Last week I agreed, in a last-minute move, to help my uncle retrieve a Chevy pickup truck from Kansas City which he won in an online auction.
Now this is a whirlwind plan: find out on Monday afternoon and agree to it, meet my uncle on Wednesday at 3 a.m. in Nashville at his place on the west side of the city, then drive up through St. Louis and across Missouri on I-70 to Kansas City. My uncle completed the purchase, and he drove his newly-acquired truck while I followed behind in the Tundra we took up there, heading back home.
I tried my best to record what I could from stations not represented on here, though some of it turned out static-ridden, as you might imagine would happen trying to record various radio stations along the way.
We didn’t have a set stop time, and my uncle considered having us drive all the way back that night, which would have been insane considering that I was going off 4 hours of sleep and this would have put us back home around midnight — 21 hours since we left, and it’s about a 45 minute drive to where I live (southeast of the city) in the Nashville area from his place.
Fortune intervened for me: not only did the truck he bought not have a working battery (which he remedied in Kansas City), but it turned out that the Chevy’s headlights didn’t work. Caught up in a road construction tie-up near the I-64/I-57 split, we waited a good 30 minutes to make it through the traffic congestion, which happened to hit right as the sun began going down. By the time we were through the traffic mess it was dark and, with my uncle’s truck lacking headlights, we had to find a place to stop.
Heading down I-57, he followed behind me with his hazard lights blinking, allowing traffic to zip past us as we made our way as safely as possibly down the interstate. About a dozen miles from there we finally found a place to crash in the town of Benton, IL, at a dump of a hotel that is part of a chain whose name you probably know. I managed to snag a couple of IDs out of the Marion/Carbondale market before I fell asleep, exhausted.
By 6:30 the next morning we had enough sunlight to where we could make the rest of the trip back to Nashville. We made it back safely, though I was worn out for the rest of that Thursday. For those of you who drive long distances on a regular basis, you have my sympathy. I wouldn’t have thought driving 1,100+ miles would be so physically taxing, but it really was, especially for someone like me who’s not used to doing it.
With that in mind, I present new IDs from Kansas City, Marion/Carbondale, IL, and a couple from my home turf of Nashville. I wish I had more from KC (and I’m on the fence on the Jack FM ID I recorded as we rumbled into town enough to wait until next week to decide on it), but better something than nothing…
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