Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II

This is Part II of a series.  Part I, The Phantom RV, is located here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).

“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes . . .” – Event Horizon

More on this sign below.  Sigh.

Preview

The following was overheard between two moms at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas, Texas:  “I wish I was as rich as the Smith family – they have enough money that they don’t have to drive a new car.”

Ohhh, vanity . . . what is thy sticker price?

Our SUV is rated to pull our camper, plus another 2000 pounds.  Our camper is, in the world of RVs, very small, much like Alec Baldwin before he discovered carbohydrates.  However, our SUV will not ever be pulled over for speeding on the open highway when pulling our camper, unless we’re going downhill, with the wind at our back, and with one of Elon Musk’s rockets strapped to the luggage carrier.  With all that?  We might hit 67 miles per hour.  Where the speed limit was 65 miles per hour, we managed only to get up to 60 or so, and that was with the gas pedal firmly jammed to the floorboard.  Really.  And I kept said gas pedal floored for probably 98% of our trip.

Alec Baldwin after carbohydrates.

The engine got hot, burning through the equivalent of the petroleum use of Cuba for a year in 15 hours.  The outside temperature was also hot, which might explain how we got stuck at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States*.  (*Shadiest that I’ve been to outside of a big city.)

How shady was it?

The front door had a sign on it indicating that it was mandatory to remove sunglasses, hats, and hoodies prior to entry, so the security camera could get a good look at you.  There was a sign on the bathroom door that amused The Boy so much he took a picture of it:

Yes, apparently they had this problem enough that they had to put a sign on the door to tell people to NOT MINDLESSLY DAMAGE MERCHANDISE while waiting in line.  I’m sure the people who mindlessly damage merchandise seem like the group who would read a sign and say, “Oh, I was going to take a knife to these water bottles because I’m bored and have no self-control, but I won’t now because someone took the time to write out a note to me with a Sharpie®.”

The Boy also took this picture of the sign inside the bathroom:

Likewise, if the bathroom is out of toilet paper or Windex® or paper towels, I’ve never been tempted to jump up and go and restock a convenience store bathroom or clean the mirror.  I wonder if that’s a problem they run into all the time, rogue cleaners?  Maybe they have to pay them if they’re technically doing work for the store?  Do they get healthcare benefits?

Hopefully the descriptions of the signs show how sketchy the place we were at is – enough random theft and vandalism that Sharpies®, copier paper, and probably the occasional police call are required.  Not a good neighborhood, but at least better than a “clerk in an iron cage” convenience store.

Here is where the Clerk of Monte Cristo stays, forever condemned to hide shamefully within an iron mask a glass booth.

After the usual filling up and going to the bathroom, we make our way back to the Wildermobile™ Mark III, and get ready to go.

I turn the ignition key.

Nothing.  Not even a click.

I turn it again.  Nothing.

Crap.  This is literally the worst place possible to be stuck on our trip.  I mean, Detroit would be worse, but I would never actually go there, since I bet that’s where Gollum, Sauron, and the Nazgûl come from, and I bet that you can’t even get a decent Über there.

I thought back to the last place we got gas.  I had (for the first time in over a decade) double-started the car, i.e., I had tried to start the car after it was already going.  Had that damaged the starter with that horrible grinding sound?

I got under the car, and immediately was confronted by the skid plate.  A skid plate is, essentially, armor for the engine.  It protects the engine from collisions with rocks (think boulders) on rough mountainous roads or stacks of blenders if you (for whatever reason) wanted to run over a bunch of blenders at high speed.  Not that I’ve ever done run over stacks of blenders at 70 miles per hour, but if I wanted to do it, I could.

Thankfully, I was prepared – we had a socket set in the back of the Wildermobile® Mark III and I popped off the skid plate.

It was at this moment I wondered if we had done the right thing in bringing a car that had already traveled 151,000 miles in its 15 year life on a difficult journey that would require the engine to operate at maximum output for over a thousand miles and for over 30 hours.  Well, second guessing that decision now was kinda out of the question.

The one thing I didn’t do was panic.  Life generally works out for me much better than it should and I assume that, generally, the situation will resolve itself in my favor more times than not.  I shimmied underneath the car and looked for the starter.  The Boy pulled the Chilton’s® Manual™ out of the back of the Wildermobile© which had a picture showing the location of the starter.  I found it, I think.  It might have been the car’s nipple, if the car’s nipple was wired and tied into the flywheel.  I wiggled the wires.

I climbed out from under the car and tried to start it again.

Nope.

I sent The Mrs. in to get some more coolant for the radiator – while it wouldn’t help, it gave her something to do and was a little better than sacrificing a chicken to a voodoo god to get the Wildermobile® Mark III going again.  Our coolant wasn’t too low, but, after 10 hours, the engine was HOT.  I put in some coolant.  I crawled back under the car – since, by experience, I knew that I could get a live wire to the starter and manually start it (if necessary).  It would be sort of embarrassing to have to crawl under the engine hot wire my car, but after a few years I’m sure I’d get tired of doing that and get it fixed.

By this time, I looked like a mess.  I was covered with axle grease (red) and undercarriage petroleum products (oil, power steering fluid, and some fluid produced by the Wildermobile™ Mark III in order to attract other cars to mate with).  Essentially, I looked like Sam Neill after he left Jurassic Park® and went to the Event Horizon™.

Me before greasing the trailer axles and getting red grease on my shirt and then crawling under the car.

Me after greasing the axles and crawling under the car.  Oh, and traveling to a hellish other dimension on a doomed and haunted spaceship.

I once again got back into the car, and used my greasy hands to turn the key.

The motor purred like a catlady’s flock of husband replacements.  Success!

As I started the engine, The Mrs. was talking to a nice lady from the town who had been asking her if we needed help, no doubt clued in by the socket wrenches and open Wildermobile® Mark III hood.

“No, I said, we just got help, and it was you!  What’s your name?”

“Angelina,” she responded.

John Wilder:  “Well you must be our guardian angel, Angelina!  Thank you so much!  You’re our lucky charm!”

Angelina and I hugged.  Odd, but stuff like that happens on the road.

The Wilder family piled back into the car.  We pulled out of the Sketchiest Convenience Store in the Central United States that features irrational merchandise destroyers, vigilante bathroom restockers, and guardian angels walking amongst us.

Pugsley frowned.  “So what, exactly, would we have done if the car hadn’t started?”  I could hear the concern in his voice.

“Well,” I responded, “what we wouldn’t have done is panic.  Panic is the best way to make a bad situation a catastrophe, sort of like Alec Baldwin’s career after he discovered nachos and high fructose corn syrup.”

I then sketched out a series of things we would have done to get the car fixed, and what we would have done until it was fixed.  Pugsley seemed satisfied.

I then told The Boy and Pugsley of the car that didn’t like vanilla ice cream, which is a story I read a long time ago.  The car owner would go to the store to get ice cream.  And when he got vanilla, the car wouldn’t start.  When he got chocolate, the car would start.  He wrote to the car company (I think it was General Motors).

Getting such an odd letter, they actually sent an engineer out to see what the problem was.  The engineer went with the man to get vanilla ice cream.  Sure enough, the car wouldn’t start for a while.

They went back to the owner’s home.  Then they drove back to the store and bought chocolate ice cream.  Sure enough, the car started.  Turns out the vanilla ice cream was in the front of the frozen food section, being more popular.  The chocolate ice cream was in the back of the frozen food section, all the way to the back of the store.  The extra time walking to the chocolate gave the car enough time to cool down (there was a heat-related fault in the car) so that the car would start.

We drove onward.  Finally, we made it to the mountains.  It was dark.  We had been in the car for 12 hours.  Still three more to go . . . if only I were a Dallas housewife, I would have had a new car that immediately started at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States.  Then where, dear Internet, would you be without this story?

You’d be as sad as Alec Baldwin’s agent when Alec tells him those four fateful words . . . “Me want ice cream.”

Next (in the series):  The Mountains, An IHOP™ Tease and a Short Turn Radius, More Convenience Store Shenanigans, A Drink Heater, Stevie Wonder® saves Captain Ahab/Clark Griswold