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bangs, carrying us eastward at
a speed of around 15 miles per hour when it
suddenly backfires and then dies. We roll to a stop and the on-board Winton factory representative gets out. A 1907 Winton owned by the museum and driven by curator David Holcombe has been following us and it stops. Holcombe comes up to confer. "It might be the end of our trip. I think it just blew itself up," Wake says of the 1899. Minutes later, Wake's wife, Pat, arrives in a pickup truck |
in which she has been following
the route.
I tell her Wake thinks the trip might
be over. She looks over, pauses a second and
says the trip is not over because Wake is still
working on the vehicle. Furthermore,she says she has not noticed any of the subtle signs that Would indicate he has given up. "He's not sitting by the side of the road pounding his fists and he hasn't kicked anything." In fact, it turns out to be a small problem, a loose wire. It is also the first of half a dozen times in the next few days that Wake |
proclaims the end is near. After the third one, I stop writing down the time and circumstances and photographing the fateful spot, as I have more faith in the mechanical ability of Wake and Holcombe than in Wake's ability to tell the future. Dead Guys are ahead We are trying to match the time set by Winton and Shanks. Our trip is supposed to be a more leisurely tour. They wanted to break 50 hours of driving time and did. Wake does not understand |
why we are
not easily beating the pace set by his great-
grandfather.
We are being whupped by two guys
who drove on dirt roads and have been dead
for at least 60 years. It is clear they
traveled far more quickly, and the
articles filed by Shaiks do not describe
any mechanical problems. This is a puzzle. Happily, in the first few days our problems are small ones. One of the first occured in Pennsylvania, when we slowly rolled to a halt, the one-cylinder engine dead. A pin for the valve that |