Kris & Greg's Not-So-Excellent Adventure Part III

Continuing on….

So once the idiot at Liberty Mutual road side assistance hotline finally figures out where we are, Greg tries to tell her to contact someone in Astoria. Since it’s a bigger town, they would be more likely to have a tow truck available, and someplace to get it fixed. Does this make sense to you? Somehow, not too surprisingly at this point, this fries the idiots little brain in to a million pieces. She calls someone in Long Beach. Fine, we give up. Send someone from Long Beach, we’ll figure it out later…hopefully with someone with a BRAIN! So we get a confirmation call from the tow company from Long Beach. They tell us that our insurance only covers the first $50 of a tow and that it is going to be an additional $65 for them to tow us in to Long Beach.

Just as an aside here, I want to say that I think we’d all better go out and buy tow trucks and start towing people. $115 to pick up a dead car and tow it less than 10 miles is good money!

At this point we don’t really care. Just send someone. So we wait about 20 minutes. Then we get a call from the road side assistance hotline. This is a new idiot, who is apparently pre-programmed to only utter a few sentences. She tells us that our Long Beach tow has been called off to tow someone else but they (the hotline) have found another tow company and how do we want to pay for the amount over our tow insurance? Greg tries for a while to figure out

a) What happened to the original tow that called and confirmed with us that they were on their way and should have been there in minutes
b) Where this new company is coming from
c) Who this new company is
d) Why they want our form of payment this instant

This pre-programmed drone just keeps telling him she doesn’t know and how does he want to pay for it. Finally, he just tells her it will be a Visa and she goes away happy. We aren’t, but hey, we’re just the customer.

In the mean time, the sun has come out at the beach and it’s starting to get really hot in the car. We can’t open the windows and we have the dogs with us so we can’t open the doors because we are right on (say it with me now!) Hwy 101. So we have to be hot. Since I was bored, I took a picture of us stranded by the side of the road:





About 40 minutes later our tow truck shows up. With two people in the cab. “Where,” we say to ourselves, “are we going to sit?”

Turns out the tow people (Classic Towing) are really, really nice. It’s a husband and wife (Tom & Christina). They think Liberty Mutual road side assistance people are idiots, too. They were told that there were no passengers, that it was just a tow. Christina said if they had known there were people, they had a bigger truck they could have brought. She thought they were a bunch of idiots, too. Christina is nice enough to call a cab company for us while they are hooking up the car. They ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the girls, and got us all hooked up. We didn’t know where to have them take it, so we were just going to have it towed to the Ford dealership in Astoria, but Tom said he knew a guy that would do a really good job and he’d tow it there. I guess he hadn’t had good luck with a truck he bought at that Ford place (it’s amazing what people will share with total strangers). They waited with us until the cab came and then towed our car away.

The cab was a small car that reeked of cigarette smoke. The driver was a middle-aged lady who was very friendly and drove us back to our campsite. She even stopped at the ATM so I could get some cash to pay her with. When we got back to the trailer, we collapsed. Now what?

Carmen & Sophie had been really good through all of this. They just slept on the back seat while we waited, and only got up when they started getting hot. They took the ride in the cab in stride and I think they had a good time sniffing everything in that car. We decided to see if we could get down to the beach and let them run. We could hear the ocean, but hadn’t found a way to it yet. Turned out we were only a few hundred yards away from a really nice beach. So we took the girls down and let them run and play. They loved it.

So Sunday comes. We prepare to hike 2 miles up to the ranger station to use a phone since we can’t get cell service. We get up to the bathrooms right by our campsite and see a pay phone. While it would have been REALLY nice if any of the people we talked to about our car problem had told us there was a phone right there instead of giving us stupid advice about flagging down a park ranger and asking for a lift, we are quite happy. Something is going right for us, finally! So we call the place Tom towed our car. Greg talks to a guy there and finds out that the battery needs to be replaced. The guy said the alternator was fine. That sounded reasonable to us, since the car is a 2000 with the original battery. We tell them to go ahead and change it. The guy has to go to Napa Auto Parts and get one. We arrange for someone to come pick us up and take us back to their shop to get the car. We have to wait a couple of hours, but we take the girls down to the beach for a walk, so it’s time well spent. Greg also fixed a 12-volt outlet in the trailer he’d been meaning to fix for ages.

Levi comes to pick us up in a little Toyota. It is a total mess inside and also smells like cigarette smoke. Levi is a nice enough guy, though. He’s in his 20s, I guess, and kinda has the grunge thing going on. Turns out he does a lot of 4-wheel drive stuff and he and his buddies use this shop where our car was repaired to do work on their cars, which is why they were able to look at ours on a Sunday.

So we pay the kids and get our car. Whee!! We have wheels again! We are FREE!! Greg & I were really excited. The weekend could now progress. We stopped at a couple of stores and got some stuff, refilled the gas tank and headed back to Cape D. to do the sightseeing that we wanted to do there.

All went well until, oh, about mile marker 7 on Hwy. 101. Greg looks down and says “The battery light is on again.” ACK!!!! WTF? By this time we are starving, so we go looking for a place to have lunch. He kept an eye on the gauge, and while the battery light stayed on, the battery level didn’t drop like it was doing before. We went to a really good pizza place for lunch and then drove back to the campground. Since it was Sunday we knew that there was no point in trying to find someplace to take it, so we spent the night at Cape D. and decided to take it in to Ford Monday morning.

Monday morning comes and we hooked up and left camp. We drove to Astoria (nothing happened at mile marker 7 this time), found the Ford place, and drove in. Turns out they have a really light crew on Monday and they aren’t sure they can get us in. They seemed to change their mind when they realized that we had our trailer hitched to the car and we were going to have to set up camp in their parking lot while they looked at the car.

The folks there were quite nice. They diagnosed the alternator problem. They advised us not to drive the trailer home to Vancouver with the alternator like it was. It could go out and then we’d be dead in the water again, this time with the trailer. We agreed that was a chance we’d rather not take and asked them to fix it. Then they had to get the part. That took a while. Then they had to put it in. That took a while. We hung out in the trailer and did stuff. Eventually, the car was fixed.

Okay, that’s a rather anti-climatic ending, I know. It was a long story and I just sorta lost momentum here at the end. So all in all we really had a rotten time at the beach last weekend.

Oh, and this is kind of funny. After we got the problems all taken care of, I realized that there was a sign that actually did tell me a cross road. It was behind me, and I never noticed it.