Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

adventuring

These days, every time something goes a little wrong when we’re on the road — be it a wrong turn or a mis-transcribed driving direction that leaves us 20 miles off-course — Rob and I try to put a positive spin on it by calling it an “adventure.” (Cue repeat plays of Be Your Own Pet’s song “Adventure” in my head every time we do that.)

Sunday night was one whopper of an “adventure.”

On our way back home from New Jersey (more on that in another post), we got stuck in a whopper of a slow-down on I-95 a few miles from the Delaware-Maryland border. We sat in stand-still and barely-creeping-forward traffic for quite a while, inching our way out of Delaware. It was a pain, certainly, but at least we had the air conditioning and a decent radio station.

Then I noticed that the air conditioning felt a little bit … humid. And as I leaned forward to crank up the air, I noticed a thick cloud of steam / smoke coming out from under the hood of the car. In a bit of a panic, we pulled off to the side of the road as quickly as we could and shut off the car.

It took almost two hours for AAA to send a tow truck, which gave Rob and I lots of time to consider our options: Depending on how much repairs would cost, should we get the car fixed or look into buying a new car? Could we get by without a car for a while, if need be? We set an upward limit for repairs and decided that if the cost exceeded that, we’d make do without a car — maybe rent out our parking space at home and save money for a new car sometime in the future.

During those two hours, I also had a lot of time to second-guess why I hadn’t noticed the radiator problem sooner. Usually, my big clue that the car is heating up (aside from looking at the engine temperature gauge) is when the radiator fan kicks in — it’s loud and pretty hard to miss. As I found out later, the motor in that fan had burned out, hastening the overheating.

Our tow truck driver was a pretty colorful guy, and during the two-hour drive to our mechanic in Alexandria, he regaled us with story after story about everything from how he met his wife (a tortured tale involving cheating and a couple barroom beat-downs) to the time he towed a Lambourgini from Maine to Delaware and got a crate of lobsters as a tip (and took them to Red Lobster to have the chef there cook them up).

I made sure to thank my mom the next day for getting us AAA Plus: The upgraded membership includes 100 miles of free towing, and our trip was almost exactly 100 miles.

We finally got to Alexandria sometime around 2:30 a.m., and our friend Shawn was amazingly generous and gave us a ride home.

On Monday, the mechanic took a look at the car and found some additional problems on top of the radiator fan issue (a cracked serpentine belt, for one), but everything was fixable and came in just under the “abandon ship” threshold we’d set for repair expenses. So at the end of this whole adventure, at least we have a working, healthy car again.

Whew.