How to begin? All is well, sort of... We have our van, the wind is flowing through our hair and the Paul Simon is blasting. Then we hit the freeway (which is not as scary as it could have been considering our newfound driving skills). The van starts jerking spasmodically as we hit 5th and stalls out on the on ramp. I intrepidly start it up again while still rolling and sort of urge it forward wondering if we should even be anywhere near a freeway in this breadbox of danger when we realize that suddenly the van has decided that any time we try to shift gears, it will commence with an awful lurching seizure. I spend several minutes cursing alternated with kind of helpless laughing and eventually through a lot of coaxing (and many people passing us looking curiously at our ridiculous heart-painted van sputtering along) we figure out that the van's preference is for an RPM comparable to a jet engine. 90 kmph in 4th gear seems to be ideal. Who knows how long the "new" radiator will hold out. Also, hills and stop and go traffic are not included in the van's repertoire. We hope to make it to Thames by nightfall or at all, really. Every now and then I peel my eyes off the odometer and I think "Shit, I'm in New Zealand, this is some of the most beautiful countryside I've ever seen hands down" but then the van gives a warning lurch and maybe trries to stall out again and I have to try again through the force of my glare keep the damn thing going. I have no idea the actual speed limit out here but regardless of what it is we can't go any slower or faster than 90 kmph and we are gaining a serious caravan of about 15 cars behind us. As of writing this we have 80 km to go.
Update: turns out we can also go about 2 kmph ok when traffic inexplicably stops in the middle of nowhere. It's a traffic light (??!?!?!) holding up about 8km of cars.
The illustrious Rupert
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