the birm*

It's more fun when you're young/the motorway is worse than in town

So we were driving home from Perpignan (south of France, about 500km from our place) when, at 130km/h the card seemed to lose power. as there was lots of wind, I wasn't sure whether that was the cause or something else. this went on for a good 5 minutes, then suddenly (still at 130km/h) it stalled. we coasted to an emergency phone booth and called for rescue...
Having old cars means things can go wrong more often than with new cars (I'm told, as I've only ever had old ones...), so paying for road-side assistance is not usually throwing money down the drain. In this case there was the towing (145€), the rental car to get back home (180€), and the train to go get the car a few days later (60€). The only thing we ended up paying (and it wasn't even up front), was the "work" that was done at the garage (80€).
Back in the day when I was still a teen/early-twenties, I'd run cars on not much fuel, as my budget wouldn't allow big fill-ups. evidently I ran out of fuel with most/all cars I owned, at some stage (usually not far from home, or at least in the city of Newcastle, which has servos everywhere, so it was just a (fun) waste of time.
It turns out, after the mechanic told us it was most probably the fuel-injection-pump (>1500€), that we had only run out of fuel, which is quite embarrassing due to the amount of effort and logistics that it was to get us home and to get the car again. but still, having to pay 80 bucks instead of 1500+ is a better outcome (though we won't trust the fuel gage again, which should avoid us having to go through that drama again!).

Labels: cars, hassles