Have You Ever Had Your Car Break Down on a Road Trip?
It's been 19 days since my last Steemit post. That's the longest break since I started using the site in July. Where have I been? Well, it's been a really busy couple of weeks.
My family and I road tripped up to Washington D.C. area to sponsor the PHP World conference. Here's the @foxycart booth all set up:
We had a good show and the vendor area / developer lounge was well organized.
I got a really encouraging comment from one booth visitor on how they still remembered my keynote talk two years ago telling the FoxyCart story of turning your code into a company. That was pretty cool.
As is our family custom, we stopped at hotels with pools along the way so the kids could enjoy a good swim. @corinnestokes took the kids to visit various monuments and museums while @brettflorio and I manned the booth during the conference.
On the way back, things got interesting. We got a late start because I put in the wrong address for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum which led to an hour+ detour into Washington D.C. (we wanted the one in Virginia). Once we finally got there, we had an amazing time and got to see an SR71, Shuttle Discovery, the Enola Gay, and more (pictures here).
After stopping for dinner we got the dreaded "Check Hybrid System" error on our Toyota Highlander. It's the one which tells you to pull over immediately and have the car towed to your dealer. It also threw a "Check VSC" error. Especially annoying considering we just recently had it towed in because they didn't hook something up correctly on a recent repair. On top of that, it was so cold out it started to snow.
We unloaded the car into the Denny's (including three car seats and all our road trip bags). Called our insurance to get the car towed to the nearest dealership. Found a car rental place at the airport which was still open, and I got an uber to pick up a minivan (the last one available given the Thanksgiving holiday week) while Corinne stayed with the kids. Loaded up the car and drove another hour to our hotel. We then drove another 5 and half hours the next day to get home as Corinne's parents were coming in to town the next day to stay a week.
It wasn't until the day before Thanksgiving that we got word from the dealership that our car was fixed at which point I had to get another rental car (we already returned ours in Nashville, assuming the car wouldn't be ready until after the holiday). PSA: Don't ever rent a rental car the day before Thanksgiving. It cost us over $250 for a one day rental. Seriously.
Thus began my 13+ hour total drive time from Nashville, TN to Roanoke, VA and back again. I've never driven that much in one day before, and it was quite a challenge. I really enjoyed listening to Dan Carlin's Hard Core History podcast, specifically King of Kings and Blue Print for Armageddon. Hurray for double speed. :)
So that's what I've been up to. Lots of driving, entertaining in-laws, and basically recovering from a lot of busyness.
It's funny how much Steemit is like an addiction or a drug. Once you ween yourself off it, you can almost live without it.
Almost. :)
Have you ever had a car breakdown during a road trip? It's pretty much the worst case scenario, but now that it's behind me, I'm really thankful for modern communication tools. :)
So what's new in your world? What do you think are the most interesting posts on Steemit that I missed? What do you think about the next hard fork?
Previous #journal entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
My Van broke down half way to NM. at 2:00am. Right transaxil went out. Had to wait til 9:00am in 17degree temps to get a new part. Not fun.
Whoa... Dang. That's intense. That's like, "you actually could have died" intense. How did you keep warm?
We were able to run the van for intermittent spells. We were concerned because our gas was getting low by the morning. We broke just outside of a small town and were able to limp into town and parked in an auto zone lot until it opened. They had the part and also a heated garage they let us used for the repair. God Stuff!
Nice! :)
More than once. The most catastrophic was when the rear end locked up on our Jeep Cherokee. I was on the Apache Trail near Roosevelt Lake and had it in 4x4. The entire drivetrain was shelled in one big BANG. Not pretty. It was a fishing excursion with my son when he was little. We didn't get much fishing done, but we made the best of it.
The most annoying was on a road trip up and down I-5 with the family. We had the truck loaded with camping gear and bikes on the back. It made it from SoCal to WA nicely, but then threw the belt. I had a spare, so put it on quickly and we were off. As we headed south from a nice couple of weeks in WA, it shredded. Then it happened again. Around San Fran it happened again. I have a friend there, so we called them and stayed the night so I could fix it again.
Finally, fixed, we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge. Just a few miles before it went again, but took out the power steering line in the process. We nursed it to a repair shop where a nice mechanic let me borrow his tools and order parts through him, since I really wasn't wanting to pay someone to do what I knew how to do.
We couldn't find the reason it was happening though, so I went to my friend's house again and we deliberated. Finally, we took it to a mechanic to look at it. After fiddling around a bit, he found a loose pulley on the brand new power steering pump. It was subtle, but just enough play to cause the belt to skip a groove every now and then. And apparently it was getting worse.
The original mechanic down in LA wanted me to nurse it home. I had my family with him, so chose to get it fixed and let him pay me back. I felt bad, but who wants to get stranded between towns on the interstate? We didn't even bother to try the GG bridge again, so we've never seen it. :)
It was an adventure though. When all is said and done, it adds another story to our lives, we met some new people, made some new friends and we got to spend some time with good friends that we wouldn't have otherwise.
Wow, what a great story. Thanks for sharing, Joe. :)
I once had my car fried in the Death Valley. That was scary a bit, but the local people helped us to get to a nice bar to wait for the rental car company to bring the new car.
Dang, that's no joke.
Death Valley... just sounds even worse than it probably is. Or maybe it is that bad, I don't know. I've never been. Any story that involves a nice bar and good local people is a good one. :)
Indeed, it could have been very bad, but thanks to the locals, it is at the end a nice story to tell :)
Resteemed
I had my car break down on a family trip before. It was not pleasant. We also had no money to have someone repair it. It needed a water pump replacement, we did that on the side of the road off in New Mexico I believe.
EDIT: I'm glad you and your family are safe.
Dang! I've done water pumps before when I worked at a Jaguar repair shop during high school. That's no joke. I can't imagine doing that on the side of the road. I got spoiled wanting a lift for anything including oil changes. Now I just pay other people to fix stuff and I focus on making money with my programming skills. Specialization is a good thing. :)
Thanks for the well wishes. I'm glad it's now just a memory.
I cannot do much on cars these days. I too have other people fix them. Yet cars older than a couple of decades were increasingly easy to work on the further back you went.
Thanks for sharing. Great post. Upvoted.
I recently made a post and thought your followers may like to see it.
Steem really does have Jaw Dropping Scalability..!!
https://steemit.com/steem/@stephenkendal/steem-really-does-have-jaw-dropping-scalability
Thanks again for sharing your blog.
Stephen
Suggestion: Don't spam comments with large images like this:
Because... it starts to look like spam and eventually people may flag you for it. I'm all about leaving a relevant comment and linking out to your relevant post. When you're doing it on a bunch of people's posts... it just looks like spam.
I wrote a bit about this here.
No problem. I fully understand. Just getting used to the platform. Dan picked up on it and I have appologised. I just wanted to share the presentation. Have been working tirelessly on LinkedIn and Twitter bringing over new users the last week. Thanks for the comment. Stephen
Yes yes I have a car break down on a major highway - tie rod end fell off....?? How does that happen? We had to walk to an overpass to a nearby town to get help - no cell phones back then. The day was humid hot - not a good walking on pavement kind of day. We took the kids into a restaurant.....they drank heartily and one too quickly - and within minutes threw up all the orange drink - all over the floor. We were asked to leave. Um, sorry.....he didn't do it on purpose.
Re Steemit addiction....yes....I have been saying this as well. It's like a magnet - or vortex - it sucks you in.
Ah man! That's terrible! Combining a broken down road trip car with kid throw up is the worst. It's funny how different the memories are now that they are behind us. It's good to look back and think, "Yeah, we got through that okay."
Having a cell phone, uber, rent car places still open... modern technology is nice. My long drive made me laugh thinking about how difficult the early settlers had compared to my "drama."
It's soooo true. Back when it happened it was pretty stressful..plus our finances weren't great - because of having young kids and I was a stay at home mom. But you're right the memories are now funny and warm. And the other thing you said about settlers and how they dealt with drama compared to us - I laughed. That's funny. We don't have 3rd world problems either so whatever happens to us here is pretty small compared to much of what they go through.
Perspective, time, wisdom, age? (eesh) all help.
Thanks for sharing your story. :)
Hah! Yeah. I had fun (even in the moment) laughing about my "first world problems" with the rental car people. I'm very thankful to be in a pretty good financial position after much work and savings. I image many others would be totally stressed by something like this.
Actually had my engine go on fire back in college when driving home from school. I was still 2 hours away when it happened, ugh.
Dang! What did you end up doing with it? I've seen some cars catch on fire before (or ones that were already burning) and the heat is intense. I wonder what happens to those cars. Did you get a two hour cab ride or did someone come pick you up? Was the car totaled?
Car was totaled.....basically got it towed to the junk yard for the fee of scrapping it. My friends parents drove up and got us. The trials of being 20 yrs old..lol
Heh. Yeah, many interesting trials fit in the "20 years old" category. :)