The following is kind of a long post and is going to get slightly technical but I think it's worth the read. It really gives a picture of my current situation. The day started innocently enough. This website fillup4free.com has been enabling me to get veggie oil while on the road. It works well enough. I made it to Colorado on like 15 dollars of diesel if you count highway driving. So the primary mission for the day was to go get some grease from this guy about 20 miles outside of town. The side mission was going to be slightly more tricky. But I was confident and afterward would reward myself with a subway tasty subway footlong and one of the many outdoorsy activities in Colorado Springs.

Background. (a) I'm living out of a tent and currently in a way too swanky state park (b) my first drive across the US was in a car that was 8 years old at the time. This go around the car being used is 28 years old. This fact resonated with me from the get go. Yet there have been points where judgment calls have been necessary. Essentially “what can old car NOT do that moderately old car could.” Most people turn the key, press one pedal for go and another for stop. With car guys that's not how we do it. Sounds, feels, smells... all of these thing register and we are constantly running a sort of systems check in our minds. While the machinations of these metal creatures may sound scary to most people it's kind of fun once you're in on the whole thing. Being on a long drive in a car that you have to figure out stuff in is kind of like placing a bet on a horse race. It's actually exactly like that. The bigger the drive the more lame if something goes really awry. At the same time, the further away from home you get the greater the feeling of accomplishment. It really fits in with my world view of Larry David-esque day to day masochism, and penchant for adventure.

But I digress. One of these judgment calls was how long to drive the car for at any given period (I've been known to go for over 20+ hours at a shot). A week without ever stopping the engine clearly is too long. The manual says something about 8 hours so that's definitely fine. Though I ended up driving for like 15 hours, my guess was 12 max. Why, you may ask? In my mind there were two problems. The first was with non-synthetic engine oil breaking down. This didn't seem terribly likely at under 24 hours, but I was overdue on the change anyway so I took a breather at about 10 hours and changed it walmart just to be safe. The second issue was a matter of the great unknown: the automatic transmission. These are to driveway mechanics what the car is to someone who doesn't own a tool kit. They're finely honed highly complex pieces of equipment of which most car guys have never seen the innards of and definitely do not have tools to work on. So let's just leave it at: I had reason to suspect driving for a sustained period could cause a problem, it did, I caught it in time but was left with a situation that would put a strain on my abilities given my on the go facilities and tools. Lameness sets in. A trip to the mechanic would cost $185 and I would be left with incomplete information regarding what happened (yes, mechanics are notorious hucksters even to those of us who are in on the joke, it just takes them more skill to invent lies with us).

These road trips have a way of every turn seeming fated. As luck would have it, the guy who was going to sell me veggie oil was also willing to lend me a hand with the transmission! Upon arriving Chuck's setup appeared real slick. He collects and recycles vegetable oil for a living, measuring it not in the tens or hundreds but in the thousands of gallons. More importantly for the transmission situation he had also amassed an impressive collection of tools over the years, many of which were beyond the means of an average driveway mechanic. We took his GMC Topkick (link to Cadillac One) modified for vegetable oil pickup to O'Reilly's auto parts, used his commercial account to purchase necessary equipment at a discount and then headed back for what proved to be an easy job with his professional jackstands and pneumatic tools.

Two things happened. The Mercedes is equipped with a way to drain transmission fluid easily that most cars do not. The pneumatic tools destroyed it. That was fine by me because it necessitated doing the job in a more meticulous manner. Downside is that it meant getting fluid out would be trickier on my on my own if we over filled it. The second thing that happened is that we overfilled it. Despite being out of there by noon, those two things proved disastrous. As it turns out, though Colorado State parks do not actually have any rules listed about working on your car in the park it is indeed against the rules. 15 minutes nobody would have cared but the amount of time I needed would prove to be vastly more than originally anticipated. After a half hour they sent their most stolid (ex-military by the cut of his jib and C.S.'s demography) park ranger to give me a stern talking to. He was generally pretty cool though and the way he put it was that he was saving me a huge fine because he just happened to see me doing this and was letting me off before the park ranger got there, who would not have been as understanding. Later in the day there were some interactions that led me to believe that the jerkoff working on his car stirred up a great deal of buzz on those walky-talkies. I was the talk Cheyenne mountain park.

After leaving the park and going through a little bit of hunger and situational induced despair I regrouped and made a game plan. A car parts store would probably not worry about me doing a small job in their parking lot because it might bring them business. Off to rear parking area of Autozone! Within 20 minutes the transmission fluid was within a satisfactory level for my tastes. But with an old Mercedes every day is an adventure. Unbeknownst to me, a rubber seal had come ever so slightly out of place. Not good. Deciding to make it a car day I then drove to Firestone to have them rotate my tires for free (they throw this in when you buy a set from them). There I made mistake #2.

For those who don't know about cars, never, EVER get work done at firestone. Let me repeat: Never, under any circumstances get any work done at firestone. Ever. Their business model is based around charging a lot for things that might be a good idea but aren't really necessary, then overcharging for them. I told the guy outright there was no point in checking my car because I wasn't going to spend any money. Under a modified pay structure called “flat rate” they even the guy working on your car has a huge incentive to get cars out quickly (resulting in poor alignments, if you want a good one the only place to go is the dealer), never take on a major job and always rack up a bajillion little things. “That's fine, it's complimentary and we'll do it anyway.” After 45 minutes of waiting a nice fellow customer in the lobby offered me a coupon to which I responded, “I would never have work done here”. In short oder they called me and handed me my keys saying the job was done. This is where it gets funny. The artards hadn't even bothered to move the car to make it look like they did something! The CD player was still on the song I had left it on!

You have to understand how hard it is for me to listen to other people getting swindled at Firestone. 500 bucks is a ton of money to some people and the lies they make up are so outrageous. It's almost like they find the most ludicrous thing to say just to test it out. Moreover, these people are way less qualified than I am to work on cars. Every extra ten minutes they make me wait for no reason isn't just lost time, it's time in which my principled rage festers. The guy that said he worked at McDonalds but dropped hundreds of dollars on what should have been an oil change was particularly galling. Good and hot after biting my tongue in the case of the burger flipper and seeing the car in the same spot, tires facing the same direction as before I walked back in visibly furious, tossed the keys back on the counter and sat back down without saying anything. The manager knew he had bungled his real job: swindling people. He gave the new employee a stern talking to and then told me “your car will be ready in five minutes.” About a minute afterward I heard a screeeech and looked up to witness my car running into their tool chest! They always give the new guys jobs that won't pay anything, thus the dude working on my car was like just hired. But this guy was so new he hadn't learned to test out how well the brakes work before pulling a car into the garage. Poor kid's rotten luck, I had just loaded the car up with hundreds of pounds of vegetable plus all my road tripping gear so it drives funny. In retrospect, watching him crash my car was absolutely hilarious. I hit stuff for fun in that beast. Under 15mph it just doesn't show. But it fueled my fire anyway. After another five minutes, I knocked on the window. Guy was rotating the tires wrong. So now the manager comes over, tells me he's been doing this for 20 years and that the greasemonkey was right. I made a hard glance at his name tag and said “alright, that's cool.” He claimed to have been a Mercedes technician or something and got right on it. Friggin' idiot couldn't figure out how to open my hood! Hahahahaha. LIAR! This is most qualified person in the joint, car was produced for 13 years yet he can't open a hood on a car that he claimed to have spent years working on. Later on he admitted I was right about the tires.

So now this next moment was emblematic of why one doesn't have to be Christian to be a good person. They spotted my earlier foul up with the rubber seal. The transmission was leaking all over their floor. I've caught Firestone lying to me before. Corporate's orders are that when they get caught red handed to placate the customer even if the store is losing money. With such a simple thing I could have used the lying and running my car into things and general ineptitude as leverage and made them fix it. I could sat there and helped them figure it out with all their great amazing tools, and got it taken care of in minutes. Oh how much fun it would have been. But the rent they pay, franchise fees, tools and employee's time do not belong to me. The new employee who had been blamed would probably have been fired and the new employee working on my car wouldn't have gotten to go home on time. Judgment call, tell them to leave it alone.

“Do you have torque wrenches in this place” (that was me being condescending)
 
“Yep”

“Just torque it to spec,” car lingo for “reprieve liar with bad luck, you get to go home on time.”

At the time of writing I kind of wish I had closed the vice while what little manhood they had was stuck in it. In retrospect being moral will feel better. So from firestone I went to another parking lot, called my father for some advice as he usually has a level head in these situations and then got down to it. Calling Chuck, he gave me a pretty good idea of what could be wrong and was correct. For fifteen furious minutes I labored in a grocery store parking lot. And then came the downpour. Still leaking and without the proper tools, losing light, in the rain, the car low to the ground from all the veg in the trunk, I was looking at a best case scenario of an hour in sheets of rain, worst case scenario of wasting three. Car's in drivable condition = bag it.

Sweet talked the park rangers with a little bit of Dale Carnegie. Explained the situation in detail, told her I was mainly worried about the environment and didn't want to upset any park rules. As DC says admit you're wrong in the first sentence (even if not so), after that the other person's argument is moot. From there you bank on goodwill and if that fails a variety of other carrot based incentives. They were all aware of the jerkoff working on the old car and felt my pain. Chuck's the man. Know I used this saying before, but I like the cut of his jib. Probably gonna need to throw him a few extra bucks, but tomorrow morning we'll get it straightened away.

And thus is a day in the life of driving a 28 year old German car 4-5k miles away from home while trying to run it on vegetable oil. Beauty all around me, permeated by stress which is in a slightly sick way kind of fun. Not if, but WHEN I get back in the Veggiewagen it will have built some serious character.

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