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Day Six January 3, 2006 What a long day! And what a ridiculously cold night in the
tent last night! Just crawled into the tent and on into the sleeping bag,
tucked myself in, and crashed hard and quickly. Ah yes, there is one other
little story from yesterday evening that I’d like to share with our CarDomain
readers back home. I was actually sitting in the little Panda writing up my
daily report, while Trevor was with a group of people having a chat about the
day’s events. Then one fellow made a light-hearted comment about the
primitive nature of the little Panda, upon which one of the 500SEL team
members commented: “Yeah, but you
should see what they’ve got on board. It’s like the NASA control center in
there!” Yes … I have to admit that
we have quite a few electronics on board.
GPS, PC, GSM phone for constant internet access through the PC whenever
there’s a cell signal. So you see, dear readers, these are the lengths to
which CarDomain will go to bring you the wildest automotive stories from the
four corners of the globe. Okay, back to morning time
here. Of course it was still pretty chilly when we woke up, since the sun was
just beginning to peek above the horizon. What a perfect time to try out the
new coffee maker! We fired up the old
0.9 liter engine on the Sand Flea, poured water & coffee into the little
brewing device, and plugged it into one of the four cigarette lighter
outlets. And wow! Talk about a drain
on the engine. Those super bright PIAA driving lights didn’t even make the
revs drop like that. And then, after about three minutes, acrid smoke was billowing
out from behind the dash. Definitely
time to pull the plug on the old coffee idea. I had to make do with plain old
water this morning, but knowing Trevor, he’s going to figure out a way to get
that little coffee maker going. Anyway, in the end today really
was good fun and once again the weather was amazing. This contrast is really
hard to get used to as well. Hot during the day, i.e. total t-shirt &
shorts weather. And then at night it’s
around 40F, so quite chilly. I’m extremely glad I brought lots of layers with
me. And what, might you ask,
did the Sand Flea and other travelers get up to today? We decided to stop in So off to work they went.
Cars up on jacks, springs out, spacers in, cars back
down. Trevor also decided to get some bars welded in under the car to protect
the oil pan, and the 500SEL folks purchased two new tires for about $60 to
replace the two blown out ones from yesterday. In the end, after having fought Moroccan
traffic to get to the shop and then waiting for all of the repairs and upgrades
it was close to 5 p.m. before we were able to hit the road south for
Marrakech. But we were determined to head on south and make up for the time
spent hanging out in the dusty streets of Morocco’s largest city. So we jumped straight into
the chaos that is Casablanca rush hour and made our way to the toll road, which
could really be an interstate you’d find anywhere in the U.S. Two lanes in
each direction, nicely paved and well-behaved traffic. Unfortunately, however, that only took us
about a quarter of the 140-mile trip. The rest was unfortunately two lanes
with lots of rusted-out, old trucks puttering along as slowly as 30 mph. But
the Panda persevered and got us to our goal.
Raised suspension and all. We decided to get a hotel
tonight, since I’ve been dying for a shower all day. And damned if I was going
to freeze my tail off again. Good night, folks. It’s time for the Panda
pilots to hit the sack. |