My silly car stories... Thursday 13

Thirteen Things about Renée My good buddy Jen was posting about her car misshaps and it got me to thinking about my own missadventures in the car area... The very first car story is when I was 2 years old my father was driving our VW van home from Kansas and hit a patch of water. The van hydroplaned and flipped over at least once. This was back in the days before car seats or even seat belt laws, so my parents had taken out one row of seats and put the play pen there for my brother. I was asleep across the seats until the accident. My mother & I were both thrown forward, my father & brother were both fine. Because the van was upside down with the roof smashed we had to exit the vehicle through the busted out windshield. I had stitches, Mom has a very messed up back. Good car story number 2: This was back in the day when no one thought anything about leaving their kids alone in the car. Mom had gone inside the store and left me and my brothers in the car. I decided to "drive the car", so I hopped into the driver's seat and began turning the steering wheel back and forth and grabbed the stick shift and moved it around...into neutral. The car was parked on an incline and we started rolling down it! Luckily a man ran over and reached in through the window to put the car back into gear... no harm done until Mom got back. Then my bottom was injured. Good car story #3: Mom left us alone in the car again (when will she ever learn?) and while she was gone, I played with the cigarette lighter and some rope. The rope never caught fire, but it did stink up the car. I rolled down all the windows so the smell was pretty faint by the time she came back, but she still noticed it. I don't remember any bottom injuries that time...but that doesn't mean there weren't any. Scary car story #4: Mom left us (yet again!) in the car by ourselves and some person came up to the car and started talking to us. I was slightly freaked out by this as we did not know this person and they were obiviously pretending that they DID know our parents. But they left and left us alone too. Whew! Good car story #5: Much older now, 18! At 18 I still didn't know how to drive a stick. One of the managers where I worked had a stick and would Always forget to turn off the lights on rainy days...so his battery would be dead. So since I was the smallest, I got elected to help him push start the car. He told me how I needed to hold in the clutch while they pushed for a while and then "pop" it, then stop the car. So we got the car going again and as soon as I stepped on the brake it would stall. We kept doing this over and over. Never figuring out why this car wouldn't stay started. Then it finally dawned on him that he had forgotten to tell me to push the cluch back in before I hit the brakes. Oh! Good car story #6: Finally someone is teaching me how to drive a stick. I'm 21 now. We take the car to an empty parking lot with lots of room and I get behind the wheel. We start going and then the car starts lurching and lurching... I'm not getting the whole gas to clutch ratio. But then the car quits! Totally quits! We pop the hood and can't figure out what is going on. It won't start.... long story short the battery area was made for a larger battery than the one installed and I had shaken the battery loose from the cables. I never got another stick lesson and I still don't know how to drive a stick. Sad car story #7: I'm 22 and my mom's coworker is selling her '75 VW bug. I need a car and mom thinks it would be great for me to "fix up" this bug... so she has her friend drive the car over and talks me into buying it. (mind you, this is a stick and I still don't know how to drive a stick!) So I get the car all registered and stuff and start trying to teach myself to drive it... but it stalls when you take your foot off the gas. So I arrange for the car to go to a mechanic...the VW mechanic is on the other side of town and the tow costs something like $80. They get the car and do some tests. Says it needs an $8 pin to make it work. It ends up costing me over $100 with the tow to get this $8 pin replaced and guess what? It is still doing the exact same thing! So a friend of mine takes me to the local dealership to buy a new car...she also drove my VW bug to the dealership for my trade in (complaining the whole time about how in the world I was supposed to learn to drive in this thing!) I bought my 2nd car... a Ford Tempo. So a few weeks later my brother locked my house key in the house (this is after I told him to not lock the door!) and we drive to my mom's work to get her house key. The friend who sold me the VW comes up and asks "You drove the VW here?" in amazement. I say "Nope! I traded that sucker in on a new car!" I get to hear later that she had sold me the car because she didn't want to trade it in to a dealer. Oops! Okay well that didn't get me to 13, so I'll have to come up with something else. 8. It's freezing cold here so today we stayed home and baked cookies. We made Oatmeal Raisin and started Snickerdoodles (just have to roll them in cinamon sugar & bake). 9. Our dog just had her hair cut last Friday, but she still wants to go outside to eat snow. She comes in shivering like crazy. Dumb dog! 10. Our rabbits who live in our basement seemed like they might be cold so I gave them a old towel to curl up in. I can't tell if they are using it or not and of course they aren't saying. 11. Speaking of rabbits (I collect them) and one of my yard bunnies took a headder off the front porch railing and lost his head! I don't know if I can repair him or not, but DH says I can't have any more because I killed that one. He BETTER be kidding or he'll find the yard over run with bunnies... heh heh heh! 12. I got my Bro & SIL's presents bought the other day! I also got some stocking stuffers for Darly. She found some earrings that I would really like to get for her, but then I'm done! Well, I need to find something from Santa for DH... don't want Darly to notice that Santa didn't bring him anything. 13. I colored my hair tuesday even though the hair dresser said that I shouldn't. Well actually she was very torn about it. It clearly needed to be done, but the ends were clearly TOAST! So she was telling me that I should only do the roots. So I bought one of those Nice & Easy root kits and used it. I liked the application, but the results weren't quite what I was going for. I don't think that anyone has noticed... and I can still see where the roots were. They just aren't as dark as they were before. Oh well. Maybe I should go for purple hair? LOL! Can you see it? Update & bonus: While leaving the house today I thought, "ya know, I should have included a car story about driving in the snow"... so here ya go! While living in Cheyenne, WY I learned some pretty important things about driving in the snow. I had my Ford Tempo at the time and had gone to the mall for some shopping. This particular mall (and if you've been there you can back me up, it's the only mall in Cheyenne) was built on a hill, where the "front" mall exits were all downhill and the back exits were all level. I hadn't figured this out yet and later I noticed that these exits would be blocked off in times of snow... but this day I didn't know and they didn't block the exit, so I tried to leave the mall at one of the front down hill exits. The stoplight was of course red and I applied the brakes... and slid about 2 feet out into the intersection in front of a semi-truck! Luckily the guy stopped and then was able to drive around me, but I was screaming at the top of my lungs on my trip down the hill with my feet both on my brake pedal so hard I thought I must have broken a hole in the floor. I lived and no one hit my car, but from then on I either avoided the mall in the snow or left from the back side. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Barbara 2. Karin 3. Jen 4. Lisa 5. Chickadee 6. Peri 7. Ammie 8. Lisa 9. Marie 10. Running2ks 11. bone 12. Uzicue 13. MadHotMamma 14. Angel 15. Shelli 16. Happy Momma to Three 17. Holly 18. sallwood I have a lot more friends now! And we are still alive despite what our parents did! :) (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

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