Omaha rose off the plains like a shimmering oasis. We stayed at a fantastic Marriott and spent the morning seeing a few sites. The Lewis & Clark landing seemed particularly appropriate for the western-ho part of Motorpool.com’s road trip.
Where Lewis & Clark once stood.
Before leaving town, Kim and I swung by the Omaha World offices to see if we could get some print coverage for Motorpool. Kim, God love her, marched right up to the security guards and pestered them until they sent down some poor intern to interview me.
Don’t dally, World-Herald peeps. Write the story. It’s a good one.
Then it was on the road again, bound for Kansas City. I should note here that the windshield wipers cooperate for about five minutes. We’ve developed a bit of a routine with them. You see, I’ve sent my tired, broken windshield wiper unit to Ficken “The Wiper Man” in New York. With a little luck, he’ll send me a working unit in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I borrowed an extra windshield wiper motor from David King (see the Brougham Spa Detroit), which is an unrestored original.
Cadillac used vacuum wipers for their silent operation. It’s real silent now.
The wiper motor works well initially. Then it mysteriously stops and no amount of fiddling with the switch will make it come back to life. It feels as if it uses all the vacuum in the system, and then simply dies. Or maybe there’s a vacuum leak somewhere. If I turn off the car and say, have lunch, when I return the wipers work normally again. Luckily, most rainstorms have not lasted longer than five minutes.
The wipers also have one other hilarious feature. On certain days (don’t ask me why) they decide to mysteriously rise up into the fully extended position to where they’re splayed at the far extremes of the windshield. Add a little vacuum pressure and they’ll retract–but only until I run out of vacuum. Then it’s back to the spread-eagle position.