No Going Back(ward)

Cindy and I set out on the Great Road Trip of 2010 about ten days ago to drive the elderly Saturn up to Oregon and exchange it for my mom's slightly less elderly (fifteen years vs. eighteen years) Camry station wagon.  We need a functional car in Oregon to drive Mom to the doctor and various other appointments, but the Camry was more car than she needed, especially since she voluntarily quit driving (THANK YOU!!!!) about four years ago.

My problem was that I had my doubts as to whether the Saturn would make it over the Grapevine, up the Central Valley and over the Siskiyous to Oregon, so we had all the necessary repairs made by our mechanics, who know us all too well.  On Sunday morning we loaded the car, backed it out of our long driveway and drove six blocks to the grocery store for coffee to start the trip.  But when we tried to back out of the parking place, we couldn't get the car in reverse gear.  I tried it, Cindy tried it, and .... nothing.  No reverse.

However, once we had pushed it out of the parking space, the forward gears seemed to be working O.K.  Had it not been Sunday morning and our favorite repair shop closed, we probably would have just driven over there and had them fix it.  But since they were not open, that would have meant delaying the trip.  So we just decided to go... forward.  That presented some challenges along the way; we had to park in a parking garage in Burbank when we stopped for lunch, but we found a space where we could pull through without having to back up.  At the hotel in Roseville, California, Sunday night we discovered that the parking lot had several spaces that sloped up, so we could just put the manual transmission in neutral and let it coast down to where we could put it into first gear.

After consulting most of the males in the family by telephone, all of whom said some variation of "Hmmm, sounds like a linkage problem," we called Triple A, got a referral to a repair shop a few blocks away, and chugged off with nightmare visions of a long delay for expensive repairs.  But after half an hour and $25, the drooping cable from the battery cut-off had been secured up out of the way of the, yes, the linkage and we again had a full compliment of gears.

Unfortunately, that incident left us so shaken that we decided not to take the side trip we had planned on to check out Peaceful Valley organic garden supply in Grass Valley.  They specialize in California native plants and supplies for organic gardening, and Cindy had really been looking forward to visiting their store.   She was hoping to get some seed potatoes and we would probably have gone north with a trunk full of vegetation, but we decided not to take a chance on the car having further problems.

So we'll have to go there on some future trip.