Two Sided Coin

Tails

Today was excruciating! We left our humble suburb home a little after eight, running a little behind what I had initially planned, on our way to my grandma's funeral visitation about 5 1/2 hours away. Grabbed some non-nutritional breakfast at McDonalds and coffee before we hit the highway. Not ten minutes of being on the road and my husband and I are arguing about the tone we are each taking with each other and an incident that happened with the kids the night before.

About a half and hour of blacktop later, our van starts blinking it's dashboard at me. All the lights on the dash are flashing off and on. Now, we had our van completely "fixed" once and not two days later the check engine light came on. So, naturally we went to and auto zone to have them read the "health meter" for our van. The guy said there was nothing to worry about, it's just overly sensitive. Buying into that, I kept driving it - almost a year I'd say - and it drove fine. As time went on, another light came on. I looked that one up in our manual and found it was something about our traction. It being in the dead of summer, I didn't think anything about it. All that being said, within the last several weeks our dashboard has been informing us that all of the van doors are ajar (when they are in fact not) and our battery light and brake light are also in on this vendetta. So, I shrugged it off as a pesky quirk. I knew this one was probably a little more important, but it only happened every so often.

Anyhow, here we are on this excursion to the bordering state and the lights are acting out again. Although this time they are staying on.... and taking the speedometer, mph gauge, temperature, and gas needles all down with them. If they were sinking, dog-gone-it the whole thing was coming with it. I noticed that it only had a tantrum when I stepped on the gas. When I let up on it and coasted, it behaved. Some more time down the road, and they all went dead on me, and they didn't make a come back. I had no idea how fast I was going, or if the car was overheating, or if we were running low on gas. Needless to say, I finally got concerned. I called our local mechanic from our hometown, now almost an hour away, to ask him if he could diagnose the problem. "Sounds like your alternator, you should definitely get off the road soon, but don't turn the car off." I'm sure he gave me more information than that, but I am a girl (and yes, I'm pulling that card), and all I heard was "Bad, serious, better have this one checked out."

So, after that news we attempt to assess the situation. Coming up on a city with s few relatives who reside there, we call in back-up. We don't get a hold of anyone, so under my breath, I start praying that God would get us safety off the interstate and get help to fix our poor child-like van. Well, we got off at the next exit with a gas station. As we are passing the pumps to head for a parking spot, the car flat out dies and the power steering goes out. We coasted nicely into an open parking spot. God answered our prayers!

We got a call back from his uncle, who was in the middle of a retreat that he was leading. Blessedly enough, Uncle Joe knew a guy! He said that he was a "bit of a mechanic" ..........To Be Continued..