Karen and Hasan’s Most Un-Excellent Adventure

by Karen Longeteig

Somebody let me know if they’ve ever had a worse car trip.

My husband Hasan and I were preparing to return from Guelph, Ontario, in 2012, where we had attended a dear friend’s funeral. Maybe that was the jinx to begin with. From time to time we imagined the departed Farokh’s laughter from afar, as if “Thanks for coming to my memorial service, so I’m going to ensure you will remember this!”

First of all, we haven’t bought a map for Ontario and have only the vaguest idea of where Guelph is in relation to anything else in the province. Mapquest seemed to be sufficient to get us there, so we assume we can just sort of ‘go back’. (Those were the days when one downloaded and printed a map.)

We start off on the return journey one and ½ hours late because first, our friends came to say goodbye and send us off from our room at a B&B. The proprietress was thrown off her stride at all these people descending half an hour before she expected us for breakfast. Maybe that’s why she gave us “poor” directions. Or, more likely, neither of us listened carefully and for sure didn’t write it down.

But first, we realize we have to fix the front headlight because on the way up when we stopped at the border, I saw that one of the front headlights was hanging down by its cord, like an eyeball popped out of the socket. For the past year, ever since my slight altercation with a telephone pole and a parking place, it had been held in place by clear packing tape, which worked pretty well – even the headlight worked – but a rare and recent carwash must have dissolved the tape.

We finally take off, we drive and drive and drive. We don’t recognize much of anything on the way, but then what do we know about Canada. Just as we are beginning to doubt our course and wonder if we should have laid a trail of bread crumbs on the way in, we happily see the buildings of Niagara ahead of us, where we have to cross the border. “Ahh” we say. Then we see a sign for Pearson Airport (!!) Shit shit shit: it’s Toronto, not Niagara! We pull off to a gas station, buy a map and ask directions. Go back. Two more hours lost.

On the (correct) way to Niagara, the little shimmy that the ten-year-old Subaru had been threatening to develop seemed to be getting worse. It was just starting to worry us, when … brake brake brake! … big tailback ahead. It seems that the Queenstown Bridge border crossing is backed up, quite seriously. Two and a half hours later we crawl past the border control, giving the officer wan smiles.

Shattered, we decide to treat ourselves to lunch in Buffalo at a restaurant instead of at the usual roadside Mickey Dee’s. It is now 3 pm, instead of the 10:30 a.m. border crossing we had planned on. We’ll get home by midnight, we figure. So we get off in Buffalo and in a couple of miles find a restaurant-bar. Hasan has scallops, I have a chef salad, disappointingly not very good, and we get on the road again.

But now, the shimmy has become worse and is accompanied at times by Bang Bang Bang. Aughhhhh. But it isn’t consistent, sometimes the Bang appears at 50 mph, sometimes at 62 mph, etc., so we press on. When it is my turn to drive (of course), it escalates to Bang Bang BANG BANG BANG and I can’t cope anymore. Turning into a service area, we call AAA, who arrive an hour later. The man tells us it may be a ball joint, which could collapse on us, so he advises us not to continue. He hauls us and our car three exits further down I-90 to the exit for Geneva, New York, where he says there is a motel, diner and several garages. It is 7:45 pm at this point, garages are closed, and we give it up for the day.

Good thing we stopped because the scallops have given Hasan both an episode of gout and the runs, and I have been maddened by both a sore toe where a mole was recently removed for biopsy, as well as by a poison ivy itch that has been worsened by the heat. And then MY lunch turned on me too.

There is a car in front of the motel with the hood up, and someone seems to be working on it. The front desk clerk reveals that the mechanic is her husband, and she says he will take a look at our car when he finishes with HER car, thank you very much. But it isn’t going well, and at 10:15 he gives it up for the night and says he’ll see us in the morning at 9.

Thereupon we find ourselves in the very crummy “The Red Carpet” motel, where the carpets are blue, watching “Turner and Hooch” on TV and eating delivered pizza, as the diner attached to the motel is closed – closed to the point where a sign invites prospective leaseholders to reopen it. Very closed.

It is the first time I have ever had a microwave as a bedside table, and the reading light works only when we unplug the “nuker.” We certainly get our money’s worth out of the bathroom. I have only one Immodium in my first aid kit, and consider arm-wrestling Hasan for it, but decide he needs it worse than I do.

The next day we go looking for the mechanic who eventually shows up, jacks up the front axle and twiddles the front tires, then the back, and tells us he thinks it is a rack-and-pinion thing and we can get it to Boston if we can stand the vibration. Our other options are to spend $2000 for a tow for the 350 miles to Boston or to give it to a local non-Subaru garage and wait three days for parts or run it into the Housatonic and say werewolves made us do it -- well, we decide we can stand the vibrations. We average 45 tense miles per hour for the rest of the day, and in a mere 7 1/2 hours, (24 hours late), we are again at our home sweet home, which looks pretty good even though the cats had punished our treachery of leaving them by depositing catshit in the kitchen sink and a dead chipmunk in my studio.

There are morals to this story.

1. Buy a map FIRST.
2. Trade in your car after 9 years, not 10.
3. Never eat scallops in Buffalo.

Postscript: It was a cracked axle, which our local Subaru garage fixed. And the toe mole was benign.