Road Trip, Part I

Akron, OH - procyon - Sunday, September 24th, 2006 : goo

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August 19: My boyfriend and I headed out from the Chicago apartment I was subletting from my former roommates for the summer, stopping for a few days in Cleveland to visit my family. My mission: visit the New York State Pavilion in Queens (my favorite building by my favorite architect) and the Space Shuttle Enterprise in Washington, DC. Nick's mission: check out a few Civil War battlefields, get his National Parks passport stamped at a few million places in DC, and visit Harper's Ferry.
My parents don't trust my car, a blue '93 convertible Dodge Shadow, farther than Akron, so we were driving the '02 Kia Rio my dad's cousin Richard left us when he passed away this winter. He'd treasured the car as much as I do my Shadow, so I'd been very careful to take care of it accordingly. In four months of Chicago driving (I usually take CTA everywhere, but had needed it for the summer to commute to Argonne and Batavia for a summer internship) it was cared for regularly, never went more than 10 over the limit, etc., and consequently had acquired only one small scratch (from some jerk who had never learned how to parallel-park).
We'd planned to be in New York by around 7PM the day we set out. Not 45 minutes out of Cleveland, however, we found ourselves in the center of a cloud of big rigs on 77. I saw the giant pothole coming, but it was too big to swerve around, and there was no room to change lanes. The synth percussion on Future Bible Heroes' "Kiss Me Only With Your Eyes" was joined briefly by a CLUNK, the other cars shifted left, and we bounced off to the shoulder.

Nick called Triple-A, who sent someone to change our wheel to the spare (noting that the wheel itself was beyond repair) and directed us to a Kia dealership a few minutes away. We discovered upon arriving that the Kia portion of the dealership had been purchased only a few days previous--meaning that even if they had a few Kia parts in stock, they weren't catalogued yet. To make matters worse, the gentleman at the dealership's repair shop told us, the 14" wheel for the 2002 Kia Rio is apparently an incredibly rare part. The nearest dealership that had one was in eastern Pennsylvania, and the soonest anyone could have the wheel sent to Ohio was that Friday, by which point we were set to be almost home.
Nick and I were mulling over the relative merits of renting a car and cancelling the trip altogether when Jeff, the aforementioned gentleman, asked us to hang on while he checked manually through their collection of Kia parts. When that search came up short about half an hour later, he started calling down a list of every tire dealer in the area. Amazingly, he eventually found one less than a mile away that had a comparable wheel. He drew us a map on the back of his business card, and we headed off.

The people there replaced the wheel quickly and at a fair price, and we were on the road again by 3:00 that afternoon. Nick and I put Jeff's business card in the glove compartment so we could call his boss when we got home and recommend the guy for a raise or something, but we couldn't find it when we got back to Cleveland. If I don't find it by the time I finish posting this series I might just make the same call without a last name. If he's that considerate all the time I'm sure they'll know who I mean.

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Jamie: cool, i like these sorta posts

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