Barstow, California

Today is my third wedding anniversary. Somehow it seems fitting that I would leave my wife and drive 800 miles west across the country to start this epic journey. You may be asking yourself, ‘why west?’

Well, unfortunately last Friday we received some bad news. Actually, it was worse than bad, it was terrible. After a final inspection and routine valve adjustment, Mark at <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/wolfsburg-autowerks-boulder">Wolfsburg AutoWerks</a> thought something didn’t sound right. His years of experience told him it was bad, but until he put a compression gauge on, it wasn’t apparent how bad. Less than twenty four hours before we were scheduled to finally leave, he discovered that one of our cylinders was barely firing, if at all, with intermittent compression on cylinder #3. Crap.

As if 82 HP wasn’t a small enough engine, we were hampered by 1/4 of our power being robbed. Now the decision on how to react came. As you can imagine, at first we were devastated. Time to pull out the whiskey and think hard. Should we take my 4-Runner down? Take the chicken buses? Hitchhike and backpack? Nope, we’ve grown attached to ‘la ultra mujer’ and we’d have it no other way. After discussing our options, we settled on heading west and taking it to the Westy mecca for a transplant. So we packed up and headed to <a href="www.gowesty.com">GoWesty</a> in Los Osos CA. After driving 800 miles, we pulled off and camped out in the Mojave desert. Our first good test of life w/o AC...