Our first Broadway store adventure in the Phoenix area had us driving to and from there every single weekend. We would gather at Alex’s house on Sunday evenings and then, late at night…drive east to the desert. Friday afternoons we would reverse the process and end up in Encino late that night, to be greeted by our families.
The jobsite, a remote location at the time…was visited regularly by the Arizona Highway Patrol in their efforts to generate a little revenue by making out-of-state-workers buy Arizona license plates. Sure enough, we were caught during our second week there. We sported dual plates for the rest of the time we were in Arizona.
And I do remember a hot night as we headed across the border into Arizona and Alex mentioned that the needle on the temperature gauge seemed to be climbing? Sure enough, it climbed to boiling and beyond and suddenly we were stranded in the desert…with a broken water pump at 2 in the morning. Dark and hot.
But as luck would have it…we had some ice left in our coolers and so we began to put that into the radiator in our attempt to cool things down enough to get us back to civilization in Blythe, maybe an hour back down the highway? (Blythe = civilization? That’s an oxymoron!)
We had to do the cooling process slowly, as we didn’t want to crack the block by adding a lot of cold water all at once. One ice cube at a time was placed in the radiator opening. It would drop; there would be a loud “hiss!” and then a little cloud of steam would emerge and drift off into the desert.
Finally, the temperature was low enough to begin our backwards trip and we made it to Blythe as the sun began to turn the horizon into a silver band. An all-night service station was able to help and called the right people to secure us a new water pump at this early hour.
The sun was up and blazing when we finally pulled into the parking lot at the project site. Luckily, our crew had made themselves busy in our absence and so we didn’t fall too far behind.
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