Triphap - Funny Travel Stories and Travel Horror Stories

We parked our car, a 1962 Silver Cloud Rolls in front of our hotel and checked in to play among the rest of the older children at Disneyland.

After three days, we tired of the fun and headed back to Washington State on a Saturday morning. We'd had our fill of junk food, daytime fun and romantic nights. We loaded our suitcases into the already crammed trunk and got in.

My husband turned the key in the ignition. Oops! What’s that? Hmmmm He tried it again. We sat in a daze, wondering what was going on. Perhaps we were seeing things; after all, it was still only 5:00 AM.

This time there was no mistake; there was smoke oozing from the rosewood dashboard. He got out and raised the bonnet (that would translate to "hood" for American cars) while I made my way across the freeway to summons any mechanical help I could find at that hour.

The owner of the station accompanied me back to the car and my frustrated hubby. The guy scratched his head as he whined about the fact that I hadn’t told him it was a Rolls Royce; a make he knew nothing about. He laughed and told us that although he couldn’t fix our "smoking" problem, he could fix our tires.

Huh? He pointed to the two flattened passenger side tires that rested with their treads smouched flat to the ground.

With the tires repaired, my husband tried to start the engine again. There was still smoke but this time the engine started. We were off and running in search of exotic car care.

We located exotic car repair place just after lunch and explained our dilemma. We were told they closed at 3PM on Saturday's.

They were booked full for the day but the owner offered us his set of metric tools to use. We’d have to pull the vehicle off the property to do the repairs...insurance issues, you know.

Okay, here's where the rubber meets the road. I know NOTHING about electrical wiring for vehicles and neither does my husband!

I located the Owner's Manual and looked for the section on "Trouble Shooting." No such section! Crap!

Okay, the only thing left was to go straight for the wiring diagrams. It looked overwhelming.

We had to remove all of our tightly packed treasures from the trunk so we could disengage the battery. Done!

I felt as though we were playing with a Rubik's Cube under pressure and we had nooooo idea how to solve the puzzle.

We made our way through to a blackened mess of burned wires. We bought the replacement wires along with a roll of electrical tape and went to work in doing a quick splicing job of the damaged wires.

We did a quick fix job and prayed it would hold long enough to get us home.

Everything was ready to go. While I was finishing up the repair job, my husband returned everything to its place in the trunk. We thanked the owner for the use of his tools which he decided to charge us for at the rate of $25/hr and we figured we were ready to go…at least that was the plan.

We got in the car and my husband put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing! Do you hear me? There was nothing happening! Nada, nix…NOTHING!

We were both about in tears as we watched the overhead doors to our salvation, close for the remainder of the weekend.

We looked around as though surveying the safety level of sleeping in the car for the next two nights until the place opened again on Monday morning.

As we sat there in total dismay, watching the last of the mechanics drive off, a thought suddenly occurred to me…the battery. We hadn’t reconnected it!

We unloaded everything out of the trunk…again, and got to the battery compartment. Sure enough, the cables weren’t attached.

We reconnected the terminals; replaced the battery cover; reloaded everything we were now referring to as "junk," and got back into the car.

He inserted the key and with a twist of his wrist, started the car. It worked! There was no more smoke.

Once back home, we took the car into our regular mechanic. He of course laughed at my electrical taping job but admitted that it did the job and it had held.

From then on, my husband jokingly asked me to take a look at the engine whenever we had a problem with one of our vehicles.

I did it once...don't ask for a repeat performance!