Sept 19th – The title of this post refers to the objective for today which is to visit the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas and to the fact that the fan noise today almost drove us over the edge.

In front of the Buddy Holly Center

First, again for the GMC folk who might be interested: the fan noise.  For the past few days the fan clutch has liked to be on whenever we were driving slowly no matter about any temperature – engine or ambient.  It would run for a long time and then finally shut off after we had been driving at highway speed for five or ten minutes.  Today, it stayed on almost all the time.  We had to resort to wearing foam ear plugs.  When we got done with Buddy Holly I went to an AutoZone and bought a medium duty TorqFlo 922747 clutch that crosses to the Hayden 2747 – the “heavy” rather than “severe” duty clutch.  I would have bought the Advance Auto 21-5046 recommended by Ray E. but we have no Advance Auto stores in Tucson (that I know of) to exchange it if I need to.

the only photo I was allowed to take

The Buddy Holly Center has recently moved and is in a really nice building in the middle of town.  Unfortunately, they do not allow photos to be taken of any of their exhibits but that is really not a big deal because it is a nice low key exhibit with only a few original items.  The reason it is small is that Buddy Holly was a star for only about 18 months before he died on “the day the music died” in January of 1959.  During his very short career, however, he had twenty-five hit records and influenced many rock and rollers who came after him.  It is even said that the Beatles name was inspired by the name of Buddy Holly’s backup band, the Crickets.

We again had some good barbeque on highway US-82 on the way here.  We stopped at a gas station – there are not very many between Wichita Falls and Lubbock – that also served barbeque and seemed to be pretty popular with the locals.  It was good.  Just a note for fellow barbeque lovers – Texas barbeque does not seem to include any pork, just beef.

After the Buddy Holly Center we went to buy the fan clutch and get some more groceries and discovered that Lubbock is a really nice town.  The population is over 200 thousand and there are lots of nice stores.  I installed the fan clutch after dinner – hoping for the best tomorrow.