Some car issues today. We will call them issues as Shadow may just have been persnickety and not necessarily having any real trouble. It’s hard to be sure.

She had a bit of an incident in the parking lot prior to the Green Lake tour. We call this one how to clear a parking lot. Mostly because it kind of did… by smoking the place up. The Maxwell was parked in the middle of the antique cars at the Legion, almost right smack in there, and Grandpa decided he needed to run off the oil. I’m not entirely sure what the issue was, if doing the valves resulted in a spill or if the oil in the car itself was suspect, but he held down the gas and let the car run for a while. The result was a rather large cloud of foul smelling smoke that was kind of all over everyone.

People started leaving for Green Lake early.

We had to go back to the trailer for air and then repeated this process some. The run around Green Lake seemed fine, at least from what I could tell as a back seat passenger. We made it around, stopped for rootbeer floats, and that was when things took a bit of a worrisome turn.

The car would not stay started. I got it to start, much to the surprise of people watching who did not believe I could crank it (I can, but sometimes it doesn’t work and it does hurt a bit, too, at times.) Grandpa said it wasn’t getting enough gas.

So we checked, had plenty in the car, and so he checked it going into the carburetor. Grandpa got under and started trying to fix it, and I’m not sure entirely what he was doing, I couldn’t tell, but we thought we had it fixed. I put the tools away, he tried to start it. Nothing. I reminded him we didn’t turn the gas back on, so I did and woosh. Gas puddles under the car, and it turns out some line was disconnected. Whether that was the line Grandpa tinkered with or not, I am uncertain, but it was a bit of a new disaster as at first it seemed like it needed a new part. It didn’t. Grandpa put it back in place, the car started, we drove back to town.

(I will add that the parking lot was rather deserted at this point.)

It did not want to start again when it was time to do pictures. I got it started after that, a bit in advance, and we were off to the nursing home.

And the car seemed to start fine the next few times, so here is hoping that bit of finicky behavior is behind us and all will be good for tomorrow’s long run.