Ziggy has broken down

I was coming back from Stella's place on Monday afternoon, intending to drop home for a bit and then to go up to Rupert and Hugo's place for an hour or so.

As I was passing the Damascus School, my car made a strange noise and a warning symbol came up on the dashboard. A picture of an engine and "Check System", plus a little picture of a skidding car. Ziggy has never done anything like that before. I drove home very carefully, contacted the overnight dog sitter to say I couldn't feed the dogs, checked the oil and water and left the car to it. I did notice that there was a slight smell of petrol inside the car, but not outside, and that the car had made a few odd noises after the warning sign had come on.

After my Japanese class at 8:00 on Tuesday morning I rang My Car in Delacombe and told them what had happened. Bring it in, they said. We'll run some diagnostic tests and see what's going on. I asked if it was both safe and wise to drive the 9km to Delacombe. They didn't know. It could be nothing, it might be something, there was a slight chance it was something catastrophic.

I decided to give it a go. It's only 9km.

This was a bad plan. I was going up the hill where Stella lives, had in fact just gone past her place, when the car started making lots of strange noises, the petrol smell became stronger, the car announced that it was Not At All Happy.

I pulled into a side street and called the Roadside Assistance people. I have a choice of Roadside Assistance. I am properly insured with AAMI, but I have 12 months assistance with My Car when I have a full service done with them. I had only had the car fully serviced three or so weeks ago. I might still have gone with AAMI, but I was going to My Car anyway so I called them, and they turned up about an hour later. (I think it would have been the same people no matter which Assistance Service I called!)

In fact, I was quite happy where I was. It was a lovely morning. I had a book, my iPad and full signal. I had a forest to my right to look at. I did some Japanese practice. All was well (apart from the car).

The tow truck turned up and took Ziggy and me to Delcombe. The My Car people said they would run the diagnostic tests and it would take about an hour. So I went and had bacon and eggs on toast while I waited.

It turns out that the car needs a new exhaust manifold gasket (which was the source of the weird noises, the petrol fumes and the alarm symbols). It also needs new spark plugs and an ignition coil. And very sorry and all that, but we are unusually busy so we won't be able to fix it until the 20th, unless we have a cancellation.

I couldn't see any point in taking it anywhere else, so left it where it was and took a bus back into the city and then a bus back out to my place.

Let us be grateful that the car decided to misbehave when I was less than 2km from home and that it decided not to go any further when I had the option to pull into a side street. It would have been much worse if I had been going at 110 on the freeway. As it was, I had quite a peaceful day. Just lots of waiting around for tow trucks, mechanics and buses.

I did rather miss the car this morning, though. It is VERY time consuming getting to work by public transport, and then back again. If Lindsey had been coming to Ballarat this evening I would probably have gone, because then I could have cadged a lift back with her this evening. But she's heading in the opposite direction tonight and I really didn't want to do a total of 7 or 8  hours on buses, trains and trams, plus all the waiting around.

I quite enjoyed taking the bus into Mount Clear to visit Stella this afternoon. It's quite nice having someone else conveying you there and back, plus you get little walks in the mixture.