so. But after hundreds of miles of straight monotony, five degrees seems like a damn roller coaster. When turns came up on the highway, we both were so startled that I nearly drove off the road into (presumably) some big heap of manure.

All states have highways that occasionally smell bad. In Alabama, everyone knew that Tuscaloosa stank because of a great big paper mill. But you drove by, made lots of comments such as “Who farted?” and were shortly out of the noxious fog. Yet here in the midwest, a giant odiferous blight hung with us for hours. It was one stank after another. Maybe we are here during fertilizer season or something. Or maybe it was so dark because we’d driven the Cadillac into a giant cow rectum. It smelled that bad.

A welcome 75 mph sign.

I tried turning on the radio but could only pick up a fervent minister and Michael Savage, who grated on my nerves as we hurtled at 75 mph (the limit up here) through the clouds of stank. Meanwhile, Kim channeled her mother, my Auntie Peggy.

The charming Auntie Peggy (in her "evening" Cadillac)

Auntie Peggy is the most charming person you will ever meet. A sprightly and inherently happy 84-year-old who originally hails from Scotland, Peggy is always interested in you, whoever you are. She laughs easily and smiles broadly. She also talks a blue streak (like everyone in my family). Best of all, she drives Cadillacs.

Throughout this trip, Kim has reminded me of her mother, engaging everyone we meet. At gas stations, hotels, parks, restaurants, and mechanic’s shops she tells people about Motorpool.com. Short of hitting people upside the head, she’s done more to recruit new members than anyone I know, including me.

But as there were no people to recruit for Motorpool in the Cadillac and Kim had left her Kindle at the last fix-it shop, she’d now resorted to reading road signs and commenting on the smells.

“Oh, there’s a McDonald’s.”

“What was that?”

“Merge left.”

“Man, that stinks.”

“Look, the end of construction.”

“It smells like old fish. I thought we were land-locked.”

“Begin construction.”

“When are we going to get there?”

“Oh, it’s now a 65 mph zone.”

“Are you tired?”

“Who Michael Savage and why is he so angry?”

“You look tired.”

“Why are you not talking?”

“Are you grumpy?”

“Why is the speedometer ticking like that?”

The speedometer, about 1,000 miles ago, began a vague march towards death. I was either going 60 or 65 a week ago. A day ago, we were doing 70 or 80. Tonight, our speed was ninety or nothing. The speedometer flew from one side of the dashboard to the other, like a berserk metronome. It’s steady ticking did not help fight the boredom of the perfectly straight highway.

Then the odometer gave up the ghost at 74,104 miles. Great. Now my unreliable gas gauge was impossible to double check. So we stopped often to tank up. 

In the last 100 miles, the Cadillac began it’s funny surge thing again. It was like a fish bite: sudden, brief, and gone before you were sure what it was. What is this affliction?

Tired after a long 420 miles, we arrived in Omaha, Nebraska at midnight. Yeehaw.

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