In the car...

 It's been quite an interesting wknd so far. (This will ramble a bit, but I'll clean it up when I get home. I'm writing this on the way to the boat in the car @ 4:19. ]

We started this trip off brite and early yesterday, my friends picked me up at. 7 am and we made it all the way to 62nd on the first leg. 

Then the grinding noise started, we hopped out to see what was dragging and it turned out to be the left rear wheel.  We popped it off and saw that the recent brake work he had done did not include attaching the brake assy with the bolts to hold it on.

It was quite interesting breaking down in NYC (is that a song?). People would walk by and stare, but noone offered to help.  The cops offered to giive us a ticket until we pointed out that we were broken down.  The officer then said "oh" and left us to fend for ourselves.

So you would think that you could get a simple 15 minute repair in a city of 8 MM people. It's not the case.  We called AAA and they sent a truck who offered to tow the car to a garage that could not do repairs until Monday.  We sent him away thinking we could repair it ourselves and limp back to a garage the could give us 2 std bolts.

I started googling furiously (I love using that verb) on my blackberry 7290. I found many repair shops, but noone did repairs on the weekends, incl the 'emergency' #s I found.  I started looking for parts companies, but no good either. (So much for telling people that I live in a city where I can have anything delivered any time I want (incl women).

So we decided to press on with our trip since there were 3 of us and we had another car we could use.  We then had a movie moment where 1 of our party could not finish the trip so we patched him up and left him with provisions for the wait for the rescue party.

So this is the story of my first "brake job", I've always been too afraid of working on my own brakes, but emergenvcies have a way of making heroes out of us. The brakes are really simple to figure out if you are an engineer [I'll incl details when I get online]

So then we finally arrived in MD and relaxed after the long drive by telling the tale with a few more details so far.  Our hosts then asked if we could do them a favor, loading 2 hay wagons into their barn's hay loft.  [Details and photos to follow from david's palm treo. I have really bad phone envy. I forgot my camera, so I have to rely on other people's snaps]

[Enuf for now, I'm getting "blackberry thumb" syndrome]

Mark
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MA:bb