Hey, have you ever been stranded on the side of the road because of car problems? Do you have a backup plan in place on what to do when your car dies while driving home from an out-of-state vacation packed full of stuff? Well, I just got home about 2 hours ago from a 7 day vacation out-of-state. Had a great time but I had car problems from the get go while driving down south. I’ll just talk about what car problems that I had this week which will lead me up to a backup plan for car problems while on vacation.
7 days ago, me and the family plus my brother and his family all drive down in 3 cars down south for a vacation from the real world and for me, mostly the internet and computers in general because I work in the IT field for a living. I didn’t go on much at all so please give me a day or two to get caught up on my feeds I’m subscribed to. I was driving my dad’s Chevy truck down since he had a hard cover cab on the back of it. We stuffed that truck with kids toys, beach stuff, golf bags and misc. stuff so when the truck died on my today on the interstate, I had a full load in there still to unload sometime today. On the way down south, I felt the transmission slipping and I didn’t notice this till around an hour and half down the road. No biggie though, we check out the truck at a rest stop and came to the conclusion that once I got the truck out of 2nd gear (automatic trans), that the truck ran fine and was able to speed up fast.
We only drove the truck to the beach which was 1 block away and really didn’t put that much strain on the bad transmission but me and my dad knew that it was going to die at some point while on this vacation. Hell, we made it 247 miles with that truck today driving before the transmission died and I couldn’t accelerate on the interstate but our exit was right in front of me. Since I had enough speed going, I coasted the truck off the exit and into a bank parking lot. Got out of the car and my dad pulled over two since we both left at same time and followed each other. The engine was smoking and we noticed the transmission fluid was dried up. Besides the transmission slipping, we must have had a leak that caused me to pull over.
Since we have Triple A car service, we was able to call up a tow truck and get the truck towed to my dad’s mechanic that was 20 miles away near his house. Yep, truck broke down 20 miles from home and we made it over 200 miles on a bad transmission driving on the interstate at high speeds. We was lucky we didn’t break down even earlier because our TRIPLE A service covers up to 100 miles free towing. If you don’t have a backup plan for when you break down on the road, you may get stuck with an expensive towing bill to top off the repair job. We was glad that we come prepared when driving on vacation. We had packed jumper cables, tire pump, small first aid kit and of course made sure someone in the car as in me had there TRIPLE A card.
Lot of heat warnings across the USA this past 2 weeks and standing outside for hours waiting for a tow truck just stink’s but we broke down next to a Burger King so ate food and stayed cool most of the time waiting for the tow truck.
Have a great week and I’ll get back into the swing of things in the next day or so. FYI, my dad picked up me and my mom at the mechanics and we then drove back to their house, unloaded his SUV, grabbed mom’s car and took 2 cars to mechanics to unload that truck. Then we home and unloaded the 2 cars. I then packed up my car that was at their house the whole week and drove home to unpack my car and stuff. Yea, we had a grizzwald family trip home today but had a great time this week. Time to get back into my grove online.
Derek
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