[First off, I want to apologize about the lack of Wedding Trip entries. I’m sure you’ve all been sitting on your hands in excitement and I’d be saying the same, but I can’t type with my nose nearly as well as I used to. Regardless, I’m eager to find out what I end up writing, but this entry is both to address something that happened today and also inform you all that no, I’m not dead yet. I don’t think.]
I spent the weekend down in Winona, MN visiting Clay and Kathleen Dobbs—I’m not sure if I’d seen them in person since their wedding, but given that they got married in December, I hadn’t started having panic attacks yet. We had a good time hanging out, doing a little catching up, going out for ice cream, killing bad-ass monsters on the Xbox 360… like I said, a good time. I probably would have come home on Sunday instead of Monday, but I was a little concerned about something.
As I was making the two-hour drive down to their place, the battery light on my car turned on. Then it turned off. Then on. Then off. It never lit up for more than 20 seconds and only did so for about a quarter of the trip, but I still felt like I should wait until the daylight hours before driving home in case something happened—there’s something about wandering through a dark, seemingly-abandoned small town in the boonies that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Thus, I spent another night, killing more monsters, ice cream, etc. “More good times? No way!” “Way!”
This afternoon, I called home to talk to Dad about the situation. He suggested a couple possibilities, the most likely of which was that the battery was low on water. I went outside to the car, popped the hood, looked at the battery and my jaw dropped when I saw all the white crusty stuff wrapped around the black terminal. I don’t think that thing had experienced human contact since the car was built in 1997 and it showed. I told Clay about it and he suggested we get a corrosion brush to clean some of the crap off, make sure there was a good connection between the clamp and the battery. But first, we had to pop it open and check the water levels.
Sure enough, in all six little tubes, the water was low. Technically, we probably could have used any kind of water (I think there was a stream nearby…), but Dad recommended that we put distilled water into the battery. They didn’t have any in the apartment, so Clay was about to jump into his car until I told him we should walk. Man, the weather was awesome today! Bright, sunny, warm… probably too warm for the jeans I was wearing, but I wasn’t going to run inside and change just for walking about a block and a half to a nearby SuperAmerica for water. It turned out being more like half a mile away, but it was still awesome weather and I couldn’t bring myself to complain about it.
After hydrating the battery a bit, I said my goodbyes, then jumped in the car and started driving. I might have stayed around for a while longer, especially since Dad had mentioned that it’d take some time for the old and new water to mix together (I’m not entirely sure what the effect would be, but given my lack of knowledge in the car repair department, I wasn’t in a position to argue). However, my little brother and his girlfriend had attended a wedding in Colorado over the weekend and were flying home that evening. Guess who was supposed to pick them up? No, seriously, guess…
On the list of recommendations, I was supposed to leave the electric stuff in the car turned off for a while after I took off—more of that mixing fluids stuff—but there was a problem: I forgot. Still, I didn’t do much until I was along the road aways and wasn’t having any problems. I kept the windows rolled partway down, although I opened up the front two all the way for about thirty seconds. It only lasted that long because the wind whipped the cap off my head and I almost freaked, thinking it’d go flying out the passenger-side window. It closed in a hurry, then I decided that the cap could make itself comfortable in the back seat for a while.
For the most part, I was driving and listening to a CD via my Discman hooked into the tape player. [Radio turned on and power coming out of the cigarette lighter for music] Then eventually I got warm (frickin’ jeans…) , rolled up the window and turned on the AC. [Power windows and air conditioner] As I was driving along the road, the speed would vary between 55 on the open road to 30 in a small town. [Automatic transmission] Most of the driving was in a straight line, but I had to change lanes on occasion to maneuver around other cars. [Turn signals] Lots of little things that slowly drain electricity—naturally, I take them all for granted.
Actually, I turned off the music and everything for a while because I was hearing a noise coming from under the hood. It sounded kinda like there were a bunch of little ridges on the road that I was driving on, even though it was flat and smooth. I flashed back to Dad asking if the belt on the car was in the proper position. Clay and I looked and it seemed to be sitting where it should have been, but given the noise the car was making, I was worrying that maybe the belt wasn’t as secure as I first thought. I turned everything off and listened for a while, but it never got better or worse, so I decided to let it be for the time being and keep driving.
Things were fine until I had to stop at a four-way intersection in a real tiny town. All six blocks of it. When I started moving again, the music started skipping and the air started letting out little bursts instead of a steady stream (I know, I know… I should have left the air off, but it was a long drive and my neck was getting seriously sore from holding my head up against the wind coming in through the window). I turned them both off, kept moving and then I looked down at the dashboard. More specifically, the speedometer. Which wasn’t doing anything. The needle was pointing down as far as it could go. Shit…
Thankfully, I found cars to drive behind so they could regulate my speed to some degree. Of course, if they’d been going 30 miles over the speed limit, I probably wouldn’t have known until it was too late. But if that had happened, at least we could keep each other company in jail. I kept going like that for a while longer until I reached Farmington, a city just to the east of Lakeville. “I’m almost home free!” Except I wasn’t.
I made it to an intersection where two highways merge for a little while (I needed to make a right turn, drive for half a mile, then turn left). I didn’t notice a specific problem until I got to the second turn: my turn signal wasn’t clicking. I opted not to get out of the car and run to the front and back to take a look, but I figured that without that little noise, the blinker wasn’t working. And if the blinker wasn’t working, my brake lights might not be working. And for those of you who don’t drive yet, trust me, that’s a bad thing.
I pulled out again and noticed that the car was accelerating kinda slowly. I thought that maybe I was taking my time instead of jamming on the gas and making a sharp, fast turn—an interesting change, but probably a good one under the circumstances. But it wasn’t a personal choice. When the speed limit increased, the automatic transmission wasn’t shifting gears. I was probably stuck in second and couldn’t go more than thirty for a stretch of a couple hundred yards.
Fortunately, the road had split up into two lanes, so all I got were cars honking at me as they drove past instead of people wanted to rear-end me for driving so slow. (I tried turning on the hazard lights to let the other drivers know there was something wrong with my car, but without working brakes or turn signals… didn’t happen.
There’s an eventual stretch where I can turn north in three places—one that follows the highway, one that goes through downtown Lakeville (which is still pretty rustic and small-town) and one that takes a different two-lane street. Given my current car problems, I opted to take the road with an extra lane so no one would have to take a different route or drive in the ditch to get around me.
That also meant I only had one four-way stop to go through before all three routes remerged. And because I had such good timing, I made a rolling stop next to a truck in the other lane and kept going down the road. Hey, what would happen if a cop pulled me over? I’d get a ticket for not stopping, one for no brake lights, one for being a public nuisance (most people who know me would agree with that)… everything but speeding.
As it turned out, that lack of stoppage only gained me a couple hundred yards. I made it to the reemergence point, then let my car drift over into the right turn lane as the engine finally died. And when I say “died,” I mean died. I would turn the key and hear lots of clicking, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. Some teenagers drove by, then came back to first use a generator, then jumper cables to get the motor running. It started going, they took the cables off and walked away, at which point it stopped again.
A police car pulled up behind me, I explained the problem and we didn’t bother with jumper cables. I was having some trouble shifting the car out of park and into neutral, but when I did, the cop used his car to push me around the corner and into a nearby parking lot. That’s when I noticed how much I take power steering for granted… But during this time and after I got off the street, I had been calling both my parents to try and get both myself and the car taken care of.
They both arrived at the scene of… well, I’m not exactly sure what it was a scene of, but they both arrived there. So we talked for a while about what we were going to do with two working vehicles. Mom had a Boy Scout meeting to attend, Dad was going to a Lions’ meeting and I had no way to get Justin and Molly from the airport. As we were talking about vehicle distribution, guess who called? No, seriously, guess…
Yep, Justin was on the phone to let me know that they’d just landed and would be ready to go as soon as they picked up their luggage at the baggage claim. I told him that I’d be there in 35-40 minutes, at which point my parents and I decided that I’d take Mom’s Explorer, Dad would drop off Mom at the Scout meeting and she could get a ride home from someone else. (She had to stay with my car at that point anyway, since her AAA membership was paying for the tow-truck that was on its way.)
So I jumped in the Explorer and headed up to the airport. As it turned out, having that vehicle instead of my car may have been for the best—I don’t think their downhill skis would have fit in two rows of seats very well. Unless I had some sticking into the back of my head. And I’d already had my head sticking in enough funny directions because of my open car window.
The three of us first drove to the store where Justin rented his tux for the Colorado wedding (and after so much time on the slopes—everybody, sign along! “Justin, the red-nosed skier, had a very shiny nose…”). They took me to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner, I dropped them off at their place, I made it home and was officially sick of driving for the rest of the week. And then I had to drive for another two hours the next day.
I picked up the car this afternoon and it seems to be working pretty well now. The repair shop gave me a new battery—they were honestly shocked that the original had lasted for so long—played with the alternator and the fan belt and sent me on my way. With $500 less than I had five minutes before walking into the front door.
But at least the car made it all the way home this time. The brake lights, the radio, the power steering—everything was working just fine. As for the police writing me traffic tickets… maybe I should ask for the old battery back.
