Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Sackville and the Volvo

There are many wonderful things to list about PEI in the summertime. However, as a small province with more tourists on the Island in the summer than residents, renting a car can be an issue at times. We scheduled two churches in Sackville, New Brunswick for August 7. Since Sackville is less than two hours away, we knew that we'd only need a rental car for one day. However, I could only get a car from 9:00 AM and we needed to be in Sackville before 11:00 AM. We decided to take our own car, a 1989 Volvo 740. We've had this car since 1999 and it has been a very good vehicle for us overall, but over the last few years it has given us reason not to rely on it too much.

I had the car in the repair shop twice in the past month to cure the car of breaking down on the highway. Everything seemed to be fixed, and in fact, we had travelled all around the western end of PEI on Saturday, August 6 with no problems. We decided that it was safe to take our car to Sackville rather than rent one this time.

Everything was going fine. We got to Sackville with no problems, and the morning service at Salem Baptist went well (even though I went off-script a little bit.) We went out for lunch, then strolled Sackville's waterfowl park, eventually ending up back at Salem Baptist just to relax until we were to go to Main Street Baptist for the evening service. Suddenly, things didn't seem to be going well. The car started making strange noises and all of the lights on the dash lit up. I pulled off the road and popped the hood to see that the alternator belt was barely turning the alternator. The car would still move, but I knew we wouldn't get far. So we walked the rest of the way (about a mile) to the church and got there just as the service was starting.

...to be continued...