Day One

On the first day I bought Charlie, man was I excited. I got him from a guy in Rigby, just ten miles away from our home in Rexburg. I had test driven it and then wrote him a check, at which point he gave me a handwritten receipt and the title. We drove over to Kara's parents and then I went to show the truck to my friend in Idaho Falls. On the highway onramp, the front u-joint snapped and I was stranded. It's a manual transmission and the emergency brake is gone entirely, so without a connected driveshaft, I was stuck sitting there on the ramp with my foot on the brake. I couldn't even get out to chock the wheels because Charlie would have rolled away. So I sat there for about a half hour and then my friend came and towed me to his house, where we spent the better part of the evening knocking out the old u-joint and putting in a new one. I learned that night that driveshafts are virtually indestructible. You can hit them as hard as you want with heavy sledgenhammers and you're not going to do anything but knock the rust off.