A Family Adventure


in the mountains, ocean, and air

all the stressful parts of life

April 16, 2007
Emilie Phillips

I went rock climbing at the gym with Orin last wednesday. That was fun. The not so fun part was that on the way there, at one red light, my transmission decided to give me a warning shot of its imminent demise. It had been popping out of gear for a while. When I stopped the shifter acted like it was in gear, and I couldn’t move it, but no amount of revving the engine would make the car move. After what seemed like an eternity of wiggling the shifter, turning the car on and off, and anything else I could think of while the rush hour traffic around me honked at me, the shifter decided to actually move, and I managed to drive off. I made it back to the apartment ok, but that was mostly by getting it into 5th gear and leaving it there.

So, any more fun plans that I had had for the weekend were nixed. On saturday we went by a Honda dealer, and determined that the car we have been thinking about is not available anywhere in NH or MA for a test drive. My officemate apparently has one on a month back order. And the rest of that saturday I spent working so that I can take off for Carnival.

Then today we had the northeaster show up. On the way to work, some of the small streams near home had turned into rivers. And a few of them were even washing a couple inches of water across the roads. A lot of people didn’t come into work due to basements flooding. And around noon reports started coming in about a large fraction of the roads in NH being flooded. So then on the way back home because of my car being out of commission, I had to drop Tyson off for a social engagement of his in the next county over. And then the normal road I would take to my place was completely underwater from the lake overflowing, so I would have had to make a big detour to get home which I didn’t have time for. So I went to a restaurant that I knew of in the next town up and then made it to my appointment. And finally, by the time I was coming back, the waters had receeded enough that I could take a shorter detour. Luckily, my apartment is at the top of a hill, so no wet basement for me.

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Comments (4)

  • You’re describing the classic symptoms of the mess of cables, levers, and springs that links the gearshift to the transmission getting screwed up. The transmission doesn’t check that it’s being given invalid inputs and will happily produce undefined results. If that’s the case, its an easy job for a mechanic to take care of, though unclear if its worth finding out. Especially as internal transmission problems could cause the same symptoms. If it’s popping out of gear under hard acceleration, its more likely to be internal. Popping out of gear when near the boundary of coasting and accelerating cound very well be the external linkage.

    See you at Carnival!