Near disaster last night

Sep 23rd, 2019

Near disaster last night

We (myself R and J) were driving back from Glasgow last night about 10pm in our 8 month old (very expensive) BMW. We came off the Rest and got about a mile down the road to the village. All of a sudden the engine cut off, luckily when we were next to a passing place. It was a foul night with pouring rain.

This has happened with this car a few times before, and normally all R has to do is press the “Start” button and we are on our way again. But last night, nothing we could do would make it start again. We pressed the start button multiple times, rebooted the system, got out and walked round the car making offerings to all the gods we could think of, but to no avail.

I can’t tell you how dark it was on that road. You could literally not see your hand in front of your face. We looked in the tool kit in the boot, and found a very small and dim torch – plus we had our phone torches, although J had managed to use most of my battery by accessing my hotspot as he is too cheap to pay for a data contract. Also the car had decided to stop in the one place on the road with zero mobile connectivity. We put on high visibility jackets from the kit in the boot and set off to walk back to Lochgoilhead as although we had a support contract for the car, we didn’t feel it was likely that anyone would be coming out with a transporter down that single track road late on a Sunday night.

Having walked for about a mile, during which time not a single car came down the road, we got mobile connectivity back, and I realized that I had numbers for some of the people in the village in my phone. So I called my friend L and thank goodness she was kind enough to drive out and pick us up. What a kind thing to do on a black awful raining Sunday night 🙂

So unfortunately, the car was left in the passing place, and this morning we had been supposed to be off on holiday to the Lake District. After R had been on the phone this morning to four different sets of service providers for about two hours, we realized that we couldn’t conceivably go off to Keswick until such time as the situation was sorted out, so J was let off looking after Tora and we abandoned the holiday down south. It will have to be a “Staycation” in Argyll after all.

I can’t say I am overly impressed with our new car considering that all that was wrong with the old one was a bit of a squeak from the back.