Trip from Hell.
So yesterday was supposed to be our trip to West Virginia to hit up Cabela's so Jim could get some stuff for fly fishing and I could get some more stuff for pheasant hunting and check out a couple compound bows and a shotgun. That trip went horribly wrong, but it was almost comical.
It takes us just under 2 hours to get there and we usually drive along the eastern edge of Ohio along the river to get down there. About 40 minutes into the trip, we start hearing this weird banging sound, like when you were a kid and stuck a baseball card in the spokes of your bike but it was against the side of the truck instead. Jim's not a car guy but he knows that when you hear something like that, you pull the hell over. If we hadn't gotten over when we did, we would have had a complete tire blowout. There was a tear right in the tread and the flap of tire was knocking against the wheel well. No idea how what we hit to cause it because we didn't even get into the road construction yet so and he hadn't driven his truck that day until we left. So now we're sitting in buttfuck east Ohio on the side of the road waiting on AAA. There weren't any mile markers and the only way to really find where we were was for me to trek along the highway until I found a sign that said how far away from the next city we were. 20 minutes turns into almost 45 because apparently the jackass at AAA told the tow guy that we were in a different car than we actually were and he just happened to be passing along on the other side of the highway and saw us hanging out. Here comes the drama.
We THOUGHT we had a spare but it turns out that some asshole cut the cables under the truck and STOLE THE FUCKING SPARE. So the tow guy is pretty cool and tells us that he has a spare that will fit our truck and says that he'll sell it to us for 20 bucks and change the tire for us to save us money on the tow and buying a whole new tire. Sweet deal right? We still have time to get to WV and we head out on our way after he changes the tire and we start driving after he takes the messed up tire and puts our old rim back in the bed. We get no more than a mile down the road and Jim says to me 'Do you see smoke?' I can't see anything on my side and he's like dude, I'm gonna check this shit out. We change lanes to get off at the next exit and see what's up and then it sounds like a gunshot went off and we're on 3 wheels. The spare blew out. So now we're right back where we started. Son of a bitch. Right before we lost the tire, we saw the tow guy about a mile ahead of us picking up another guy. Back to square one, we call the tow guy back and he said he'll head back for us as soon as he drops the other guy off at the next exit and we had to call AAA back to reopen our help request. This time we get loaded up on the flatbed and I'm frantically calling the nearest Wal-Mart to make sure that we can get into their tire center before they close. The guy feels bad and he gives us our 20 bucks back and only charges us half of what we'd be charged for the tow since we were having some shitty luck. By this time, I can't stop laughing because now I'm sitting in a big rig and the only dead animals that I've seen so far were roadkill that were sitting by each one of our off road stops. Jim's ready to explode because this is just another thing in the long line of shitty luck that we've had with this truck. I swear we got this thing with some voodoo curse on it because there has been nothing but bad things happening to it for the past 4 years. Allow me to divert for a second to share all of the things that have happened to this truck.
It's a 2002 Chevy S10, purchased in 2006, so fairly new. When we got it, we were down at Ohio State and his parents bought it for him because his last car completely just died and he needed a car to get to work and get home. They were going to get him a truck for graduation later that year, but his car didn't last until then and we both were relying on his car to get to work. So his parents drive the truck down for us and all's good. Then shit started happening. Before the school year was finished, the gas cap was stolen, some drunk ran into the side passenger mirror and bent it clean off but they were nice enough to place it back on like it wasn't broken at all so when I opened the door, it fell off into the grass. Then around my birthday, he started having trouble with it not starting. It would just randomly die and we'd need a jump constantly. Turns out the battery was bad and we had to have it replaced, something like the cells were reversed or something. Then he graduates and the problems seem to stop for awhile until my birthday rolls around the next year again. He's at his friend's house watching the NFL draft while I went somewhere with his mom and sister. When they drop me off at the party later, his dad pulls up and says 'Where the hell is his back window?' So I get him on the phone and they all come outside and we see a missing back window and a ton of glass on the ground. Turns out some little turds were using his truck as target practice with their BB guns and shot out his window and left tons of little pellet marks along the side. Thankfully the window was on the cap so they could take the cap off and he could drive his truck like a regular pickup until it was fixed. Since then, we've gone through 2 more batteries, a windshield, the spare was stolen and the lock on the cap was broken.
Come to think of it, it's not the truck, it's him. He's gone through 3 cars since he started driving and all of them were weird freak occurrences. He hit a deer in his first car and then totaled it about a year later when he was going down a hill and the brakes failed. Then in the car before the truck, the back window was smashed out and broken into while he was fishing and then it totally died a year later. Now this. My grandpa is rolling in his grave right now that I married somebody who drives a Chevy instead of a Ford and would even consider buying a Dodge and can't do more in terms of maintenance past checking the oil and refilling the wiper fluid. I can just see him right now having a stroke over this haha. On the other hand, my car is almost 18 years old with almost 170,000 miles on it and my only issue in the past 4 years has been one dead battery, a fuse that made my check engine light stay on and having to replace a headlight or two. I'm starting to think that maybe he's the one that needs the new car first but I think it's just him, not the cars. At least he's not being a jackass and totaling them by being stupid like my ex though, that's the bright side of this for me.
So when I left off, we were at a Wal-Mart in East Liverpool. We had the papers with the tire info from when he got the new front tires so I go in while they're unloading the truck from the flatbed and get us a new tire. When I come out with the guy who needs to verify some info, they're trying to drive the truck into the loading area so they can get the new tire on and I'm dying because they have no choice but to drive the couple feet on the rim and it's making this terrible sound as the remnants of the last tire that was absolutely shredded is just flopping around and just serving as a cushion so the rim isn't scraping against the ground at this point. We decide to wander around the store while they worked and I had this ridiculous upset stomach from drinking coffee and being nervous so I need to find a bathroom. Of course after I do my business, I find out that not only is there no toilet paper in my stall, there aren't any of those paper ass guards either and I tried to reach up into the next stall to see if there was any paper hanging low enough for me to grab and pull down without leaving the stall but of course not. So I had to book it to the next stall with my pants down. Wonderful. After that fun experience, the truck was already done so we head back and pay for the service. I stayed back and asked some questions to the tire guys while Jim was over by the truck. Now for some reason, my 'knows nothing about cars' husband stuck his hand behind the tire to check for... something. He doesn't know what he was looking for and neither do I but he called us over and had me stick my hand back there. I have pretty small hands and I couldn't run my hand along the back of the tire because there were 2 bolts crammed right up against the tire and if we drove on it again, we wouldn't have made it home because it would just grind against the tire until it found a weak spot and it would burst again. Now we're starting to worry about the actual frame of the vehicle because this new tire is sitting really far in compared to the other one and it seems that these bolts are the ones holding in the crossbeams under the back end and we're afraid that it means it's off center and it's just gonna fall off next. Then I step back and take a look at the side of the car and realize that the rim of the new tire didn't match our rims. None of us realized that we were using the rim of the spare from the tow guy and not our own, which is what caused the second tire to burst. The tire guys can't believe that they didn't think of that either and change the rim for us, that we still had in the back. The spare rim wasn't as deep as ours so when that one was used, it allowed the tire to sit deeper on the axle and pushed it up against the bolts. With the old rim on and the new tire, I could slide my hand through the back of the tire without catching my hand on the bolt at all. When they drove the car back into the loading area, you could just hear the bolt grinding against the tire, which is where the smoke was coming from before the second tire burst. No idea what made him stick his hand back there but if he hadn't, we wouldn't have made it home and we would have been screwed because we were the last truck they saw before they closed.
So we made it back home when we assumed we'd be getting home from West Virginia, but the farthest we got was a Wal-Mart 45 minutes away. We're trying again today. Wish me luck because I'm officially afraid to travel with my husband because of his apparent string of bad vehicular luck.
It takes us just under 2 hours to get there and we usually drive along the eastern edge of Ohio along the river to get down there. About 40 minutes into the trip, we start hearing this weird banging sound, like when you were a kid and stuck a baseball card in the spokes of your bike but it was against the side of the truck instead. Jim's not a car guy but he knows that when you hear something like that, you pull the hell over. If we hadn't gotten over when we did, we would have had a complete tire blowout. There was a tear right in the tread and the flap of tire was knocking against the wheel well. No idea how what we hit to cause it because we didn't even get into the road construction yet so and he hadn't driven his truck that day until we left. So now we're sitting in buttfuck east Ohio on the side of the road waiting on AAA. There weren't any mile markers and the only way to really find where we were was for me to trek along the highway until I found a sign that said how far away from the next city we were. 20 minutes turns into almost 45 because apparently the jackass at AAA told the tow guy that we were in a different car than we actually were and he just happened to be passing along on the other side of the highway and saw us hanging out. Here comes the drama.
We THOUGHT we had a spare but it turns out that some asshole cut the cables under the truck and STOLE THE FUCKING SPARE. So the tow guy is pretty cool and tells us that he has a spare that will fit our truck and says that he'll sell it to us for 20 bucks and change the tire for us to save us money on the tow and buying a whole new tire. Sweet deal right? We still have time to get to WV and we head out on our way after he changes the tire and we start driving after he takes the messed up tire and puts our old rim back in the bed. We get no more than a mile down the road and Jim says to me 'Do you see smoke?' I can't see anything on my side and he's like dude, I'm gonna check this shit out. We change lanes to get off at the next exit and see what's up and then it sounds like a gunshot went off and we're on 3 wheels. The spare blew out. So now we're right back where we started. Son of a bitch. Right before we lost the tire, we saw the tow guy about a mile ahead of us picking up another guy. Back to square one, we call the tow guy back and he said he'll head back for us as soon as he drops the other guy off at the next exit and we had to call AAA back to reopen our help request. This time we get loaded up on the flatbed and I'm frantically calling the nearest Wal-Mart to make sure that we can get into their tire center before they close. The guy feels bad and he gives us our 20 bucks back and only charges us half of what we'd be charged for the tow since we were having some shitty luck. By this time, I can't stop laughing because now I'm sitting in a big rig and the only dead animals that I've seen so far were roadkill that were sitting by each one of our off road stops. Jim's ready to explode because this is just another thing in the long line of shitty luck that we've had with this truck. I swear we got this thing with some voodoo curse on it because there has been nothing but bad things happening to it for the past 4 years. Allow me to divert for a second to share all of the things that have happened to this truck.
It's a 2002 Chevy S10, purchased in 2006, so fairly new. When we got it, we were down at Ohio State and his parents bought it for him because his last car completely just died and he needed a car to get to work and get home. They were going to get him a truck for graduation later that year, but his car didn't last until then and we both were relying on his car to get to work. So his parents drive the truck down for us and all's good. Then shit started happening. Before the school year was finished, the gas cap was stolen, some drunk ran into the side passenger mirror and bent it clean off but they were nice enough to place it back on like it wasn't broken at all so when I opened the door, it fell off into the grass. Then around my birthday, he started having trouble with it not starting. It would just randomly die and we'd need a jump constantly. Turns out the battery was bad and we had to have it replaced, something like the cells were reversed or something. Then he graduates and the problems seem to stop for awhile until my birthday rolls around the next year again. He's at his friend's house watching the NFL draft while I went somewhere with his mom and sister. When they drop me off at the party later, his dad pulls up and says 'Where the hell is his back window?' So I get him on the phone and they all come outside and we see a missing back window and a ton of glass on the ground. Turns out some little turds were using his truck as target practice with their BB guns and shot out his window and left tons of little pellet marks along the side. Thankfully the window was on the cap so they could take the cap off and he could drive his truck like a regular pickup until it was fixed. Since then, we've gone through 2 more batteries, a windshield, the spare was stolen and the lock on the cap was broken.
Come to think of it, it's not the truck, it's him. He's gone through 3 cars since he started driving and all of them were weird freak occurrences. He hit a deer in his first car and then totaled it about a year later when he was going down a hill and the brakes failed. Then in the car before the truck, the back window was smashed out and broken into while he was fishing and then it totally died a year later. Now this. My grandpa is rolling in his grave right now that I married somebody who drives a Chevy instead of a Ford and would even consider buying a Dodge and can't do more in terms of maintenance past checking the oil and refilling the wiper fluid. I can just see him right now having a stroke over this haha. On the other hand, my car is almost 18 years old with almost 170,000 miles on it and my only issue in the past 4 years has been one dead battery, a fuse that made my check engine light stay on and having to replace a headlight or two. I'm starting to think that maybe he's the one that needs the new car first but I think it's just him, not the cars. At least he's not being a jackass and totaling them by being stupid like my ex though, that's the bright side of this for me.
So when I left off, we were at a Wal-Mart in East Liverpool. We had the papers with the tire info from when he got the new front tires so I go in while they're unloading the truck from the flatbed and get us a new tire. When I come out with the guy who needs to verify some info, they're trying to drive the truck into the loading area so they can get the new tire on and I'm dying because they have no choice but to drive the couple feet on the rim and it's making this terrible sound as the remnants of the last tire that was absolutely shredded is just flopping around and just serving as a cushion so the rim isn't scraping against the ground at this point. We decide to wander around the store while they worked and I had this ridiculous upset stomach from drinking coffee and being nervous so I need to find a bathroom. Of course after I do my business, I find out that not only is there no toilet paper in my stall, there aren't any of those paper ass guards either and I tried to reach up into the next stall to see if there was any paper hanging low enough for me to grab and pull down without leaving the stall but of course not. So I had to book it to the next stall with my pants down. Wonderful. After that fun experience, the truck was already done so we head back and pay for the service. I stayed back and asked some questions to the tire guys while Jim was over by the truck. Now for some reason, my 'knows nothing about cars' husband stuck his hand behind the tire to check for... something. He doesn't know what he was looking for and neither do I but he called us over and had me stick my hand back there. I have pretty small hands and I couldn't run my hand along the back of the tire because there were 2 bolts crammed right up against the tire and if we drove on it again, we wouldn't have made it home because it would just grind against the tire until it found a weak spot and it would burst again. Now we're starting to worry about the actual frame of the vehicle because this new tire is sitting really far in compared to the other one and it seems that these bolts are the ones holding in the crossbeams under the back end and we're afraid that it means it's off center and it's just gonna fall off next. Then I step back and take a look at the side of the car and realize that the rim of the new tire didn't match our rims. None of us realized that we were using the rim of the spare from the tow guy and not our own, which is what caused the second tire to burst. The tire guys can't believe that they didn't think of that either and change the rim for us, that we still had in the back. The spare rim wasn't as deep as ours so when that one was used, it allowed the tire to sit deeper on the axle and pushed it up against the bolts. With the old rim on and the new tire, I could slide my hand through the back of the tire without catching my hand on the bolt at all. When they drove the car back into the loading area, you could just hear the bolt grinding against the tire, which is where the smoke was coming from before the second tire burst. No idea what made him stick his hand back there but if he hadn't, we wouldn't have made it home and we would have been screwed because we were the last truck they saw before they closed.
So we made it back home when we assumed we'd be getting home from West Virginia, but the farthest we got was a Wal-Mart 45 minutes away. We're trying again today. Wish me luck because I'm officially afraid to travel with my husband because of his apparent string of bad vehicular luck.