PT Cruising No More

I write a lot of articles about motor cars, but I can't say that I have any great love for them. Maybe it's because I've always preferred to play around with electrical circuits rather than fan belts or maybe it's because the cars I've owned have always been based strictly on what I can afford rather than what interested me. Or maybe it's because where a broken computer means falling back on things like pencils and paper, a broken car means being stranded miles from anywhere with the prospect of a whacking great repair bill at the end of it.

Or maybe it's because said strandings happen at the most inconvenient times.

Take yesterday. I'd had an appalling string of circumstances that had begun with my having the rare luxury of being a week ahead on my work and ended with my being five days behind and only four days to hit two deadlines. I'd planned my day out accordingly and cleared my schedule so that I could make my phone calls and pound out my articles in short order. The only thing I had to do was drop off my daughter at school and then it was back home to the keyboard. It was bloody cold with ten to fifteen degrees of frost, but that isn't too bad. Unless the car heater on the PT Cruiser refuses to kick in, that is–which it didn't. Then it's a bone-numbing episode with the daughter huddled under a blanket and my wiling away the time by wondering whether my fingers or toes would be lost first to frostbite.

But such cheery thoughts were soon banished as I saw the engine temperature gauge creep up from its usual operating zone and closer and closer to the red. That's scary enough in town or on the motorway, but when you're winding through mountain roads past farm and field ten miles from the nearest garage, that gets to be a bit hairy. Still, it wasn't actually in the red, nor were there any scary beeps and blinking lights, so I kept one eye on the needle and soldiered on. I dropped the daughter off at her school, checked the water level in the reserve tank , let the machine cool down, then ran it in idle for about twenty minutes. Everything seemed normal, so I figured that it was just a product of the cold and decided to try for home while my luck held.

It held alright; like a gallon of buckshot in a wet paper bag. I didn't get a mile and a half before the temperature shot up and I stalled at an intersection. Fortunately, I was able to get it running again by letting it sit for a half hour while I pounded my head on the steering wheel. Deciding not to take any more chances, I got on the motorway and made for the nearest service station.

It's the sort of gamble I've made many times before with blinking petrol gauges, cranky brakes, and whining tyres, but this time luck ran out and as I made to turn left at the lights, the PT Cruiser gasped its last and died. I almost wepted; partly out of sentiment for the valiant chariot, but mainly because the tin sod had not only conked out in the middle of traffic, but the gearbox was jammed, so I couldn't even be pushed.

So began several hours of phone calls to the insurance company, then to the wife to pick me up, arrangements for a tow, discovering the tow companies are insanely busy in snowy weather, standing in the freezing cold warning motorists to go 'round me (0ne of whom I swore was Santa Claus) and counting up how many asked me if they could help against those who thought I was deliberately parked there just to annoy them. Finally, two state troopers and a tow truck later, the Cruiser was hauled to the Chrysler dealer in Monroe, where I asked them to have a quick look at the damage before Chrysler went bankrupt–not that that would be likely after I answered the phone at home a couple of hours later and was quoted a repair price so high that any government bailout would be redundant in comparison. So, now my family is faced with the choice of either pouring an insane amount of cash into a car that never ran well since the day we bought it, or finding some alternative mode of transport.

Needless to say, I am now in the market for a secondhand motorbike with a sidecar.

Can't be worse.