How I lost my faith in my car, part four: Crazy Yooper Mechanics
Trudge trudge trudge through the snow. The auto parts store just closed, of course. We walked across the street to the Holiday gas station, and asked a couple of yoopers if they knew if there was an open parts store nearby. “Nope, everything closes at 6.”
Crazy yooper inspects our hose. “Looks like it’s kinkin’ dere,” he says. Offers us a ride back to our car. Sure. Back to the car. He goes in to the oil-change service station we’re parked at and disappears in the back room with the oil change guy, to see if they can unkink the hose. At this point I know we’re doomed.
He comes back out with the hose. “We had to cut ‘er down to get rid of the kinks,” he said. The hose has indeed been cut down; it’s about 3 or 4 inches shorter. He wrestles the hose on there, and decides there’s still some extra length that he could cut off. He takes it off again, and trims it down. He finally gets the hose on there with clamps and everything, and we fill the tank with the rest of the premix coolant that I had bought in Hated Wisconsin. Then we open up the pre-mixed coolant that Peggy’s dad bought for us as a gag gift. Glug glug glug. The radiator drinks half of that jug of coolant down.
We thank the Crazy Yooper, and drive off. Maybe we can still get home tonight, or at least to Duluth. We put on Weird Al’s song Dare To Be Stupid and laugh about me getting a face full of coolant.
15 miles outside of town, the temperature gauge creeps up again. Pull over. Open hood to cool engine. Curse. Get back in the car and wait for the engine to cool down. Peggy convinces me to turn around and drive back to Ironwood and get a motel room, instead of trying to limp across Wisconsin with the crippled hose. I get back out again, and the hose has completely collapsed! What’s going on now? Then the reserve coolant tank completely drains itself. Hmm.
I now know that the Crazy Yooper has removed the metal spring from inside the hose which would force it open (and help to keep it unkinked.) So it was working fine when it was just sitting there idling in the service station parking lot. But actually driving the car caused it to kink up.
I refilled the coolant reserve tank and got back in the car. After waiting 20 minutes, I started it up again, did an extra careful U-turn, and started going back to Ironwood. Five miles later, the temp gauge started creeping up. Pull over. Wait. Fill reserve tank. Drive. Pull over. Wait. Fill reserve tank. I babied it along like that until we got to a motel with a vacancy. (It’s snowmobile season in the U.P., so it’s harder to find a vacancy than you might think.)
While getting back to town, I used up nearly all of the remaining pre-mixed coolant. I also discovered that it was a good thing that we didn’t run out of it; remember how I had one jug of undiluted antifreeze and one jug of water? That was in Hated Wisconsin on the way to Michigan. By this time I had one jug of antifreeze and one jug of ice.
Anyway, we’re at the motel. It took all of my convincing and bargaining skills to convince the motel guy to take a check. Finally we get our room. Number 5. It has cable, yay! Watch a couple home redesign shows on HGTV, and then Iron Chef on Food Network. Scampi battle. Challenger gets owned. Read a bit from a Star Trek novel. Spock and McCoy get kidnapped! Time for bed. Turn off light and…
…two minutes later the drunk snowmobilers get back to room number 6. Peggy thought ahead and has a pair of earplugs. But for the next hour I got to hear raging debates over whether Linda is worth f***ing or not, who got f***ed by whom in the past week, and who they’d f*** if they had the chance.
After a while, Peggy pulls out an earplug and asks me if they’re saying anything worth posting on the internet. I don’t remember how I answered her then, but obviously the answer is yes.
Finally I fell asleep.
Costs for part four:
- Motel room: 75 dollars.
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