Susanne and I hit the road on March 2 for our move from Washington DC to Boston. After two days of working with the movers to pack and load our possessions, we picked up a rental car, loaded our two cats, their litter box, and our minature bamboo tree into the backseat, and headed north.
We broke up the drive over a period of two days: four hours on Tuesday, four hours on Wednesday. This was the first time either of our cats had been in a car for longer than a 15 minute stretch (our cat Dizzy hadn't even been in a car in nearly three years), so we were rather apprehensive of how they'd handle the roadtrip. Images of screaming, carsick little felines had been haunting us for several weeks, so we were quite relieved by how well they handled the drive. At first, both cats seemed pretty wired, unable to relax, but they stayed very quiet and resigned themselves to the fact that they'd have to hang out in their sherpa carriers longer than either of them would have liked.
The first half of the trip -- DC to New Jersey -- was very straightforward. We arrived at a Holiday Inn in South Plainfield at 6pm, just in time for the hotel's bar to be packed with a group of burly, fortysomething fluid mechanics who'd assembled for some kind of conference. (It was a revelation to me that fluid mechanics went to conferences, but maybe this was a particularly precocious group of gearheads.) We had a quick, but thoroughly unsatisfying dinner at the local Red Lobster and went back up to the hotel to make sure the cats weren't too freaked out by their temporary digs. Both boys were under the bed, eyes dialated, wildly alert; fortunately they came out and joined us to watch eight contenders duke it out on yet another episode of American Idol.
The next morning we left the hotel just after 9am, hoping to get to Boston for a late lunch. We needed to get to our new hometown, Brookline, in order to pick up parking permits for the moving van before the town hall closed at 5pm, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to spare just in case we needed to run other local errands.
About five minutes into our morning trek, amidst the morning traffic on 287 South, the road started to get bumpy. Then very bumpy. Then downright scary. We soon realized the road was just fine, and that we were burning rubber at an alarming rate -- our back right tire had blown out. I kicked myself over and over in my head -- just before leaving Boston I'd noticed the tire pressure was a little low, but soon forgot about it after giving it a quick blast of air at the local gas station. Big mistake. The tire was a total loss. We were just short of the closest highway exit by around 200 yards, but there was no way this car could go any further.
Thanking our lucky stars we finally got cell phones last year, we called Hertz and asked them what we should do about it. They said they'd call a tow truck to come and help us with the spare tire; then we could either go to a repair shop to get the tire fixed, or go to the closest Hertz dealership, wherever that might be, for a replacement vehicle.
Before the tow truck could arrive, a truck from the New Jersey Department of Transportation came by and said they'd put on the spare for us at no charge. I called back Hertz and told them to cancel the tow truck. Soon we were mobile again, but the spare wouldn't get us to Boston, so we took the next exit to go to a repair shop that'd been suggested by the NJDOT driver. Unfortunately, when we got to the shop, they said they only had one guy working, and it would take all day for them to fix it. They told us to check out a small gas station down the street that had a repair crew on staff.
A few minutes later, we were at the gas station, and they said the tire was damaged beyond repair, so they'd have to put on a new tire. Hertz had told me I would need their approval first if I wanted to get reimbursed for the tire, so I called them back. This time I got another operator who must have worked for an HMO in a past life; she insisted that only a particular brand and model of tire be used for the car, rather than several other brand-name tires available at the gas station.
For the next hour I played phone tag with Hertz trying to get final authorization for the tire; meanwhile we waited for Hertz's pet brand of tire to get delivered to the gas station from another repair shop 20 miles away. Susanne and the cats sat patiently in the car, with all of our luggage strewn on the pavement, since we needed access to the tire storage space in the back trunk. Eventually, the tire arrived and the mechanic managed to get it on the car in about 15 minutes. By the time the car was ready to roll again, it was noon. Depending on traffic we'd get to Boston some time between 4pm and 5pm, perhaps too late to get the parking permits for the moving van we so desperately needed.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at March 9, 2004 05:57 PM | TrackBack