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Stranded

I will not elaborate on why I'm starting this blog. You can just check my profile to know that information. But I'll start off with an entry that prompted the creation of this blog.

Yesterday, May 20, Friday, my husband had our old but very reliable Toyota checked by the mechanic. The car made weird sounds once in a while. We also experienced an overheat last Sunday. Anyway, the car was underwent a tune-up. The mechanic also found out that the shock absorbers were totally destroyed. Some other parts were changed. The car was returned to us at around 8 p.m.

We headed home (home is down South) at around 8:30 p.m. Before we even got out of the subdivision where we had the car fixed, my husband noticed that the car made weird vibrations. So we turned back and returned to the mechanic. The mechanics discovered that the spark plug cables could not stand the heat from the exhaust, thus, they melted. They changed the cables around three times and they test drived the car thrice too. According to the mechanic, the third cable will do although they needed to put an aluminum cover on it. He assured us, albeit hesitantly, that the cables will last until Sunday and that we could bring the car to his place by then for the installation of the cover. My husband kept on asking the mechanic if the car won't die on us til Sunday but he could not give a categorical answer. That should've been our cue.

Anyway, we headed home again. It was around 10 p.m. by then. My husband complained that the aircon belt was kinda tight. Then we began to smell something weird. It smelled as if something was burning but it would go away from time to time. I said that it just smelled like something new. We passed by a gas station then we drove home. However, just before we reached our exit, the car slowly died on us. The power weakened and boom, the car died. We were stuck in the poorly-lit highway all by ourselves with super fast vehicles flying by.

It would have been a very ugly event. Although our hazard lights were working, I was scared that the other vehicles won't see us. I was just waiting for a giant truck to hit us and leave our car rolling over. But thank God, that didn't happen.

Despite the terrible incident, we were fortunate because we were able to pull over the shoulder of the highway. And we were lucky that it happened in that part of the highway where there was actually a shoulder. We were blessed because it was not raining. Visibility would have been a bigger problem if it was raining. The tow truck arrived and although they charged us an exorbitant rate, we were just glad that help arrived. We were also lucky because our phones had sufficient battery charge which enabled us to call the highway hotline and the mechanic.

The truck brought us to the nearest gas station. We were quite pissed with the guards who seemed to take advantage of us, but thank God we were able to convince them that we were not going to stay there for a long time.

And although he caused the trouble, I'm still grateful to the mechanic. He did overtime work to finish working on our car. Then when we called to inform him that we were stuck in the highway, he answered our call. Any other evil person would have just ignored us, anyway he was already paid. But he took our call and promised to come for us. When he arrived, he agreed to switch cars with us and he paid for the towing service. He told us to go home, sensing perhaps that we looked super tired and promised us that he'll take care of everything. So even if we had every right to get mad at him, we could not because he was such a conscientious man.

So, yeah, even if we got home really late and even if we were uber tired, I'm still grateful because I know that things could have been worse and we're lucky to have helpful angels and we got out of the whole thing unscathed, albeit poorer. =)

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