I can laugh about it now that it's all over, but yesterday had to be the worst waste of a perfectly good day off I've ever had. It all started when my girlfriend wanted me to go with her to Savannah, Georgia to meet her ex-husband and pick up her children. We were going to have (2 of) her kids for New Years since she couldn't see them for the holidays. After arguing about it for an hour, I finally agreed to ride with her. I grabbed my portable DVD player and a few DVDs and off we went.
About halfway through South Carolina, we ran into trouble. It had started raining and there was a police warning sign stating that there was an "incident at mile marker 86" and to "prepare to stop". That's where it got bad. We never saw what the "incident" was, but we sure found where the traffic stopped. Then it happened. The car jolted and came to a halt. In the middle of stop-and-go traffic on the interstate, the transmission went out. It took some doing, but we got the car off the road and down the exit to a service station.
Mind you, it's still raining at this point...we pull in to check the engine and try a few things to get it going again. My girlfriend is in tears at this point since she's obviously not going to see her kids at this rate. I made the executive decision that they should turn back and go home (back to Florida) and we would try to get the car back to North Carolina. That was about the best thing I could come up with because I was able to get the car rolling again, but not for long. We made the mistake of stopping at a rest stop and that's when it happened. We were able to back out of our parking space and then go far enough down the interstate to make it a pain in the @** to walk back later.
Apparently the tourque converter went out on the transmission, so here we are on the side of the road witha nearly-dead cell phone, one with hardly any signal, no car chargers, and it's still raining. We call my father in North Carolina who says he's figuring out what he can do and he'll let me know something. We used up the last of the battery on the DVD player to kill time, (about an hour and a half)just to find out that my father hadn't left yet. Once he did get on the road, I finally decided to just take a nap until he got there.
Upon arrival, we got the car loaded onto a trailer and were about to head home. That's when I realized that, there in the dark, I was standing on a large fire-ant hill. A perfect end to the perfect day. And for those of you who don't know what fire ants are, let's just say that they are little ants that bite the **** out of you if you happen to get them on you. We rolled into the driveway at 4:30 this morning...18 hours after we embarked on a 10 hour round-trip excursion. Long story short; always prepare for the worst.
Hope everyone has a better weekend than I'm having. Cheers!