“I bought it.” My husband, Eddie, had just become the proud owner of a 1966 Mustang convertible, located through the Internet, sight unseen, through a web site that listed car sales across the country. The seller was as amazed to receive a call from Texas before his ad came out as Eddie was to find that the car was still available.

But the car was in Cocoa, Florida; we live in Sugar Land, Texas. “You want to fly to Florida in the morning and drive it back?” he asked.

I had learned to drive in my dad’s 1964½ Guardsman Blue Mustang hardtop, one of the first sold in Texas. I had wanted one ever since. “Let’s go!” I answered.

There are a few suggestions you should keep in mind when buying long-distance.

Suggestion #1: Keep your hopes in check until you see the actual condition of the vehicle.

When Geoff Bishop picked us “crazy Texans” up at the airport and drove us to Cocoa, I fell in love the moment I saw the Candy Apple Red lady with the black top parked against a backdrop of palm trees. It needed work but I knew that was our car. So much for Suggestion #1.

Driving across the country in a thirty-five year old car that you don’t know much about is not an adventure for the faint of heart or the mechanically challenged. Have a Plan B. If the car broke down, we planned to put it into storage, fly home, and retrieve it later. Suggestion #2: Hold on to your return airline ticket.

Eddie christened our new ‘Stang “Rita,” after his red-haired mother, and we hopped in.

The car wouldn’t crank. Plan B crossed my mind. The first leg of our trip was a quarter-mile trip to a parts store. A suspicious click in the engine bay alerted Eddie’s “auto-intuition” to the rusty voltage regulator, the original blue part with yellow lettering. The store had an electronic aftermarket replacement, not Concours correct, but it would get us down the road. Eddie installed it right there, then we were on our way. Suggestion #3: Bring tools.

Ten miles later the brakes went squishy and Eddie’s jaw muscles started to twitch. In Titusville we stocked up on brake fluid, transmission fluid, and quarts of oil. We continued the journey with all our fluids intact. Suggestion #4: Add a funnel, flashlight, and hand wipes to your tool list.

Near Daytona Beach the engine developed a miss, which became worse in stop-and-go street traffic. Tooling around the crowded streets wouldn’t work. Frustrated that we couldn’t sightsee, I did glimpse the Atlantic Ocean when we got lost in a shoreline neighborhood as we tried to get back to the freeway.

At Jacksonville, Eddie began to relax until dusk fell, and he found we had no gas gauge or dash lights.  When he used the dimmer switch, the headlights failed. At the next exit we stopped and manually pried up the stuck switch, but the station didn’t have the correct fuse for the dash lights. We made do by shining the flashlight on them every few miles.

We’d kept track of our mileage, but Eddie couldn’t remember how many gallons the tank held. We filled up every 200 miles, just to be safe. Suggestion #5: Bring your Mustang manual and pray for no cops.

By Pensacola Rita refused to idle, but the Mustang Spirits were with us. At two-thirty Sunday morning, the car died as we rolled into the parking lot of a motel near Interstate 10. They had to give us a room.

The next morning the first words out of Eddie’s mouth were, “The idle jets are clogged.” How could we maneuver the five hundred plus miles home when the car could idle only in neutral? The dinner we had planned for New Orleans was in serious jeopardy.

In the parking lot Eddie pondered the problem while I reminisced about my Dad’s Mustang. “I remember pushing in those little knobs on the stick shift to put it into reverse.”

“That’s it!” Eddie yelped. “I can shift it into neutral when I slow down, and the stops will keep me from going into reverse. We can do this.”

I’m a genius, what can I say?

On our way again. It was 9:00 A.M. and we were halfway home. The day was sunny and crisp. Our spirits soared.

Ten minutes later, boom-thwacka-thwacka. The car swerved and smoke puffed from the left front. A beauty ring flew through the air and landed in the right lane. Eddie wrestled the car to the shoulder and stopped. We had blown a tire. As he sprinted up the road to retrieve the beauty ring, a tractor-trailer rig barreled past and flattened it like a Frisbee. So much for “’66 Mustang, all trim intact.”

“Welcome to Alabama,” I read on the sign beside us.

Two hours later we read “Welcome to Florida,” as we were towed back to Pensacola.

By noon Rita was on the rack getting a new set of tires. Eddie checked out the undercarriage. His jaw muscles were twitching again.

“See anything interesting?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when we get home,” he said.

Suggestion #6: Maintain a flexible schedule and bring along your credit card.

We were back on the road at 3:00 P.M., but our detour through New Orleans was definitely out. We’d be lucky to reach Houston by work time the next morning. Luckily, I’d loaded the back seat with oranges while we were lost in Daytona. We wouldn’t starve.

Eddie drove a steady fifty miles per hour the rest of the day to prevent more emergencies and, I think, to give other motorists a chance to admire our prize. And admire they did. Rita turned plenty of heads. We were experiencing the Mustang Mystique.

By nightfall we reached Slidell, Louisiana, another 200-mile gasoline stop. Eddie tried a different fuse. Still no dash lights, but now the cigarette lighter worked. Great. We could take up smoking. Frustration threatened until Eddie bought a map light that plugged into the lighter, which he twisted to shine on the dash. No more gauge checks by flashlight! Suggestion #7: Like Marines, improvise, adapt, overcome.

The stretch of Interstate 10 to the Texas/Louisiana border was so rough, Rita’s tires clip-clopped like horse’s hooves over the uneven seams in the pavement. Everything in the car rattled. The gap between the front right fender and the door widened by a quarter of an inch.

Near midnight we rolled through Beaumont, Texas, and I-10 smoothed out. It was the home stretch, the last hundred miles. The night air turned cold, but Rita’s heater blew warm. We both tried not to doze off at the same time.

 We pulled into our driveway in Sugar Land at two-thirty Monday morning. Eddie insisted we clear out a bay of the garage and park Rita inside before we could unload our oranges and go to bed. In thirty-five years dew had never touched her hood, and it wasn’t going to happen on his watch either!

As we settled into bed, exhausted but happy, I set the clock to wake us in two hours to get up for work. “What was it you wouldn’t tell me in Pensacola?” I asked.

“Just that the frame rails are almost rusted through,” he mumbled sleepily. “I was afraid your side of the car might fall off before we got to Mobile.”

I gasped. “You mean the car could have broken in half?”

“I’d rather be lucky than good any day.”

My jaw muscles twitched.

On an Internet Mustang Odyssey, you’ll need a few tools, some problem-solving skills, and a lot of luck.

Suggestion #8: Keep in mind that sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I'll let you know how it's going from time to time.