Beefy Problems
Jenna and I are writing this post from a bar/café in Lac Mégantic, Quebec. 17 miles from the US/Canada border. We spent the night in the mechanic's lot. Déja vu. Another day, another mechanic. Another tow. Jenna and I got out of Rangeley around mid-day yesterday, with, if not exactly high spirits, at least tentative optimism. After all, we were excited about crossing the border out of Maine and getting into a new mode, something that felt different from the difficult time we had in Maine.
Rangeley is about 50 miles from the Canadian border. We were getting close to the crossing, in beautiful woods and incredible overlooks, when things started feeling unsteady. Specifically, we smelled the ominous smell of roast beef. There was no obvious source to this beefiness, but it got stronger as we were driving. Furthermore, I noticed steam rising out of a vent in the back of the van. I'm still not totally sure what this vent is; I think it leads either to one of the water tanks (black or grey water), or is a heat release for the living-area heater. Anyway, it's never steamed before and now it was steaming.
Once again, we decided we would have to visit a mechanic in Quebec, but I was hoping that this problem was something minor. The customs officials tore through the van pretty aggressively at the border crossing, but let us go without any problems. About 15 miles past the border, the heat started climbing. The van was oppressively beefy. On a long uphill climb, I started losing power. Pressing the accelerator seemed to slow the car down, if anything. I pulled over posthaste, with nightmarish familiarity. Heartstopping thoughts of "hydrolock" gripped my brain. If, after all this, coolant was leaking into the engine block, we were finished. Total engine rebuild, $5000, do not pass Go.
I wasn't even sure if my AAA membership would allow me to be towed in Canada. Fortunately, at least that worked in our favor. This would be my third, and final, free AAA tow. We didn't have to wait long for the inappropriate, but appreciated, joviality of the red-faced tow truck driver. He descended from his truck with a hearty, "YOU SPEAK-A FRANCH? NON? I SPEAKA NO EENGLEESH EEZER!" I was able to work out with his dispatcher where to take the van. We were towed a few miles into Lac Mégantic. On the way, I got to exercise my extremely rusty (and none too polished to begin with) high school French. Pointing to the lake: "On peut nager là?" Jenna: "C'est tres jolie." Truck driver: "Uuh, ouais. C'est jolie." And grinning like an idiot when these basic phrases were understood.
Once again, we were permitted to camp in the garage lot. One of the mechanics spoke good English, and served as a translator for the head mechanic, a tough-looking bald man with a beard and eyebrow piercing. Exactly what you would imagine, if you tried to picture a small-town French-Canadian car mechanic. They poked around under the hood for a few minutes and quickly told us the bad news: the alternator had burned out. Because the battery wasn't drawing a charge from the engine, we had also burned out the battery. The pungent roast-beefy smell was the combined odor of the sulfuric acid boiling out of the battery, and the components of the alternator cooking themselves. We had lost power when the battery wasn't able to power the spark plugs.
It was hard to believe this was happening. The repairs were going to be expensive. As with the coolant system, the cost wouldn't beggar us, but it was cutting severely into the money we had worked to save over the past year. Imagining the price in terms of hours of stressful or boring work at our respective jobs was palpably painful. After these multiple failures, we no longer felt that we could rely on the van for any more of this trip. None of these mechanical problems seemed to faze the various mechanics we consulted; they each treated them as par for the course for a 23-year-old vehicle, even one with fairly low mileage. Indeed, nothing we encountered was all that complex. However, how many more of these simple-but-crippling problems could we expect to see in the next 10,000 miles?
You gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, and now that I've used up my 3 free AAA tows, Jenna and I are going to quit before we get nickel-and-dimed into financial oblivion. Basically, this trip has ceased to be fun, and poses too great a financial risk for us to responsibly continue. We've worked hard to travel, not to throw money against bad in a series of engine repairs. Jenna and I have had a long talk, and decided that this is the best course to take. We'll take our savings, and travel in a different way.
As for our immediate plans, we have to take the van back to western Pennsylvania, to my parents' house. I hope that the repairs we're making now will take us home without incident. On the way back, we'll stop to hike to Piazza Rock back in Rangeley, and we're thinking about attempting Mount Marcy in New York. That will be a big challenge. We're going to try to do it as a two-day hike. We want to make proverbial lemonade. My mom and step-father, who used the van while Jenna and I were living in Philadelphia, like it a lot and were sad when they had to hand it over to us. They have generously offered to buy it back from us for a fair price, which will cover the repairs and the gas money we've spent so far.
We're thinking about trying to backpack through Europe. Between now and then, we'll try to pick up jobs in Pittsburgh, so we don't dip into our savings too much. It will take a lot more planning and research, but we think it will be financially feasible. The trip will be shorter, but we hope it will be fulfilling. We'll keep updating this blog as we figure out what's next.
I am disappointed, of course, that this trip is ending this way. I'm at a loss to come up with a lesson to take away from this experience. I haven't learned anything, or taken away anything to do differently in the future. I know that that's not how it works. There's no organizing force in the universe setting up neatly pre-packaged learning experiences for confused twenty-somethings. Still, I feel like I've been kicked in the shins by fate with nothing to show for it, and it stone cold sucks.
I thought that traveling by van, or living in a van, or whatever I had conceptualized this as, was kind of hedging my bets. I felt that perhaps I wasn't resourceful enough to hitchhike or hop trains or hike the Appalachian Trail, but was perhaps just capable enough to manage van dwelling. But instead of making things easier, the van was an expensive burden. We never even used most of the living systems. Perhaps, in reducing our creature comforts to the things that can fit in a backpack, we will be taking a greater risk, but there's a lot less that can go wrong. I'm curious to see if this will prove to be a better formula for us. At the moment, it doesn't feel like it could be much worse.
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