The Drive Home

Now, usually I would just have ended the previous post with, "we drove home." But... our drive home was almost as much of an adventure as the rest of the trip was.

It all began with the Chaos Destroyer acting a bit funny as we pulled out of my grandparents' driveway. We made it out to the gas station on the corner and the van just stalled. So, we went inside the gas station to see if anyone there knew of the nearest Mazda dealership. We didn't really want to drive home with the van acting funny. Well, once inside we realized that John didn't have his cell phone or his wallet. So, we ended up going back to my grandparents' house. After tearing apart our suitcases and searching their house for them, Julie started complaining that she has to go to the bathroom. So, we let her out of the van. She went inside, went potty, and then out the back door, where she promptly picked up both the wallet and cell phone. The little monkey knew where they were the whole time.

Well, after finding out that the nearest Mazda dealership was about half an hour away in the wrong direction... not to mention, their service center wasn't open on Saturday anyway... we decided to just attempt the drive home anyway. If we had to, we would try to find another one along the way...

So, after several hard shifts into second gear, we made it out onto the highway. We were cruising along with no apparent problems when all the sudden this truck decided to cut us off. John hit the breaks and avoided the truck, but the van stalled. Thankfully, John thought quickly and put it into neutral and restarted it. Again, we cruised along without problem... and again, we had to slow down and the van stalled. Eventually, we figured out that every time the RPMs dropped below 2800 and the van needed to downshift, it would stall. This wasn't too much of a problem as long as we could just cruise along. But, John was the only one who could drive. There was no way I was going to mess with attempting to restart the van while moving.

So, we made it as far as South Carolina and got a room for the night. It was right next door to a Mazda dealership, but unfortunately the next day was Sunday... the service center was closed. We ate dinner at Chile's and found out that the mechanic for the dealership was her sister-in-law. This, unfortunately, was no help since she was on vacation.

We got up the next morning, semi-prepared to stay another night and attempt to get the van to the service center on Monday. After breakfast, John and I decided to take the kids to the park a short ways up the road. It was just far enough to have to drive. We got there without incident. The van seemed ok. So, we figured maybe we should just keep going. So, we packed up again and left the motel. After being on the road for a few hours, the van began stalling again. It was like this the rest of the way home.

On Monday, we got up and took the van to the dealership here. They tried to give us a hard time about having driven it from Florida like that, but we explained that 1) we all had to get back to work. 2) the kids had to get back to school. 3) we called Mazda and they were closed because of the fires in California. 4) the dealership in SC was closed because it was Sunday, and what could they do? It isn't like they could give us a rental to get back to PA. So, they relented and honored the warranty.

Turns out that the Chaos Destroyer needed a whole new transmission. It took them several days to figure this out, a week to get a new one in, and then a day and a half to fix it. There is no way we could have done that in Florida or South Carolina.