The first part of my trip to SoCal was great. Got to spend time with my   brother and friends. Got some good food, went to a swap meet, and   visited UCLA. The second part was.... an adventure. I made it to Vegas   and ended up staying there about 3 hours longer than planned. One rear   fender was about 1/4" above the tire while stopped and the other was   literally on it. The previous owner gave me a jack but the Racelands   have so much travel, the wheel wouldn't leave the ground. I went to Home   Depot and bought a few 2x4's but couldn't get them to work. I ended up   pulling the wheel into a gutter in the middle of the parking lot which   let me get the wheel off the ground. The lugs were torqued on so tight  I  couldn't get them to budge with a tire iron so I had to raise the  coil  through the wheel/wheel well. I raised it about 2 inches on the  coil  which added to about 1/4" wheel gap when compressed. This a  shorter  version of the Vegas story.
I get back on the road and  about 4  hours later my battery light starts flashing. The car starts  bogging  down and the lights flicker. I pull over to check the battery  and it  turns out the alternator ground split in half (I found that out  later).  I'm on a fairly small highway an hour south of Ely,NV. It  starts to rain  and is getting dark. I call my dad and he offers to  drive the 8 hours  from Boise to pick me up with a trailer.
I'm  15 miles south of a  small town (Lund, NV) and in a dirt lot. I decide  to try and bump start  it. I end up about 300ft off the highway (the  small highway), in the  dark, in the rain, on a dirt road. One of the  hardtop latches is broken  and it doesn't fit right so the doors won't  open without the windows  cracked. I decide to flag someone down to help  me bumpstart it because I  almost got it to start last time. The first  guy I flagged down said he  wouldn't help me but he would give me a  ride. He seemed extremely  sketchy so I didn't go with him. I go back to  my car and realize that  this sketchy old man told me he would send  someone my way and I'm not  visible from the highway so I start getting a  little paranoid. I decide  to flag someone down to help me push it back  onto the highway because  there was a little traffic flow, I felt it  was safer that way. This guy  pulls over and we try to push it up the  dirt road to no avail. He was  nice and offered me a ride to Ely. I  accepted after calling my dad to  let him know I'd be in Ely.
We  get into Ely and I book a $35  room. It was nice to know I didn't have  to wait in a miata for 8 hours  while getting rained on in cold weather  on some sketchy dirt road. I got  a warm meal at a nearby diner, took a  shower, watch some tv and get a  good 2.5 hours of sleep.
My dad  gets there and we head for the  Miata and it takes about 3 hours to get  it loaded up. We tried jumping  it and of course it dies after idling 30  seconds so we tow it back up to  the highway because there's an incline  that will make the trailer more  level. The trailer isn't exactly  slammed car friendly. We end up getting  it loaded by (carefully)  pulling the miata with the van and a tow cable  up the ramps.
The  rest of the trip was uneventful. We had  breakfast and then he slept  while I drove home. We picked up an  alternator and the way and that  night we discovered that the ground had  split and the alternator fried.
Anyways... here are some pics I took:





I have already sold the Grids, which I'm getting loads of hate for, but I'm not a fan of buying someone else's car and calling it my own without doing anything to it.