Road Trip with Ruby

On a more humorous note, we had quite an adventure while our friends J & M from Indianapolis were here visiting. The morning of their first full day with us, we all pile into the car (a.k.a. Ruby) to head to a game reserve four hours from our house. (Mind you, these friends had been on a plane for 20+ hours only a mere 12 hours prior…and they are both over 6-feet tall!) We arrive at the game reserve, stay the night, and have quite an enjoyable time. (K & M were reunited with Sam the elephant from the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” However, Sam didn’t seem to remember our prior meeting. So much for the old adage about elephants not forgetting…)

On day 2, we pile back into the car for our four-hour ride home. About two hours into the trip, our car dramatically starts overheating! To make a long story short, we essentially end up coasting 10km to the nearest town, which also happened to be a pretty big town, hoping to find a mechanic at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon. Again miraculously, we find a mechanic & he tells us he thinks it’s the water pump but can’t actually do anything for us at this point in time. Our two options are to 1) stay the night in this town two hours away from our house and deal with it in the morning (which would be tough on a Saturday…very little is open) or 2) call a tow truck and get towed back home that very evening. We all agree that we should just try to get home. So the tow truck comes two hours later and we get the car up off of all four wheels on a flat-bed tow truck.

However, there’s not nearly enough room in the cab of the truck for all four of us AND the driver. So what option do we have but pile back into the car (which is now nestled nicely on top of the flat-bed truck), buckle in, and hope for the best! There we are, bumping & bouncing around on top of this truck in the rain, no heat, no radio, foggy windows from all of our breathing & laughing. Just when we think it can’t get any more bizarre, the tow truck driver turns on his yellow lights on top of the cab…which happen to be RIGHT at eye level for us! Oh, what a night.

We had started for home that afternoon at about 2pm and didn’t get home until midnight. But thank the Lord we arrived back safely & got to wake up in our own beds.

Just in case you thought the story was finished, wait…

So we leave the car at a VW dealership near our house where it would sit until Monday when someone could look at it. On Monday, they get it right into the shop, tell us it is indeed the water pump, replace the pump, and call us to tell us the car is ready to be picked up that very day! Amazing service. So we go to pick up the car thinking this bill is going to be HUGE, what with a two-hour plus tow & a brand new water pump. We get the bill and we owe…R63! That’s less than $10! We couldn’t believe it. The service agent told us that everything, even the tow, was covered in the warranty. We only had to pay for new antifreeze.

Crazy stuff.