Car Problems

Well, that same 26-mile washboard dirt and gravel road that we had to drive over on the way in to the slot canyons gave us some trouble on the way back out. First, we got the car bogged down in some fine sand, but after digging out the wheels, and getting a push from the people we were blocking in, we were soon out of the sand and on our way again.

The bigger trouble showed up when we had about 10 miles to go before we got back to the main road. We went over a particularly big bump, and I thought I saw something come out from under the car, so I stopped the car, and it immediately died. Not good. I went back to where I thought I saw something come out from below the car, and there was nothing to be found, so I got back in the car, and tried to start it. No dice. It didn’t even turn over. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to have stopped the car pointing downhill, and since it’s a manual, I tried compression starting the thing just to see what would happen, and it started right up. Phew.

With the car started, we headed the rest of the way down the dirt road without incident, and headed straight for the closest town of Escalante, UT to figure things out. We stopped the car in the Escalante High School parking lot across from a gas station, and popped the hood in a futile effort to see if we could diagnose the problem ourselves; of course not. So, we hopped back in the car, and it didn’t start again. Since I had the stick-driving experience, Becca was relegated to pushing the car on the flat parking lot so that we could drive across the street to the gas station. How chivalrous of me. Again, the car started fine using a compression start, and we left the car running while we looked up the closest Nissan dealer, which happened to be in St. George, UT on the other side of Zion. Well, we had just come from that way, and we didn’t want to go back, so we decided to head on towards Boulder, UT where we had intended to stay the night.

When we pulled out of the gas station in Escalante, we discovered another problem with the car – apparently the washboard road wasn’t too great for the rear shocks with 500-lbs of food, clothing, books, and camping equipment in the back of the car. The back end was awfully bouncy so we took it nice and slow.

We made it to Boulder fine, and it being a small town and without an auto repair shop, we thought it would be best to keep going while we could, and head for Moab. We passed through Capitol Reef and a few other places that would have been cool to see if the car was alright, but getting the car fixed took precedent and we passed them by.

Eventually we needed gas, so we stopped to fill up and turned the car off. Naturally that meant that we would have to turn in back on again, and again Becca (with the help of a nice gentleman that happened to be there) valiantly spurred the car to life again, whereupon I almost immediately killed it, and the nice gentleman wasn’t interested in helping again. So yet another time, this time all by herself, Becca saved the day, pushed the car back to life, and we were on the road to Moab once more.

After about 5 hours of nursing the car along and getting passed by an endless string of cars and trucks, our back end bouncing to the rhythm of the road, we finally arrived in Moab, we found ourselves a nice motel with soft beds, a nice shower, and only a block from a good auto repair place. We went out to dinner, had a couple of margaritas, and considered ourselves lucky as it could have been a whole lot worse.