When I think of this subject it brings up many memories. Most of them not good. I can think of many titles for this article. I settled on Excessive Towing but I could have used…The Car From Hell…or The Worst Vehicle I Have Ever Owned…or Can Vehicles Be Cursed? All I know is that the experiences that we had with this car were interesting at best and unbelievably horrible at worst.
We were having financial problems but we needed a second car. At that time, we had the VW Bug Convertible and I had to use that for my job. That left the family without a vehicle…an unacceptable scenario. Our credit was in really bad shape so we needed to be creative. We saw an ad in the local paper for a Jeep Wagoneer. I placed a phone call and I explained my financial situation to the person selling the car. It was agreed that they would finance the car and we set a price and a monthly payment and basically, I started making payments on the Wagoneer. They sent me a payment card. I would send them a monthly payment and note it on the card. He would initial that he got the payment on the card and send it back to me each month. I made the scheduled payments and eventually we owned the Wagoneer. Oh boy…it became our car…I actually had a pink slip on this car. I cannot believe that it was possible in this life to own something like the Wagoneer. I don’t actually think it was of this world.
We, of course, had to insure the vehicle, and we also were members of AAA. The problems really started one weekend when we decided to go skiing. Everyone piled into the Wagoneer with all of the skiing paraphernalia and we were off. We lived in Grass Valley and the ski areas were in the mountains up Interstate 80. We drove to Colfax and got on I-80. Just east of Colfax was a stretch of I-80 referred to as the three-mile grade. We started up that part of the freeway and almost made it to the top, but didn’t. Our skiing weekend abruptly came to an end. The kids were extremely disappointed. We had to be towed to a shop where the car could be repaired. Bummer. Without getting into too much detail we tried this whole thing all over again the following weekend. We again almost made it to the top of the three-mile grade but didn’t again. We were towed back to the same shop and the ski weekend didn’t happen for a second time. We decided not to try the ski weekend again. In the interim we had a few other situations with Wagoneer breakdowns where towing was required. I want to say at this point that each time we were towed we did get the car fixed…at least we thought it was fixed each time, but in each situation the car would continue to breakdown and not always the same problem. The Wagoneer continued to have different things go wrong which kept it from working. I guess you could say that the Wagoneer had creative ways to fail and we had to deal with each one. You never knew when the car would breakdown. It certainly made life interesting. This was before cell phones and when we broke down it was a major problem to let AAA or whoever know that we needed help. We broke down so much that it became a thing with our friends at Lake of the Pines. Just going to the grocery store could become a serious problem. One day I received a letter in the mail from AAA. They informed me that our membership was being cancelled because of…. Excessive Towing. I couldn’t believe it. AAA was a company that was in business because of towing. You contacted them for towing and now we are being cancelled because we are using their primary service too much. Oh well…there was no recourse and we were literally on our own regarding any future breakdowns. I have a feeling that not many members of AAA are actually cancelled for…Excessive Towing.
The Wagoneer continued to be a problem for us. We continued to have unscheduled breakdowns and we never knew when the next breakdown might occur. One day we are at the Lake at Lake of the Pines enjoying a great afternoon. We had driven there in the Wagoneer. I remembered that I had left something at home that I needed to go and get. Our house was probably about a mile from the beach so I wouldn’t be gone that long. I got in the car and started to drive home. I had gone about half a mile and something happened. There was a pretty loud noise and the car literally stopped. I got out of the car and looked under the car and it looked like the drive shaft had fallen off the car on to the ground. It was almost laughable… seriously… how does the drive shaft on a car fall off on to the ground…how can that actually happen? Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere in that car. As luck would have it a good friend of mine Don Ellis happened to drive by and stopped. He was familiar with our history with the car and was very understanding. Neither of us had ever seen anything quite like this. I told him that if we could get the car to my house that I was done with the Wagoneer once and for all and that I wanted to get rid of the car. I explained that this episode was the final straw. I couldn’t imagine keeping this car for one more day. Don helped me get the car to our house and I placed an ad in the local paper the next day and the ad basically offered the car to anyone who would take it…for FREE. This one guy came to the house…looked at the car and said he would take it. I had the pink slip and wanted him to just take the car. He clearly was uncomfortable just taking it for FREE. He asked me if I was sure and I made it abundantly clear to him that my intentions were to give the car away. I finally convinced him that he didn’t need to give me any consideration for the vehicle. Just taking it away was enough. He was able to take the car. As I remember he hooked the car up to his truck and towed it away. In my mind the cloud was finally lifted…the curse of the Wagoneer was gone…no one was hurt and we survived this chapter in our lives. We no longer had the car from hell and maybe someday we could be reinstated with AAA when we no longer had automobiles that could lead to…Excessive Towing.
I want to share one other episode with the car that contributed to the negative history. Whenever we drove to I-80 from Lake of the Pines we would take this back road that went over the Bear River. It was winter and a very cold day. The Bear River was raging as we approached the bridge. We were all in the Wagoneer. As we got on the bridge the car started sliding on the icy bridge. The bridge wasn’t all that long but it didn’t have any guard rails. I was sitting on that bridge and looking and listening to the raging water and I ask Kathy and the kids to get out of the car and move off the bridge. I am not sure what my plan was, but I did think that I could get the car off the bridge. Somehow someway I managed to get the car straightened out and drove it slowly off the bridge. I don’t think we ever went that way again during the winter. I have spoken to the kids recently about that experience and they have told me that they were really scared and didn’t know if I was going to get the car off the bridge and that I might have actually ended up in the Bear River. I guess sometimes you do things because they simply have to be done. This was one of those times and I don’t think I realized how crazy this whole situation was. Bottom line I got off that bridge and only now do I believe that the Wagoneer was probably the reason for the problem in the first place. I think we have to assign blame to the car and not to my dumb idea of trying to go over that bridge when it was covered with ice. I see shows on TV where people have survived some crazy stuff and I usually criticize them for their dumb decisions that led to these life-threatening situations. The bridge thing could have turned out very badly and I might have been in one of those TV shows explaining why I did such a stupid thing. Thank God it didn’t turn out badly. But it also added more reasons to get rid of the Car from Hell. You can’t get rid of the Dad – so you do the next best thing and get rid of the car. I am happy to report that we did get reinstated by AAA and to this day I have not been cancelled for… Excessive Towing.
