Well, that was fast…

As I mentioned in my Shore Leave post earlier today, I dropped off my car this morning for the electrical repair work I needed done. The guy at my regular garage, which is about a one-mile walk from home, told me that they couldn’t identify the problem there, so they recommended that I take it to a shop about four miles away, a bit harder to get to, but a few minutes’ walk from a bus route. I’d been hesitant because I was reluctant to take the bus during the pandemic, but I finally had to get around to it to be ready for Shore Leave.

As it happened, I just missed the bus I should’ve taken and caught another one that used to go the same way past the university, but it turned out it actually goes a different way now. But the point where it diverged, a bit over halfway to home, was within what I consider manageable walking distance, past Burnet Woods and through the university. So I got off at that corner and walked the rest of the way. Two weeks ago, it might’ve been harder, since it’s uphill nearly all the way. But I’ve been taking pretty much daily walks lately and I’m feeling more fit.

I’d been worried that the electrical problem would be some complicated thing that they needed time to fix, or that there’d be a big backlog, given that I needed days’ advance notice to schedule the dropoff. I hoped it wouldn’t take so long that I’d be late for the trip. But as it turned out, they called me less than four hours after I dropped it off and told me they’d already fixed it, and done the basic maintenance and safety checks I asked for too!

Apparently they did a point-by-point inspection of the electrical system to try to identify where the fault was, and didn’t find an answer, which I guess is as far as my regular garage got. But then they looked a little deeper and found that there was simply a fuse missing! Apparently it’s so elementary that they didn’t think to look for it at first.

So it was an easy fix, but it left me with the need to travel to that garage twice in one day. I rested up a bit more, then tried to walk as far as I could. If it had been my only walk that day, I could’ve probably made it the whole way. But I only made it about a third of the way, maybe, before my knees advised me they’d had enough. So I sat and waited and took the bus the rest of the way, though I had a fair walk from the bus stop to the garage, this time through unfamiliar territory (though I had a map printout to follow).

So that went fine, except that on the drive back, the GPS tried to make me turn onto a closed road, and I had to do some awkward circling to try to get out of it. A police car went right by me while I was veering around confusedly, but fortunately didn’t seem to think it looked as dangerous as it felt to me, because they went right by. Oh, yes, and when I was nearly home, a cement truck blocked the intersection I had to pass through, but fortunately I was able to make a right turn to squeeze past it and then go left onto a parallel road… which was blocked by a delivery truck, so I made another left and a right to get back onto the intended road.

But now my car is back, and it’s fixed, and that’s one major thing off my pre-Shore Leave checklist.