All-Night Movers started a Southern tour.

January 9, 2003. Day .

We wanted to start our winter tour so we left a day early. We went to Athens so we wouldn't have to do that whole Atlanta drive the day of the show.

We took Sara's Honda Civic. It was a manual, and I was getting better at driving it, but I was still worried.

"There's a stoplight in the middle of a hill in Athens, or Congress Avenue," I told Slade. "I'm gonna get stuck on it and not be able to get the car back in gear." He said that was ridiculous.

When we got to Athens I got stuck at that light. I was the first car. I had never started a manual car on a hill before.

Slade directed me to let the clutch out and give it gas, but I was sure I was going to kill the motor. It didn't help that Slade started laughing. And cars started honking. I wasn't sure what to do. So, very stupidly, I put it in second gear.

Slade cracked up. The motor was roaring and stinky smoke came from under the hood. I think cars started to pass me. Slade screamed, "No! No! Put it in first!" So I did, and I somehow managed to get us going, away from the cloud I thought.

We went to a bar called The Manhattan about ten blocks away. When we got there there were people out front talking about what they thought that horrible odor was. I can't believe the car didn't just die after that.

Thanks to The Wayback Machine for keeping the hard copies of my website since my database is long gone. (Text files are forever, or at least more forever than a MySQL db.)

Georgia Athens rock All-Night Movers Slade Nash manual transmissions stories