Complications

The nature of our trip - and my love of old cars - is such that the engine could have fallen out on the road yesterday after we carried the whole car on our backs down from the the peak of Mt. Pisgah, and I'd still be saying 'that's what you have to expect on a trip like this,' and 'it could have been worse.' I am going to rationalize away in advance the impact of any problem with the Chrysler because nothing about a a new vehicle replaces any part of the experience of driving an old one. Consequently, you should view nothing of what follows as whining. Because the engine didn't actually fall out and it's possible to coast down from Mt. Pisgah, if you have to. Which we didn't. It could have been worse.
Toward the end of our first day driving through Great Smoky Mountain National Park (hereafter if necessary GSMNP) we noticed the motor had an occasional hiccup on some of the upward slopes. By the next day, the hiccup was a somewhat more obvious hesitation on our trip to Clingman's dome (not a dome but an observation tower; dome refers to the mountain). Once down the mountain and into town in Cherokee however, we noted no problems at all.
But this was only reality following the dictates of narrative drama, pushing in the foreshadowing so that when we came to start our drive on the Parkway, we wouldn't have a look of total confusion on our face when the real problems started, and there would be no excuse for the audience to say 'where did that one come from?' There is a reason Scotty always remarks that he 'dinnae likes the way the wee mendacitron generators are behavin', Capt'n,' somewhere in act One; it is just the warming up of Kirk's Graceful Babe-o' the-Week AutoDump Feature (tm), and should be regarded as the Universe unfolding as planned.
We had barely started to climb up from GSMNP on the Parkway when it was obvious that the Chrysler was having problems with that misbegotten Thermoquad. Originally at the top of my list of things I wanted to fix on the Chrysler, this carburator had moved to the top position of Things About Which I can do Absolutely Nothing Because There is No Time Left list when the govenment neglected to get me my refund on a timely basis. And to tell the truth, the carb had actually performed well enough for every other bit of this trip so far, well enough that I can claim no rueful regret at leaving without fixing it. No 'I knew I shoulda...' here, unless it was an 'I knew I shoulda' lived in a place where they get me my money back at least half as fast as they'd be down my throat if they thought I owed it.'
A decade younger than the engine it sits on, the Thermoquad is festooned with all sorts of pollution control fittings that are blocked off or left open, intended for emission control devices undreamed of in 1966. Its electric choke is disconnected, which makes cold starts interesting, if by that you mean a thoroughgoing nuisance. But once it is running, and right up until yesterday, it peforms just fine and gets a respectable distance out of the premium gas that runs through it.
Now it coughed and gasped and wanted to lay down and die. Going uphill was too much for it and it wasn't having any fun, and everything was uphill and more trouble than it was worth. If it stalled, and it did, it didn't want very much to start again, and it accelerated the car only in the sense that we picked up speed in terms of half minutes, not seconds. In hindsight, this is where rational (not rationalizing) people would have turned around at the nearest overlook and gone back down to Cherokee and tried to find a garage that still fixed carbs. Did we do that? Nooooo, with as many oooo's as you want to add. We continued to limp onwards to Asheville, a distance of eighty miles or so. The idea of going back never occured to us.
The speed limit on the Parkway is 45 mph, and we found that if we could get close to it, the Chrysler would not stall. Unfortunately, 45 mph is a best possible speed, and the scenery, curves and sheer drops at the side of the road are such that most people savour the experience and stick to 30 mph or less, depending how all three of those factors add up on the Wow! scale. This means that they get in your way, usually at the moment at which the road starts to climb for eight miles. Going downhill was not a problem for the carb; it behaved here as if there was nothing at all wrong with it. Against expectation, the road went up more than it went down.
Jane drove for nearly all of this portion; her skills at keping the engine alive and the car on the road so surpass mine that I gladly dumped the task in her lap and sat in the passenger seat and admired the deep drop-offs next to the curves with no guard-rails. Or speculated aloud if required as to the intelligence, ancestry, upbringing and medical conditions of all those in front of us who slowed down to look. One regrettable result of this hurried dash was that we were passing some of the most outstanding scenery of our trip, unable to properly appreciate it or even pull over for a longer look. But as we passed Looking Glass Rock, we threw caution to the winds and stopped for a picture - the overlook was sloped downhill in the direction we were going - but did not shut the car off. (The Rock gets its name from the fact that under the right conditions, when it is covered with a fine layer of water, it will reflect acres of sunlight. On this day, it was merely a vast, impressive rock.)
We made it to Asheville, and the carb started to behave itself again, still following the laws of narrative drama. At our motel, we hooked up the computer, and found the yellow pages and between the two, started making calls in what I thought would be a drawn out and difficult job, trying to find a garage that knew what a carburator was. But the first place I tried recommended the garage at which we ended up; Pate's is the best place for carbs or anything else, according to the taxi driver, who drove us back for a measly $28.00 (ten mile drive, and he most definitely did not dawdle or take the long way). Finding Pate's garage was yesterday; we had the car to the garage at 0800 this morning and were told that there was a carb kit in Charlotte for the Thermoquad, and even as I type now, they are working on it. We await their call, and another expensive taxi ride with bated breath, or at least as bated as you get when you go back to the motel and sleep away the morning, and a good chunk of the afternoon.