My Weekend

I love long drives.  Especially long drives with no real destination and no time limits at all.  And since I’m temporarily (?) relocated 170 miles from my home-home, I have an added bonus that makes it much, much more interesting: I can drive in just about any direction and see landscape that I’ve never seen before.

Here in central Pennsylvania, there are some decent mountains.  Now I’ve been out west once, and the mountains here aren’t THAT decent, but they’re much better than the mountains in the Philly suburbs where I really live.  It’s an amazing thing to watch the daylight recede behind a range of mountains, where there’s a soft and fading blueish glow above the ridge, and it’s pure darkness below.  And there’s one stretch of road out here that I’ve driven that’s in the valley between two parallel mountain ranges.  It’s so sparsely populated, and driving that at night, it’s almost pitch black on either side, with a bright sky full of stars overhead.

Last night I went for a drive in the general direction of Montoursville, which is about 60 miles away.  There’s a bike shop there, one of the few shops in PA that sells Kona bikes, and of those the closest one to me.  I knew it wasn’t open, but I felt like going for a long drive, and figured I’d drive by and get a feel for where it’s at before going there one day this week during business hours.

The road from here to there is route 220, and I love that road.  It’s got an alternate route that’s only two lanes, with so much interesting mountainous landscape.  I set out, hit "random" on the stereo, and it picked "Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo" by MxPx.  I got that album almost six years ago, and was crazy about it for a long time, but for the past couple years I listened to it less frequently.  But it was perfect for last night.  I was feeling really melancholy and thinking of a musical selection to match, but this album is pretty upbeat (it’s pop-punk after all).  But the lyrics are also really introspective and some of them are pretty sad.  It fit.  "My words don’t come out easily, so I will tell you honestly... no one wants to spend eternity alone."

It was almost dusk when I left at quarter after seven, still completely light but fading, and it got dark 15 or 20 miles into the trip.  Route 220 eventually turns into a four-lane that’s 65MPH, and it was dark by then.  Driving 70 MPH (much slower than most of the traffic -- this was a drive for the sake of the drive, remember), I saw for a split second what appeared to be a raccoon walking across the road in front of me.  Another split second later I hit it, and it went right under my car.  I was fairly mortified since the biggest thing I’d hit before was a squirrel or rabbit, and this thing was about the size of an smallish-average dog.

Well about two minutes later, my radiator fluid light came on, indicating that the level was too low.  I took the next exit and pulled into a gas station, which was maybe 5 miles from where I hit the ’coon.  In that time, the engine temperature didn’t rise at all; the guage stayed right in the center, at 190 degrees, where it always is.  I looked under the car, and it was dripping from everywhere.  The radiator fluid reserve tank -- the one that never needs refilling under normal circumstances -- was empty.  I read through my owner’s manual a little, called my parents, and looked around under the hood, but couldn’t see where the source of the leak was.  The red radiator fluid was sprayed or pooling all over in the bottom of the front driver’s-side of the engine compartment.

I needed water.  Gallons.  This little Citgo gas station didn’t have gallons, just 1-liter bottles of spring water for $1.85 each.  I bought 11 of them.  I poured three and a half of them into the reserve tank, at which point it filled up.  After about 45 minutes of talking with my parents and assessing the situation, and realizing that there was a truck stop about 5 miles back toward home, I decided to drive back.  The engine temperature hadn’t risen at all, so I figured the radiator had to be holding some amount of water.  Right after I got back on the road, the fluid-level light came on again, but still the temperature didn’t rise at all.

At the truck stop, there’s a 24-hour service station but only for trucks.  But the guy was nice enough to come out to the parking lot and look under my hood, and got on the ground and was looking under there too.  He couldn’t tell where the leak was.  He sold me a $3 bottle of "radiator stop" but it didn’t.  Went right through with all the water we poured in after it.  So either there’s a big crack/hole, or a hose came off, or something, but dude couldn’t figure it out, and I sure couldn’t.

Here, they actually had gallons of spring water, so I bought two, which brought my total to about four.  I knew there were a couple stores in the 30 miles between there and home, so I decided to give it a try.

I didn’t push the engine much above 2200 rpm, which limited me to 45 mph (in a 65).  I coasted all the downhills.  I stopped every five miles to pour a gallon of water through and let the engine sit for ten minutes.  The whole time, the engine temperature didn’t rise at all, and the radiator didn’t steam until I stopped and poured some water in, and even then it didn’t steam much.  I’d pour about half a gallon in, and it would hold it.  But just above that amount, the radiator made a sound as if it was throwing up, and forcefully expelled all the water out the bottom of it onto the ground.  Then the radiator fans would turn on, and the other half-gallon seemed to pour almost straight through.

I got home that way in about an hour and a half, with no (other) problems.  Konstantin is one of those fix-the-car-himself kind of guys, so he’s going to look at it tomorrow, and unless he can figure it out, I’m taking Golfy to the radiator shop.  Fortunately for him there’s one in town that "specializes in Volvo - VW - Audi" repairs.  He so hates being treated like he’s on the same level as the other kinds of cars on the road.