Stuck in Neutral
Saturday morning was nice and sunny and warm by the time the sun got up above the hills. so we had some breakfast and tried the key again, and nothing. I’m not sure what I expected, but sometimes things heal themselves overnight, right?
Once it looked like the Tire & Repair shop next door was up and running around 8:30, I walked over, and tried to explain my predicament. One of the guys offered to walk back over with me, and check it out but he couldn’t offer any guarantees. As we walked up to the RV, we were talking about odd things like this – where there were no suspect rattles or clunks or wheezes or whines with which to diagnose odd mechanical or electrical problems. Just a big fat sound of NOTHING when you turned the key.
“It is strange, I’ll say.” he said.
“Yeah, odd.” I said, reaching for the door handle.
“You did try jiggling the gear shift, right?”
Shit. Suddenly, I knew exactly what he meant. I reached over and slid the black-knobbed arm from “P” through “R” and “D” and then back to “P”
Jiggle-jiggle.
The damn thing started on the first turn. We looked at each other. He whooped and high-fived me. “Oh well…” he said, grinning like a madman.
In every auto or truck with an automatic transmission, there’s a little switch thingy in the gear selector area, whether it’s on the steering column like ours, or on the console or wherever, that keeps the vehicle from starting up unless the transmission is solidly in PARK or NEUTRAL. It’s called the “neutral safety switch”, and in our case, it gets a signal from the little needle on the gear selector, making sure it’s under “P” or “N”. And in our case, due to age and just general wear and tear, the little arrow was not quite touching the tiny metal contact next to the “P” that it needed to to complete the circuit. A quick jiggle back and forth, and suddenly we were perfectly aligned, and the beast fired up with no problems. Had I even THOUGHT of this last night, we would have been off and running with no problems.
But now we had an issue. The seeds of doubt had been planted in me, and all I could think was that everytime we shut the RV off, we’d be rolling the dice as to whether it would start back up again. I pictured us deep in the wilderness of northern Vermont, a hundred miles from any kind of assistance. We wouldn’t be lucky like we had been last night, stranded in the bustling, electrified, paved city center of Hoosick, New York. Plus, we’d lost several hours of drive time. We sat and had a palaver.
We knew we had to be in Rochester on Tuesday for Melissa’s company function. It was now Saturday, and my thought process was that, if we kept on into Vermont, and found the rest of the family somewhere up there by late afternoon, we’d have one day there, and have to leave again on Monday morning, and if we had any mechanical issues, we’d be late getting across to the other side of the state. So it was decided to abandon our original destination, and make a big U-turn and head back down towards Albany and then across the state on the Thruway to our campground near Rochester. So I called Mom and the family and explained our situation and they understood. Then I called our campground, to see if they could put us up for a day or so ahead of our reservation. That was another almost-issue. There is a small number of RV campgrounds within about 25 miles of Rochester – in fact, that number is 1. It’s a KOA Kampground about 30 miles south of the city, near the little town of Canandaigua, right at the tippy top of one of the Finger Lakes.
Luckily, the folks at the KOA were amenable to our early arrival, so we told them we’d arrive sometime mid-afternoon, and packed up. We put our heads together again, and came up with a plan. Bennington was right across the border into Vermont, and I thought that there was a better than even chance that we’d find a garage or some sort of repair place there that might be able to look at our situ. and replace that annoying neutral safety switch for us. So we decided to head there. We crossed into Vermont, and found Bennington about seven miles up the road. It was a small town, with narrow streets, and some sort of celebration was taking place there this weekend as well. Just the thing for an out-of-towner with a big RV.
We cruised around the city for half an hour, and finally saw an open auto repair place. I maneuvered into the parking area, and consulted with the mechanic on duty. He agreed with our diagnosis, but said he would probably not be able to work on it until Monday or Tuesday. That didn’t help us, but we agreed that if the situation arose again, a quick jiggle of the gear shift would probably achieve success. So I decided to make our way out of Bennington, and had back to Hoosick and the rest of New York.
At least we could scratch “Vermont” off our list of states to see, even though we’d only gotten about half a dozen miles into it. We went back through Hoosick, and then down through the woods and across the reservoir and back down that horrible hill into Troy and then across the river back to Albany, looking for the avenues over to the New York State Thruway on the other side of Albany.
It wasn’t too bad, and after a while we found ourselves heading west across New York State. Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse. They all approached, and then receded in the mirrors. We were paralleling the old Erie Canal along much of the way, it was interesting to see that ancient waterway along our flanks as we motored on.
By late afternoon, storm clouds were gathering as we approached our exit to Canandaigua, and then we hit some construction, and were slowed down to a crawl for a few miles. But soon enough, we exited the Thruway and found our KOA, where they were nice enough to get us situated in a spot, telling us that our regular reservation would put us in a different spot on Monday. We pulled in, and with no small amount of dread, I turned the engine off for the first time since that morning in the Moose lot, and then looked over at Melissa. I closed my eyes, and turned the key.
“Vrooom!”. Started right up.
Thus ended Day 3.
Day 2 – Croton to Hoosick Day 4 – KOA is A-OK! Vacation 2014 Home