If you’ve read Part I of our trip from Brooklyn to Illinois, you know that our road trip had hit a snag before we had even left the city.  (Or, more accurately, a snag had hit us, in the form of a huge bus.¹)  We figured we had probably just reset our moving karma and the rest of the trip would be cake, but, alas, it most certainly was not.

First, the good: On Friday night, even with the delays attendant to being hit by a bus (dealing with the police and the rental car company and then hitting rush hour because we had been delayed in the city), we made it to our goal town of Weirton, West Virginia.

Now, the even better: On Saturday, we traveled on to Indianapolis, only about 5 hours away, and visited some friends (also former Brooklynites) who live there.  We hadn’t seen them in over a year, so it was nice to spend some time with them and their son (who had turned two since we had seen him last and acquired a huge vocabulary).

Everyone had been warning us about the impending snowstorm, and we were compulsively checking the weather.  The last thing we wanted to do was be stranded on the highway in a minivan full of 95% of our worldly possessions during a snowstorm, and we were trying to determine the best time to leave Indianapolis to avoid this fate (or if we could leave at all on Sunday as planned).  When we woke up on Sunday, we found a few inches² of snow on the ground (and on our vehicle) but there didn’t appear to be any ice at that point.  The weather showed snow continuing to fall in Indianapolis for the rest of the day, but the remainder of our drive looked pretty clear.

We set out early in the morning, stopping to grab breakfast at a Steak ‘n’ Shake (oh, how I’ve missed the Midwest), and finding the interstate more or less clear once we were outside of Indianapolis.  Feeling pretty good about the forthcoming drive, we turned up the music and continued along I-74, planning to stop in Champaign to visit both my alma mater and my college roommate.

About twenty miles east of the Illinois-Indiana border, squarely in the middle of nowhere, our dashboard lit up with the warning that our tire pressure was low.

We pulled over and took a look at the tires, and, sure enough, something shiny and sharp was jutting out of the rear passenger side tire, and the tire was hissing and deflating rapidly.

Let me pause here and state that, while I have had my share of flat tires, I have never changed a tire.

But, parked on the shoulder of I-74 at least ten miles from the nearest exit, we didn’t seem to have much of a choice.  And so, in the snow and absurd cold, with cars and semis whizzing past us dangerously close (or, at least it seemed dangerous to me) in the right lane, we³ jacked up stuffed-to-the-gills minivan and put on the spare tire. We were so glad that the spare tire in our rented minivan was stored underneath the front of the car, not in the back. I think I would have cried if we had to unload our carefully packed minivan on the side of the highway in the snow to access the spare tire.

After jamming the old tire in the minivan (no easy feat, as there was very, very little available space), we turned to a task that proved even more difficult than changing a tire in the snow:  finding an auto repair shop that was open on Sunday.  The internet warned us not to drive more than 50 miles on the spare, and Champaign was still about 60 miles away. We called every repair shop that we could find, but all of them were closed on Sundays (and some, like the Sears in Champaign, was closed forever). Finally, we found a shop that was taking customers until 1:00 pm. We rolled in about 12:51 pm, thanking our lucky stars that the spare tire had carried us that far.

Thankfully, they were able to patch the tire. After a pretty short and inexpensive visit to the repair shop, we tried to salvage the rest of our day. I marched Marc around the University of Illinois Quad in single-digit weather, pointing out the location of the Morrow Plots, trying to get into Foellinger, and dragging him up the stairs to the fourth floor of the library to see the Classics Library, where I worked during undergrad.

We even got to meet my college roommate (thanks for driving in, Molly!) for lunch at Zorba’s, a gyros place that I have loved since I was a little kid.

Then it was back on the road, completing the last snowy stretch between Champaign and Galesburg.

We arrived in Galesburg around 6:00 pm, and, after we carried in the things from the minivan and had dramatically recounted the story of our flat tire to my mother, who was appropriately impressed with our fortitude, we collapsed in front of the fire with a well-deserved drink.

¹ For clarity, I feel as though I should note that although it was a bus emblazoned with the word “Bieber,” it was not actually Justin Bieber’s bus.  “Bieber” is apparently the name of a tour company run out of Pennsylvania, and the bus did not seem to have transported anyone more exotic than some Pennsylvanians taking a day trip to New York City.
² I wish I could be more specific, but, alas, I am abysmal at estimating numbers.
³ By “we,” I mean that Marc performed the hard labor while I read instructions from the manual and kept an eye on the lugnuts so that they didn’t get buried (and lost forever) in the snow.