Rolling into New Orleans

 

Like a dog with a bone, Chris has his eyes on seeing Sophie and Amelia in New Orleans so we agree to push on early. Barbara is also returning to the team. Unfortunately early morning torrential rain and lightning made departure challenging to say the least. Instead we settled in for an excellent breakfast curtesy of the Hotel general manager, a Brit, who loved the cars. He also kindly slipped Hobnobs, digestives, marmalade and other critical comfort foods from home into Chris’ car before we left. As I have said before and will say again, the kindness of strangers.

 

We left as the rain abated, Lagonda roofs up, Chris dressed head to toe in waterproofs. In the event we started right at the tail end of the rain and didn’t really get hit by it for the rest of the day. The worst that happened was Ham got soaked by a car coming alongside to take pictures and going through a large puddle, most of which seemed to hit him.

 

We had a choice of either takin g a ferry from Galveston across to the Bolivar peninsula or as Waze suggested back to Houston and then onto highway 10 past Lafayette and Baton Rouge pretty much all the way to our next hotel. Given the miserable weather we chose the longer route via Houston but given how things turned out perhaps we should have braved the ferry.

 

Early on Nigel’s Lagonda sped ahead and that for the most part was the last the other two cars saw of him. When Chris and Ham stopped for coffee, ‘Find my Friend’ already showed Nigel some 30 miles ahead.

 

Highway 10 is a busy, straight road through the remains of Texas and across the Mississippi river all the way to New Orleans and although somewhat tired from the exertions of celebrating Nigel’s birthday the night before drivers and machines cruised steadily onwards. It’s another long drive of over 600km and as Ham arrived at the hotel a thumbs down message was received from Nigel. What had gone wrong? Not having seen him all day it was difficult to judge.

 

Nigel’s temperature had suddenly sored and his engine was so hot that the oil in it was steaming, not a good sign. The reason that he was behind the other cars that he had taken a diversion to get an oil change, a diversion which was successful. His first message was that he had ‘dropped all his water in the radiator’, a sign that his radiator had a fatal flaw in it. He had pulled over on the side of the highway with a very, very hot engine and no water in the radiator. A kind local stopped to help and disappeared to find 3 gallons of water and thankfully returned with said coolant. The gentleman’s name was Mohamed and when offered compensation for his help he refused on the basis that as a muslim it was his duty to help travellers in distress. We succeed on the back of the kindness of strangers. The water and an open bonnet got Nigel to the hotel before it got dark. The good news being that his engine appears not to have been damaged, the bad news is we have to find out why he is losing all his water and subsequently overheating his engine. We are all convinced that it is the water pump again. If the pump isn’t working the water remains in the engine block and doesn’t go through the radiator to cool down and the water in the block will boil and evaporate away. Both Lagondas have now lost their water pumps, a bit of a worry. Nigel’s magneto hasn’t worked for a week or so and he also wants to fix that. Ham needs to fix his ignition switch issue and see if some other minor electrical issues can be resolved. At last Chris has decided that the time has come to change his spark plugs. That Rolls just keeps rolling on!

 

We have always scheduled a rest day in New Orleans so we have time to sort these problems in the morning. We went for a drink before dinner (which was probably the best meal we've had on the trip) and think we spotted father Christmas, whose obviously a jazz fan and is attending New Orlean Jazz Festival, during his spring break.