"whistling in the dark"

 I come home from one of my soccer games one Saturday morning to find my housemate Chris in the driveway on his cell phone loading up the blazer. His brother mike is supposed to be driving a jeep up for him that he bought recently. The look on his face tells me something is not going right. I put my stuff in the house and change into some regular clothes, then head back outside to see what is going on. Turns out his brother and a friend were almost to st George when the jeep lost all oil pressure and died. Their dad had come up and towed them the rest of the way to mesquite. They did not know what to do from there, hence the call to Chris. Chris told me he was gonna drive the blazer out there and see what was going on, and tow the jeep back if he had to. Since I had nothing else going on for the weekend I offered to go with. After filling the back of the blazer with tools and grabbing some mt dew we headed off. The drive to mesquite was nice and easy, and we made decent time. When we got there we met up with Chris' dad, brother and brothers friend. After some brief introductions we started checking out the jeep. We discovered a pretty bad oil leak near the rear main seal, other than that we couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Since there was nothing more to be done to the about the jeep, we decided it was time to get some food. We all went and ate at one of the hotels that was offering an all you could eat shrimp buffet. After at least an hour of over filling our stomachs, we decided it was time to get back on the road. We hooked the trailer with the jeep up to the blazer. It was well after dark by the time we started on our way back. About 20 min outside of mesquite we started hearing this horrible knocking sound, with a huge loss of power, so we pulled over to investigate. After looking around for a bit, we discovered that the blazer had some bad spark plug wires. We tried taking some of the wires off of the jeep, but found out they were the wrong kind. I made a couple calls, and was able to get a hold of a couple of my cousins (mike and Dan) who were living in St George at the time. Dans wife dawn was nice enough to drive to the nearest store and get some spark plug wires for us that would hopefully work. They they drove out to find us. After waiting about an hour or so on the side of the freeway, a truck pulls up and Dan and mike along with one of their friends climb out. after swapping out the plug wires we fire it up and notice the problem is still there. After some deliberation we decide we are not gonna be able to fix it here on the side of the road in the middle of the night, so I call up my mom that lives about 45 min away and explain the situation and ask if we can crash at her place for the night. She says yes. So we decide to unload the jeep, and have the jeep tow the trailer, while mike and Dan tow the blazer with their truck and a tow rope. Since I am the one who has the most experience driving a vehicle being towed, I get to ride in the blazer and operate the brakes and steering wheel. So there we are caravanning down the highway in the middle of the night, with me being towed in the blazer about 6 ft behind the truck, eyes as open as I can get them so that I can keep an eye on the tension in the tow rope. We pull into my moms neighborhood, and as we are coming around the last turn, the tow rope snaps. We tie it back on and finish pulling all the vehicles to the front of the house. After giving mike and Dan many thanks, they head off back to st George. The rest of us are shown were we can sleep. After about 4 hours of sleep, I awake to find Chris sitting at the table pouring over a tech manual. We head back outside and start trying to figure out what is wrong while the others are still asleep. Not too long after, I notice that one of the spark plugs is broken, so we start checking all the plugs only to find that one of them has completely broken apart on the inside and the pieces have fallen into the cylinder. Now everything is starting to make sense. I call up my buddy Chris v who lives in Vegas, and ask his wife if its ok if we steal him for the day. Soon after Chris v is on his way out to meet us with some new spark plugs from auto zone. When he arrives, we put the plugs in, and fire it up only to find out the problem is not fixed. We decide the next best course of action is to get the blazer back to mesquite to auto zone. We pull the blazer, with Chris V’s blazer. Once we get to auto zone, we notice that the tension pulley is not operating as it should, so we figure that might be the what is causing the problem. After several hours of no luck, Chris calls his dad. New plan is for his dad to come back and we will put the blazer on the trailer and he will tow it back to Utah. Chris and I will take a chance and drive the jeep back. We stock up with several five qt jugs of oil and some coolant, and hit the road with Chris v following us. We leave chris' brother and his friend with the blazer to wait for their dad and ride back with him. On the way to Vegas, I keep a steady eye on the oil pressure gauge. Every time it makes a sudden drop we pull over and add a couple qts of oil. We have to pull over twice on the way to Vegas. We stop by Chris V’s house and his wife Kim is kind enough to make us dinner. I pass out on the couch while she is cooking. After we eat, we decide its time to get back on the road, especially since Chris has to be to work in the morning. As we pull out, we find that the headlights don’t work, so we make another stop at auto zone to pick some up, along with more oil. Then off into the night we go. Now one of the qualities that the jeep has, is a levitating roof, meaning of you are not actively hanging on to it, it wants to fly away, and when it starts to lift of the body is when the doors are free to open on their own. Obviously this caused some interesting moments going down the road. When we got to stateline we stopped and filled up, and of course added more oil. We also bought some bungee cords. Before hitting the road again we took off the snowboard rack from the roof and hooked the bunge cords through the holes and then hooked the other ends to the roll cage. We also found a way to bungee the doors shut. This made the rest of the drive much easier. We then continued down the highway going about fifty miles an hour the rest of the way home taking back roads so as to stay off the highway and out of every ones way, stopping about every hour or so to top off fuel and add oil. After a while we stopped switching off back and forth for driving, and I drove the rest of the way so that chris could get some sleep since he had to work in the morning. It was around sun up when we rolled into the driveway, what a weekend....... we later found out that the blazer had thrown a rod, which I should have guessed right away.