Stranded in Utah With No Money: A Trip Report

[rjoefish]

So here I am, on my way from Iowa City, IA to Las Vegas, NV. I recently graduated, have a friend that lives out there that I can stay with, and have decided its the best time to move somewhere exciting and new.

My car. Its a 1991 Jeep Cherokee with about 117k miles on it. Its been running not lately but not overheating. Thought I had that under control. OOPS. My roommate from Iowa is also moving out and we're driving together, in seperate cars, all packed up with crap.

We left Saturday morning. After about 150 miles my car starts getting a little too warm on the engine temp guage for my liking. We slow down a bit but its still high so I turn on my heater full blast (I had been driving with my windows down as my car doesn't have A/C lolz). Temp goes down to an exceptable level and we drive to Denver and my dad uses his frequent hotel stayer points to get us a free room.

Today, Sunday, we take off and drive through the mountains. At the top of Loveland Pass and the Tunnel my car gets dangerously hot, but just at the right moment we hit the downslope of the mountain and its smooth sailing for the next 200 or so miles. At about Grand Junction my car is heating up again and I start leading the way so that I can set a pace that I think my car can handle. By the way, I'm driving with my drivers window down and the heater on full blast again. Getting out of my car into the 90 degree heat is a welcome relief, its hot in there. We drive along a ways and pass Green River, Utah.

As we're going up a mountainous slope disaster strikes. Temp guage going up and won't stop, we pull off onto Black Dragon View Point. As I stop my resevoir tank boils over. [censored]. We wait a bit and I have a gallon of water I put in there. We try to make it to the next exit. We get about a mile and game over, have to stop, its too hot again and I don't want to permanently destroy something costly (if I haven't already). We drive the 20 miles back to Green River to get coolant and more water to hopefully solve the problem. Guess what doesn't work.

So my friend wants to continue on to Vegas still as he has a lizard in his car's front seat. So we decide that since he wants to keep going and I can't since I have all my stuff here in, and on top of, my truck, I need to find a place to stay. My dad gets me a hotel room again and I call the tow truck.

So here I sit, in the Comfort Inn in Green River, Utah with about 350$ to my name and a car full of everything I own. I've already paid the tow truck driver 145$ to get my car about half a mile down the road to a NAPA store that opens at 8am tomorrow. I'm hoping that they can fix it quickly and cheaply and that I won't have to do odd jobs in Utah (kill tourists) to make enough cash to get to Vegas. I need to be in Vegas by thursday to keep a scheduled job interview on track, so here's to hoping it all works out.


Cliff Notes: Truck breaks, friend continues on to Vegas, stranded for the moment in Green River, Utah with 350$ and a broken truck with all my life's belongings in it. Going to offer repair man a 2007FP and a 2000FWP to fix it, hopefully he'll bite.