On The Road

The wife and I are on the road for a week for kind of a Thanksgiving vacation, so I won't be at the "Liberry" for a while. I will have a couple of back-stock entries to add, so don't drift too far. Plus, if our trip continues its horribly true nature, I might just turn it into a travelogue of terror for the week.

Last night, while driving through Virginia on my way to my in-law's place in North Carolina, I stepped on the gas to pass an 18 wheeler and my engine suddenly began making a loud rhythmic flapping noise. However, no engine lights came on and there was no loss of power, so I continued on, hoping to find a good place to pull over, but after a couple of minutes the flapping subsided.

I thought, perhaps, a tie rope had come off the 18 wheeler and wrapped around my axel and had flapped against the road until it came to bits. I drove the rest of the way to NC and didn't think much more about it. My wife suggested I might have lost an engine belt of some sort. I figured it would be the airconditioning belt, as I'd had no problems driving so it wasn't likely the drive belt.

Turns out, it was the drive belt AND the airconditioning belt, since a `99 Malibu only has one belt for all. Fortunately, God was smiling on my journey, for my car was instilled with some Blues Brothers grace and only half of the belt had shredded, leaving me another half to limp in on. We determined pretty quickly that it was beyond even my industrial mechanic father-in-law's ability to fix out in the yard and we found someone who was open and could do it for a decent price.