Not long now.

There are only like three days until Christmas. I am home after a small adventure trying to get here. I left normally enough on Friday afternoon - I took longer than planned to get out of the door, but that wasn’t unexpected. A quick stop at my aunt’s place to drop off some gifts and I got behind the wheel to give my mom a much needed break from driving. (I’m not sure how she can drive 150+ km each way back and forth from work.) We missed the rush hour so getting onto the bridge was relatively uneventful. All is quite well as we drive through Dartmouth and then all of a sudden the engine revs up to 5000 RPMs - I figure that I have knocked the car into neutral with my knee and quickly check to fix the problem. Nope, it was still in drive. So I am driving a car that has no ability to accelerate. Good.

Popping the car into neutral and then back into drive seems to fix the problem - temporarily. After a couple more episodes of this slippage, I pulled into the MicMac Mall parking lot. Long story short, my mom tried, same deal and then we called my uncle who works for Ford to see what he could arrange. Unfortunately no one with the authority to make magic wheels turn are working on Friday evening. :P We spend the night at my uncle’s place after he drove our car to a dealership (without incident). In the morning we find out that the transmission guy won’t be in during the weekend, but their certified mechanics couldn’t find any problems and didn’t notice the issue when they test drove it. So we loaded my stuff back into the car and away we went - no problems all the way home. The real irony is that my mom’s lease expires today and she was going to trade in the car last week, but didn’t get a chance.

The good news is that I got some Futureshop shopping done when we were ‘stuck’ at the MicMac Mall. And it just wouldn’t be Christmas without some sort of car related incident.