Ah, the Fates.

After several days with the in-laws for Thanksgiving in freakishly sunny San Luis Obispo (technically Atascadero, but I wander), highlighted by a sea otter sighting, even, we decided to make the 15-hour trek back to Portland in a single day.

As we have the dog with us, we brought David’s car, a 1999 A4 Avant (that is to say: wagon). Some of you may have heard some of the stories (which have a mythic bent, but, let me assure you, are true) about the Evils of this car. It has had issue with every kind of component that a car has, in fact, it has had issues with components I didn’t even know cars did have.

Some basic problems of the past: exhaust leak, suspension woes, timing belt. Much of the fun is less than basic: control arms, ignition only firing on 3 cylinders (yes, that was a fun trip back from Hood River), the replacement of the entire steering column and instrument pods because–follow me here–the headlights suddenly stopped working. Conveniently this last thing happened at night when we had somewhere we needed to get to. In Las Vegas, we sat around for hours in some significant hotness at a tire store because something had caused one tire to wear so badly on the drive down that it was near to asploding. Some things we’ve never solved, as in the engine light blinking wildly if one accelerates hard in hot weather.

Sometimes the engine light comes on for no reason, so, like smart people, we started ignoring it. Like earlier today when it came on while we were slogging through mist-snow in the Lake Shasta area of northern California.

It wasn’t until I was driving up the grade coming out of Grants Pass, Ore., listening to a lecture about the stresses caused by the growth of empire during the Roman Republic on an iPod, that a Very Bad Sudden Loud Growling Blowing Up Noise ensued and I immediately pulled over to the shoulder because it had terrified me. Fortunately, it was barely above freezing, dark, blowing mist and raining. When we peered into the engine compartment with a dying flashlight, it–the engine block–was glowing. That’s because the catalytic converter is essentially no longer and had separated from the exhaust manifold. Great.

We limped up the grade in the emergency lane until we came to the hamlet of Sunny Valley, which was not sunny but might be a valley, at least during the day. Given that they had in total: A general store (with a neon sign that said “MOVIES”); a gas station (Winter hours 8:00am-7:00pm; it was 6:58). Two guys in their late teens were in the garage’s office, smoking, offering us words of encouragement to offset the fact that they couldn’t do anything for us.

So the only choice, really, was to drive the car (of course by now I’m quite sure it’s going to explode, or at least poison us with carbon monoxide gas; I had the window down in the piss-pouring freezing rain out of this paranoia).

We made it the 13 miltes to Grants Pass on fumes–too many perhaps–and giggles. Now we’re holed up in a pet-friendly, free-wireless hotel (the Two Cardinal Virtues in a hotel for us), figuring out how I’m going to wrangle “working from Grants Pass” tomorrow–because, yeah, I’m supposed to show up at my job and stuff.

In short, I’ve started calling that Audi “Ol’ Strandy.”