Category: Life Experience

Wheels: Seeing Red

smiamccroskey1 Comment

At the beginning June the check engine light in my 2008 Volvo convertible came on. This car is the replacement for the one I wrote about several years ago — same model, 10 years younger, slightly different shade of blue. I’ve had it since around 2010.

A few days later I went to Europe, so I didn’t have time to deal with it. In Spain I rented manual transmission cars and had a blast driving around Mallorca.

Back home in late June I got my act together and made an appointment for the car, which was also due for inspection in July. I opted to wait at the dealer repair shop to find out what needed to be done. It turned out to be a waste of three or four hours.

The repair needed to correct the check engine light would cost $17,000. And, of course, the car could not pass inspection with the light on. Fortunately, the car was driveable, so I drove it home.

I was fond of that car. However, the air conditioning died three or four years ago and summer driving has been hard. Last year the headliner came unglued, making it difficult to lower the convertible top. There were other quirks, and I’d sunk several thousand into it the last couple years for other repairs. It was time to move on. Even so, it took me a couple days to accept the fact that I was about to spend a lot of money — a lot more than $17,000 — or incur some debt. Or both.

I made a wish list: Manual transmission, because by gosh if I had to do this, I was going to get what I’ve wanted for the past several decades; convertible, because I love to put the top down and I’m not compromising on that; not too old, perhaps from the current decade. I already knew there were no hybrids or EVs matching my list. And I’m reluctant to go EV, given that I do some long drives and don’t want to add the challenge of finding a charging station along the way.

So I plugged my search criteria into various car search sites and held my breath. My screen was flooded with Mustangs. There were also BMWs and other high-end brands, and some Minis and Miatas. I drove a Fiat Spider for years and I know I need more room, so I filtered out the cute little roadsters. My results included a Volvo convertible — an automatic, not manual — because those sites give you vehicles that don’t match all your criteria. I was glad to see it, not because it was a chance to replace my current Volvo, but because it made me realized I needed to move on. The last model year of the Volvo C70 was 2012. I’d be buying the same set of problems that I was trying to get away from.

It was easy to eliminate the BMWs and Saabs and other high-end brands simply by price. Which left me with the Mustangs. The first car I drove after driver’s ed was my mom’s 1967 Mustang (not a convertible). That had also been the first car where I got to sit in the front passenger seat, when she first got it and I was 9. But I digress. So the Mustangs were not completely alien to me.

I became more picky about age and mileage, accepting that meant dollars. I sent a couple enquiries to dealerships. By the end of the week I was in conversation with a dealership right across the Hudson River that had a two-year-old red convertible, black interior, standard transmission V8.

On Saturday I went over for a test drive. As the salesman opened the door and looked in, he turned to me and said, “oh, you know it’s a manual, right?”

I chuckled. “Yes, that is on purpose.”

It was a good thing I’d been driving those standards in Spain, or I might have embarrassed myself getting out of the dealer’s lot. Needless to say, after a drive around in the growling monster I sat down and did the financing paperwork. Unfortunately, I could not drive it home — the DMV was closed until Monday. Plus I needed a bank check for my down payment and to dig up the title for the Volvo.

So on Monday, July 13 I went back across the river, said thank you and farewell to the Volvo, and drove home in the big red machine.

And as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Tappan Zee bridge I realized that for months I’ve been looking forward to being able to drive soon after my upcoming left knee replacement (the doctor would not let me drive for a month after the right knee operation), and I’d just squashed that by getting a standard transmission.

Life is full of trade-offs. And trade-ins.

It figures!

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In another post I wrote about my struggle with sciatica. A result of it was a hiatus on lap swimming. For weeks my pool bag sat, first in the car where it normally lives, then inside my apartment because the car was going for repair.

As the sciatica abated, I decided to charge up my swimming MP3 player so I could get back to the pool. I looked for it. It should be attached to my goggles in a small black pouch. It wasn’t there. I unpacked the whole bag–sport towel, turkish towel, fins, snorkel, gloves, zorries… I could not find the goggles and MP3 player.

The goggles were custom fitted, not cheap. Luckily, my source had a holiday sale and I’d already bought a couple more pairs. But I need my music to zone out in the pool. It was possible I’d left the pouch in the locker room when I last swam. I remember feeling off that day, after that swim, and the sciatica had flared up the next day. So I might have been distracted enough to leave them. Thing is, it was months ago. The odds of my stuff being in a lost and found were very low–so low it was not worth the effort to go there and check. And my cynical nature, or maybe life experience, told me calling and asking someone to look for it would not be productive.

So I ordered another MP3 player–the same model, as it happens because I didn’t find anything better. When it arrived I loaded it up with my swimming playlist, adding some tunes to it in the process. A few days later I made my way to the gym for the first time in months.

Once in the locker room I opened the pool bag and took out the smaller bag of stuff that goes poolside. I shoved clothes, shoes, and the larger bag into the locker. And I looked down at the bench and saw a black pouch.

“Seriously?”

Yes.

I have no idea why I did not see it when I checked the bag at home. I took everything out! But I do have a black microfiber towel for drying my zorries, and all I can think is the black pouch was tangled up with it. So I have two waterproof MP3 players, not to mention the goggles I thought lost. But hey, now I can rotate them so I never get a “low battery” message.

I Was forced to Spend Five Days in Paradise

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This happened in the middle of a sailing trip during which we planned to visit the US and Spanish Virgin Islands (the latter are part of Puerto Rico). One could argue that the entire nine days of sailing was in paradise, and one would be correct. But we did not plan to spend five days of it secured to a mooring in Gallows Bay, Christiansted, St. Croix.

When we arrived in Gallows Bay on the third day of our adventure, our skipper–the guy who had organized the trip–did not feel well. Indeed, he’d spent a couple hours of the trip from St. John sleeping below. Most of us couldn’t spend more than a few minutes down there as the boat heaved on the swells, so his need for rest had to be very powerful.

Naturally, one of our group produced a Covid 19 self-test and the result was positive.

Cue the tense group dynamics.

We were all vaccinated, most of us with two additional boosters administered fairly recently. Two of the group have regular, close interaction with family members who are immune compromised. One of them also self tested that evening and the result was negative. He put on a mask and continued to provide moral and informational support to our skipper. The other put on a mask and said our leader should leave the boat immediately. Instead, he stayed outside, having us hand his dinner, and then his bedding, up to him in the cockpit. He called his wife and his doctor and his insurance company and studied the CDC protocols.

In the morning, our skipper and his supportive crew went ashore and took a taxi to an urgent care facility. The rest of us waited on the boat swimming, reading, and inevitably discussing what would happen next.

They came back a couple hours later and reported the same results, which were now officially recorded. The rest of us gathered our shore gear and left the boat to make the same trip to urgent care. Our skipper packed a bag, made a hotel reservation, and left the boat in the care of our other crewmate.

After the longest taxi ride imaginable, we checked in at urgent care. Our crew mate who cares for her aging mother is also self employed with insurance that does not cover her outside of New Jersey. She was charged $100 for the Covid antigen test. The rest of us produced insurance that covered the test. The doctor had us stand outside while she swabbed our noses, then told us to wait there for the results. An eternity later she returned and said, “you guys are all clear.”

That’s when I realized just how stressful this whole thing was–when the uncertainty about whether I’d have to pay for a hotel on an expensive island, maybe not be able to fly home on schedule, was eliminated the relief made me almost jubilant.

This is when I decided that although this was not what we had planned, we were going to spend five days in paradise, so we might as well make the best of it. The other three agreed.

We texted our crew mates about the results, and we had the taxi drop us at a restaurant just outside the marina for a late lunch/early dinner. We urged our other healthy crew mate to walk over and join us. Good thing we didn’t wait to order, because we were half-way through our meals when he turned up. It wasn’t until later that I realized he felt strongly that the five of us should be in quarantine on the boat, not eating at an indoor restaurant. He also was no longer willing to do any scuba diving because it would put him in close proximity with the other divers on the boat.

Distinctly different opinions about what we should do regarding Covid certainly shaded our five days in paradise. Our two crew with the immunocompromised family at home entered into frequent heated discussions about CDC guidance and protocols. The rest of us repeated what the doctor had told us upon delivering our negative test results: don’t get another test unless you become symptomatic. Our crew mate with the New Jersey insurance was adamant that she would not pay $100 for another test. So our other concerned crew mate became determined to find a pharmacy that would provide him the six monthly self tests provided by Medicare, even though all of us said no, we would not do those tests either.

Despite these conflicts, we rented a car and drove the length of the island, all crammed into a small SUV joking and laughing a lot. The next day four of us went to the beach at a nearby resort, and the day after that we signed on for a catamaran voyage to Buck Island, a mostly underwater national monument. Our fifth crew mate refused on the same principle as his no dive boat decision. The rest of us felt the likelihood of us infecting anyone–if in fact we did have Covid despite the negative tests–in the open air on a beach, and on a sailboat, was very low.

At last the five days ended, our skipper felt much better, and another Covid test was negative. Early in the morning of the sixth day he returned to the boat and we dropped the mooring to sail north. We had a couple more days–not enough to visit the Spanish Virgin Islands, but certainly enough to visit Christmas Cove on St. James Island and the pizza boat, and to snorkel in Caneel Bay on St. John.

Even as many places and people begin to view the pandemic as if it’s in their rear-view mirror, it is not over, and it can still disrupt lives. Our only recourse is to adjust and adapt, or we’re destined to lose sight of the joy and lessons that every life experience provides.

Read the full story of our USVI sailing adventure.