Happy trails! One more time, everybody!!
(See my last newsletter for Part 1 of this travelog)
There are 278 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona.
278 miles of dusty almost nothing.
Which isn’t great when you’re cruising along, and you’re doing around 80 and suddenly all the lights on your dashboard light up with stern warnings that something has gone wrong and your car literally starts to shake.
Uh oh. What to do?
- Slow down. Pull over. Give everything a good once over - everything seems intact. The engine and tires are still where they should be.
- Check the manual. Not a lot of help.
- How about YouTube? Ooh, I still have cell service! Let’s see. Could be the engine mounts (can an engine really do a dismount?), the engine coils, or just faulty sensors. No way to tell without a mechanic doing a diagnostic.
Next stop is Lordsburg in 22 miles. We’re in the middle of that 278 mile stretch. Las Cruces is 100 miles behind us, and we're about 180 miles from Tucson. We’ll take it slow, like 65.
We rolled into a truck stop just outside of Lordsburg to make sure we were still intact, and then prayed to the gods. Help me Google! “Mechanic near me”.
There was one. All Makes Automotive.
We rolled in, and gulped. It looked like a junkyard. There were cars of all vintages laying around in pieces. Mater’s distant relatives? We had to thread the needle between them just to get in.
I heard the tune of Deliverance somewhere in the back of my head.
Stacie said, “you get out”. I did. With nothing but a phone as protection. It didn’t look good . . . .
But long story short, there was a lovely woman in the office, and she and her husband worked with us for almost 3 hours to identify the problem, source the part we needed . . . that by some minor miracle was available in town (it was a bad engine coil), and get us back on the road. They wished us well on our journey.
But wait? How much do we owe you?
Victor (the owner/mechanic) reasoned since the actual problem didn’t really require any significant work, and we had gone to retrieve the part ourselves . . . no payment was necessary, but if we insisted we could just leave him a tip and a good review on google. And that we did, which you can see below.
Victor and Zariah are our people now. If I’m in the area again, I’ll stop and say hello. And I’m not the only one!
According to another google review from a person who got stuck there and had to stay overnight, they gave him a place to sleep and made him soup when he woke up sick the next day, all while continuing to fix his van!
But here’s the moral of the story. That unscheduled stop brought us into close contact with some of the nicest, most generous, salt of the earth type people I have ever come across.
They understood our situation and the journey we were on, the problem we had, and problem-solved with us to keep us on the path.
That, my friends, is the entire point of business.
They understand their purpose: to get people going again.
They don’t have a website, but they have great google reviews. Mine is just one more in a long string of them.
Now let’s not fool ourselves. As the literal only game in town, they could easily have extracted ungodly amounts from us and we would have swallowed that bitter pill and paid it. But they didn’t. They asked us to let others know about them.
Free advertising! Brilliant.
My point is this. There are good things happening all around you.
Pay attention. And give thanks.
I’m thankful for our temporary breakdown in Lordsburg. It was a masterclass in the virtuous cycle.
And if you’ve made it this far, I’m thankful for you too.
Thanks for reading to the end! Happy long weekend, and Turkey Day if you’re in the US.
Ginger, CEO at Motive3.com
