Our Messed Up Car by Mia

Zander pushing the car--- but not hard enough!! We ended up getting really
stuck...

We rented a gihugic white van (like the kind kidnappers use) from a car rental that was too cheap to get an actual booth at the airport. The car was great until today when the starter engine battery died and we had to push the car to get it to start. There was a huge bang and a puff of smoke when the engine started, but otherwise it worked nicely! I’m really glad that there was plenty of space because if we had been in the tiny hotel parking lot (if you can even call it that) with the steep uphill driveway when it a broke we’d be screwed!

                 Since it broke daddy has been trying to turn the car off as little as possible and park with lots of space so we don’t get stuck. Daddy still has a bit of a habit of taking the key out, though and he sometimes pulls it out even when he says he won’t. We have pushed the car out of a ditch by the side of the road because daddy forgot to keep the key in the ignition. Luckily it went downhill a little before the big steep hill up ahead, but we still had to push the car for a while.

                Our big 10-seater mini bus is surprisingly easy to push, though as long as there are two or three people outside pushing and there is no uphill at all. Usually Zander and I are outside pushing, while mommy does traffic control, and daddy steers and does whatever it is he does with the clutch to start the car. We are in the snowy mountains in Bursa to go skiing and it’s really tough to start up in the snow. It’s always very exciting and we just had an extremely exciting bordering on scary experience starting in the snow. We didn’t get it going fast enough going down the hill and we got stuck for like an hour trying to start it up on flat ground, on the icy road, while it was snowing. I guess we were attracting a lot of attention because like 3 people came over and tried to help us out. None of them really spoke English but they got what was going on. Eventually a guy called his friend with a big semi-truck to pull us so daddy could start it with the clutch. I don’t know why we don’t just jump start the battery already! No matter, it gives me plenty to write about and its kinda fun to push the car (only if it isn’t snowy and icy and it takes us no more than 5 minutes, that is).

Daddy putting on the crappy chains.

                When we started driving daddy put the chains on and they kept falling off and making all sorts of noise. It was really annoying! We stopped like five times on the side of the road before daddy finally took them off. After about 5 minutes of driving without the chains we stopped again to help another car that had a flat. I guess if you have car trouble you can empathize. The people in the car obviously had no idea what they were doing. There was two guys and two girls and the girls were in the car with their phones texting and smoking while the guys tried to change the tire. They had problems with the jack because it was too short or something and they forgot to put on the hand brake. The car rolled off the jack and freaked the girls out so they finally just took control and called a tow truck. It was pretty funny!
           After that incedent we just drove for a while before it got too icy and daddy had to put them back on. Instead of stopping in Bursa before going to the ski mountain town daddy just drove us all the way there. That turned out to be a huge mistake because there was only about one hotel room left in the entire town and it was extremely expensive. Then, when we were looking for a better place the car got stuck in the parking lot of a full hotel and some guys came and tried to help us get it out. They didn’t really speak English so they were kind of getting in the way instead of helping, though. After a while we realized that the chains had fallen off of one tire so daddy put them back on (that took longer than necessary because the guy that was ‘helping’ seemed to think that it was on the wrong tire and it should be in the front. When the chains were on it was easy enough to get it out until the car stalled and we were stuck there. There was no way we were going to get it to start again and the chains that had been whipping around had punctured the gas tank so that car is pretty much toast. By then it was around three in the morning so we decided that it wasn’t worth 700 lira to get a room for a few hours. We just slept in the car in our sleeping bags for the rest of the night. The whole deal with that car has been really exciting, but now we have to get the rental people to come get their car from the top of a snowy mountain and get another car from someone so we can get outta here.

PS This blog was started earlier yesterday after the starter engine broke and just kept on growing!!!!