No Service, part 5

To read part 1, click here.
To read part 2, click here.
To read part 3, click here.
To read part 4, click here.

Visualize, if you will, a man, 6' 4", crammed into my Geo Metro. Visualize the movie, "The Incredibles" in which you see that superhero hunk come out of that tiny undersized little car. That is my husband in my little Geo.

Say what you will about those Geo Metros, mine hasn't given me a lick of trouble except a little windshield wiper water squirter motor gave out once and I had to replace a muffler for a safety inspection. It is a 1996 but runs great, only has 79,000 (mostly California, no salt) miles on it and it is always there when we need it, and we needed it. I call it my glorified motorcycle. We ran all over town on Sunday and went out to dinner with the family for Father's Day. I drove the Geo Metro LSI and my husband sat in the passenger seat with his head bent slightly forward to keep from hitting his head on the roof. His knees were up into his chest but he didn't complain. He was taking all of this in stride.

To our surprise we got a phone call with an estimate at 7:30 AM on Monday and they said they would have the Subaru fixed by that afternoon. Now that is service!!! It turns out that the alternator went out and it killed the almost new Sears battery while it was at it. So what is a few hundred more dollars, we almost have a rebuilt car by now. My husband said he'd come home from work early and we'd drive to Warren in the Geo, pick up the car and each drive our own cars home. On the way we passed a Subaru on the side of the road with people inside. I said we should stop and help them if they are stranded, my thoughts of repaying the kindness given to us. But just then the car pulled back onto the road.

Maybe you have to go to the country to find nice, helpful people like the ones we encountered on Saturday. Maybe it is because they haven't been corrupted by the hustle and bustle of city life. I think we all get so caught up in being in a hurry that there are few that go out of there way to help someone. It is all about US and get out of OUR way mentality of people. When someone does help it is such a big deal that the person will write a thank you letter in the newspaper (or as in this case, a blog) . We wondered if we had driven by someone sitting on the side of the road where we had been stranded, would we have stopped to help. I'm ashamed to say I don't think we would have. I always think there is too much danger in it. Those two girls took a chance on us and I hope to be able to help someone someday like they did.

We decided to go to Kinzua Reservoir in the first place because we thought it would be a nice drive and we would be back in time for game 6 and what we thought was most probably the final game of the Stanley Cup. We missed it. As luck would have it, not only did we have a great day on the day we broke down, but the Stanley Cup went to game 7 and we were back in time from picking the car up on Monday to see it.

PS. Last night we went car shopping. : -)