Fonteney le Chateau

This place was free and was roughly 3 ½ hours away. For whatever reason the GPS has stopped indicating turns to Julie. The result of this was a lot of U-turns. The last U-turn of the day was on a highway, where I pulled off and drove some distance to turn around and rejoin it. We were driving uphill when I glanced down at the console only to see the heat gauge almost maxed out. I said “shit” and drove the van up the hill to the first exit and got off all the while watching it climb and max out. I managed to pull off to the side of the road while the engine gave in and shut off. I might have sworn again, but I can’t remember. A few days back I remembered that I needed to “top” up the coolant but forgot. For the life of me though, I couldn’t imagine the engine heating up so quickly without giving me the flashing warning light as it had in the past. After I removed Julie’s seat and the engine cover a cloud of smoke came up from the engine. Despite being on a highway, we were really near nothing and it was a Sunday, so everything was closed. Julie made me read my book for an hour before I was allowed near the engine to see what had gone wrong (she said the engine had to stop smoking first). She didn’t need an injured boyfriend on top of a dead car. The coolant tank was completely empty, so I decided to fill it up. Julie was watching the line to let me know when I put in enough liquid, but it never reached it. Julie and I realized this at the same time, but the coolant jug was already empty. So we both frantically looked and listened for a leak. It wasn’t long before we found the culprit. A rubber tube had torn almost in half. The tools I had were useless to fix this problem but I tried anyway to no luck. Not wishing to be stranded though, I asked Julie for a butter knife and proceeded to unscrew the clamp. My hope was to either cut the tube and refasten it, or to force more of the tube onto the metal attachment and re-clamp it. I did the later. We topped up the coolant tank with water and prayed it would work. Our first try, we needed to add more water as the pipes were empty too. Afterwards, it seemed to hold. So we continued on our way. Thankfully we only had to drive 36 km before our stop. Only 10 km in and the warning light started to blink. To top it off we have driven into one mother of a snow storm. I pulled over quickly and had another look at the engine. The tube was leaking so I decided to see if the clamp could be tightened more, and thankfully it could. I topped off the tank and ran the engine again, this time the water was staying put. We had only stopped for about 5 minutes but the entire van had at least 2 – 3 cm covering it. The snow was coming down in huge clumps and falling fast. The repair seemed to hold to our stop and when we stopped we decided to see about visiting the restaurant of the parking lot we were in. It was too expensive. It became cold in no time so we huddled under the blankets and read before going off to sleep. I hate to eat my words, but Phil’s dad told me of a time he needed to fix a car with a knife while he was traveling and Phil and I both laughed at the possibility and I said I would hope to never need to resort to that. Well, it wasn’t a difficult repair in the least, but I still remembered his story. We plan to get the van fixed tomorrow.