The Very First Post

Hello, family and friends of the family,

This is Joanna, writing the very first Cinderannie journal. I wasn’t expecting to write one tonight (“We drove all day and then stayed in a hotel” doesn’t make very exciting reading) but the day turned out a bit more interesting than I expected.
My brother Thad is traveling with me, and then flying back to Michigan. I am extremely glad to have him along. We left at about 9:30 this morning after hugs and goodbyes from all my family and siblings. And… we drove. Indiana is rather pretty, being basically all farmland. In fact, Thad and I were getting extremely hungry (as we traveled down a strange road that didn’t know whether it was a freeway or not – one minute there would be exits and then next thing you know there’s a stop light), and turned down a somewhat promising looking road (meaning there was a hotel and not just farms), but the only thing there was Pizza Quik. It didn’t look like the sort of place one should eat at if one wants to be in good health later. So we turned around in the long driveway of a beautiful farmhouse on a hill, and stopped at the next place we came to, a Subway-Citgo travel plaza-ish thing. Neither of us are Subway lovers but it was good and we were starving, and it was the only thing to eat besides raw corn out of fields as far as we could see. Then, five or ten minutes after we were back on the road, we reached the city of Kokomo.
It was the twin of Alpine. Stores and restaurants everywhere. IHOP, Steak’n’Shake, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Kohl’s, Arby’s, TJ Maxx, Best Buy, Burger King, Wendy’s, Outback Steak House, JC Penney… yeah. Out of nowhere, emerging from the everlasting fields of corn, a gleaming metropolis. And we’d already eaten. Highly unfortunate. But we couldn’t have known.
Round about 6:45pm, my car’s oil light started blinking, and I remembered that I’d forgotten to check the oil before I left, and it probably needed more (it leaks). So we got off at the next exit (we had just gotten into Tennessee), and pulled into a BP. And noticed it was smoking. Oh dear. So I popped the hood (it stopped smoking quite quickly) and checked the oil. Lower than it ought to be. And then I noticed that the coolant was far lower than it ought to be. Dear me. So I went inside and bought coolant. There was an old man in line behind me, thin with a long somewhat scraggly white beard and a friendly, honest, mountain man face.
“Do you need any help with that?” he asked, motioning to the coolant. For a brief second I was baffled – it wasn’t that heavy! – but then I realized he meant with whatever car issue was causing me to need to buy coolant. “No, thanks,” I said with a smile, “It’s just low on coolant.”
But when I got back to my car I discovered that that was not the only problem. The coolant hose was leaking, a thin steady stream. Rats. Just then the old man came out, so I went up to him and said somewhat sheepishly, “Excuse me, but since you offered help… the coolant hose is leaking.” He came right over and examined it.
“Do either of you have a pocket knife or anything?” he asked. I pulled mine out, I must admit somewhat proudly. I am not a completely useless girl, I do have a pocket knife. He explained that since the leak was right near the end of the hose, I could just take off the clamp (Thad was better at seeing how the clamp worked than I was; it was covered in grease and it was hard for me to perceive it until I looked at the clean one at the other end), cut off the end of the hose, and reattach it (there was plenty of slack in the hose to allow this). He also advised reversing the ends of the hose since the end attached to the coolant reservoir didn’t have any pressure on it so we could put the more damaged end there. All this would have to be done after the engine cooled down. I thanked him very much, and Thad and I bought drinks and sat in the car waiting for it to get cool.
We ended up having to use pliers (I’m double not useless, I have a tool chest!) to get the clamp off (after our first attempt, when it was still too hot, and we had to wait again), and then discovered that the end of the rubber hose had melted and then re-hardened and as a result the clamp was impossible to remove from the hose. So I cut off the damaged end, and after futile efforts to get the end of the hose out of the clamp, I went in and bought a new clamp (or actually, I bought six, as they came together). They were a different type than the other one. “You’ll need a screwdriver,” said the lady at the counter. “I have one in my tool box in the trunk,” I said (proudly).
It took some effort, but we got the hose all back on correctly, and the oil and coolant filled up, and by the time we had gotten washed up it was a few minutes past eight. I was quite pleased. My car had broken down, and my brother and I had fixed it, with advice from a friendly Tennessean (they were all so nice!), and I hadn’t even had to call my dad, and I’d even figured out what the problem was all by my own self! And used my own pliers and my own screwdriver and my own pocket knife to fix my own car. I was glad Thad was there. It was a friendly not creepy gas station, but what if it hadn’t been? And I was stuck there for ages waiting for my car to cool? Besides that, he understood the clamp better than I did.
Okay, I was going to write about the adventures of Nashville, but this is quite long enough and I need to go to sleep. Suffice it to say that although we were never exactly lost (we always knew where we were on the map) we went down at least three wrong freeways and if I never drove through Nashville again it would be okay with me. And people think Grand Rapids having three freeways is bad… at any rate, we got to our hotel all right, and it’s time to sleep. We’re going to sleep in a little tomorrow because it’s a good deal shorter drive. And not so much confusing freeways, and hopefully my car will not break down. But if it does, I have confidence that between me, my brother, my tool chest, my pocket knife, and friendly Southerners, it can be fixed.

Good night.