Nicolette’s Design Diary

We were heading up to Litchfield, Connecticut yesterday to attend the 11th Annual Litchfield Jazz Festival when we encountered the inevitable. Starting out at 9:00 a.m. we arrived in Richmond with no problem and stopped off to pick up a few things and to eat lunch. Afterwards, we headed out toward Washington D.C. Somewhere in Northern Virginia while I was enjoying catching up on podcasts I noticed that I was stomping on the gas pedal, but the truck wasn’t going any faster. In fact, it was slowing down. I quickly pulled over into a closed HOV lane to keep from getting run over by a 16-wheeler. My husband James who was dozing over in the passenger seat woke up. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

I had no idea what was wrong. One minute the truck was going down the road, the next minute it decided to go on a coffee break. I re-started the engine. The truck re-started fine, so I pulled back out on the road again. Five minutes later, the truck decided it wanted a second cup of coffee. I pulled back into another HOV lane and tried to figure out what the problem was. The radio was still running, the AC was still working, in fact the only thing that wasn’t working was the engine. James and I looked at each other. This definately wasn’t good.

I restarted the truck and drove for another mile. The truck went out for a danish to go with the coffee. That was the last straw. We restarted the truck and pulled off on the next exit which happened to be to Woodbridge, Virginia. We consulted the GPS to see what the closest gas station was. The trusty GPS found a Goodyear and a Merchant’s Tire and Auto less than two miles away. We pulled into the Goodyear before the truck decided it was time to go out for lunch.

I was very concerned about the whole situation. We’ve never had any problems with the truck before. The East Coast was in the middle of a heat wave and it was about 1000 degrees outside, so I wondered if the heat had anything to do with the truck’s bad behavior. I was hoping that whatever was wrong with the trunk was simple and cheap to fix. There’s nothing like blowing your show budget before you even leave the state.

We discussed the problems with the truck to Nate the Goodyear service manager and he reassured us that he would find the problem. We ended up sitting at the Goodyear for the next three hours while they ran diagnostic tests and actually ended up having a nice time. James made friends with the other people waiting in the service area and I put on a small jewelry show for them. Even Nate came over to take a look for something for his wife and I offered to pay for repairs in jewelry. We both laughed, but I don’t think he knew that I was serious.

After a couple hours, Nate gave us the good and the bad news. Bad news was that they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the problem was. If we wanted to know for certain we would have to wait until tomorrow because a more thorough diagnostic might uncover the problem. The good news was, whatever the problem was, it wasn’t serious enough to be dangerous or enough to leave us stranded on the side of the road. He then noted that the fuel injection hadn’t been cleaned for a while and it might be a good idea to go ahead and get that taken care of. At best, it may take care of the problem because it was possible that a sensor somewhere was being tripped because the engine wasn’t getting enough gas. At worst, nothing would change, but at least that was one more piece of maintenance we wouldn’t have to worry about. We figured that we’ve been there for the better part of the afternoon, so if there was a chance that this may fix the problem, we may as well.

While they cleaned the fuel injection, we decided to get something to eat as by then it was getting close to dinner time. We went to the Mexican restaurant next door and shared a meal. The waitress couldn’t speak english, so I had to drag out my middle and high school spanish to order our meal. After a meal of fairly decent fajitas and very hot salsa, we went back to Goodyear to pick up the truck.

Now, this was a situation in which if a mechanic had the inclination could have given us a major scalping. We were out of towners, in a hurry, dealing with a problem we knew nothing about, and didn’t have a lot of choices or time for second opinions. I’m happy to say that Nate was was a very nice guy. He charged us for the fuel injection cleaning and for only half of the diagnostic testing since it didn’t uncover the source of the problem. In all, the service only set us back a couple hundred bucks and three and a half hours. While I wasn’t too thrilled to part with my money or my time, I was thrilled that it wasn’t more. As it turned out, we didn’t have any more problems with the truck after that. The three and a half hour delay may have turned out to be blessing in disguise, because by the time we got back on the road, we had missed the intolerably bad D.C. and Baltimore rush hour traffic.

As it was, we didn’t arrive at our hotel in Connecticut until 1:00 a.m. The trip ended up taking over fourteen hours long. Not a good way to start a show weekend.
[tags]jewelry[/tags]