2021 Nissan Altima plus six bungee cords
Last Friday my son Nigel and I left Lancaster at 8:30 p.m. to drive to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He will be staying with his sister Lisa for a couple of months.
The plan was to drive to somewhere around Cleveland, drive as far as I could Saturday and arrive by Sunday late morning. As it turned out, I drove straight through. We arrived Saturday at 1 p.m. More on that later.
Nigel and Lisa at Caribou Coffee in Minneapolis
About 100 miles from Lancaster on US 322 West, I ran over what I think was a chunk of truck tire. There was a horrible scraping noise. We pulled over and found the bumper and pieces of the underbody dragging on the ground. We tried to pound it into place, but it fell apart as soon as we moved.
Then I remembered I had a bungee cord in my back pack. And at the second place we stopped there was a bungee cord lying in the breakdown lane. With two bungee cords, we could drive slowly to a Rutter's Store four miles away. There I bought a half dozen more bungee cords. I threaded them through the damaged pieces under the body, pulled bumper into place and kept driving.
The Nissan Altima before we left.
Nigel asked if the cords would hold until Minneapolis. I reminded him that NASCAR repairs partially wrecked cars in the pits with Duct Tape and Bungee Cords and they hold at 200+ mph. I could tell him the bungee cords would hold till I got home. They did.
When I returned the car after the 2,500-mile trip, I pulled off the bungee cords. The bumper and underbody parts stayed in place. They will fall apart if the car is driven over a bump, but the tension of the bungee cords had stuck the damaged parts together.
And why did I drive straight through? When we got near the Ohio state line, I looked on my hotel app and saw very few vacancies anywhere near Cleveland. A Holiday Inn near Toledo had one room for $368!!! I decided to keep driving. When the sun came up we were approaching Chicago. We at pancakes in Wisconsin and got to Minneapolis in the early afternoon. I slept for four hours, got up for dinner, then slept nine more hours. Late the next morning I started back. This time I stopped half way.
Modern cars are so reliable, it was fun to show Nigel I could put a broken car back together on the side of the road in the dark with green, yellow and black bungee cords.
